Having reviewed, designed, and built asset management websites for more than a decade, we know what works - and what doesn’t.
- A family office CIO is deciding whether to take a meeting with your IR director
- A pension fund trustee pockets your business card at a conference
- 50 decision makers see your name in an Institutional Investor article
What’s their next move?
Nine times out of ten, it’s a visit to your website.
If their first impression is a bad one, it could be the last time they ever think about you.
A successful website is essential. But building one is not easy. If you get this wrong, rather than being an asset, it could repel potential investors.
Here are five common mistakes to avoid when building your firm’s website
- Misunderstanding your website’s purpose
- Failure to differentiate your proposition
- Providing a poor user journey
- No content plan
- Overkill
1. Misunderstanding your website’s purpose
Your website is a mousetrap – not the library of Alexandria.
The main purpose of your website should be to attract new investors, portfolio companies, and talent. That is not achieved by treating it like a data room.
When visitors land on your homepage, they make a very quick judgement about whether to continue or go elsewhere. Make sure key marketing messages are prominent and easily digestible, with clear calls to action.
Jamming your site full of long text passages and company data is not the way. Your site doesn’t exist to serve investors performing deep due diligence. These investors know you well – and have the keys to your data room.
2. Failure to differentiate your proposition
Stand out – or stand still…
One of the main complaints we hear from investors is that fund managers all look and sound the same. Placing yourself in the middle of the pack may feel safe, but it’s actually one of the riskiest things a fund manager can do. Investors need a reason to take on the career risk of championing you through the months of meetings and reports required to secure an allocation. That risk is intensified if you are new.
If your website fails to make a case for how you are different, and why an investor should care, investors will simply opt for what they perceive to be the safest option – invariably, one of the well-known industry titans.
You have the freedom to make your website original, memorable, and striking – while ensuring it is a true reflection of your identity and what you do.
If you want them to remember you (and nobody invests in managers they have forgotten about), stand out.
3. Providing a poor user journey
Confused visitors won’t hang around.
Visitors to your website are likely there to achieve a specific goal:
- Getting an overview of your portfolio companies
- Checking the bio of someone they are meeting later that day
- Discovering whether their company meets your investment criteria
Visitors are time poor and easily frustrated. If you ask them to click too many times, or scroll endlessly for what they are looking for, they will likely leave. In many instances they will continue their research on a competitor’s site.
Whether they want to know more about your strategy or learn where you worked before you launched your fund, help them achieve their purpose as quickly and painlessly as possible.
Include clear ‘calls to action’ with links to the most important sections of the site. These act as signposts, helping people find information quickly – and steering them to the content you want them to see. Subheadings also make text easier to navigate.
Visitors who find your website user-friendly and intuitive will assume these traits run through everything you do.
4. No content plan
Failing to plan is planning to fail.
An insights or blog page with more cobwebs than content is utterly counterproductive. Investors will assume your inconsistency in this area translates to other parts of your operation – including your investment strategy.
Think of these pages as a beast that needs to be fed.
If you are building a new website, you probably know you need to improve your marketing game. Regularly publishing content on your website is a great way to do that. We strongly encourage managers to publish blogs, articles, and papers that demonstrate their expertise. But none of this will happen consistently – without a plan.
Generating impactful content requires skill and time. Luckily you can hire professionals, like us, who truly understand your strategy – and your audience, to do much of this work.
5. Overkill
Nobody wants to sit through your ten second animation before they see the homepage.
Think about what happens when you have to wait several seconds for a page to load or the scroll gets stuck moving through a whizzy website animation? At best, your experience is tainted. More likely, your mouse pointer is drifting to the X in the right-hand corner.
When building a new website, you may want to get creative and give it some “wow factor”. But be careful, animations and other ‘high-end’ features can make a site slow or glitchy. The last thing you want is to give investors the impression that you have grand ideas but poor execution.
If you are going to include such features, make sure you pick the right hosting provider. Some offer higher speed connections. If you want a large website with a lot of high-quality images, pick a hosting provider that can handle it.
You can also compress large files to reduce their impact on performance. If you want to include video, consider hosting it on a third-party site like Wistia or Vimeo, rather than embedding it into the site.
If you want help avoiding these and other pitfalls, contact us today. Your website should be a valuable marketing asset, not an encumbrance.
