“My advisors don’t use the website management tools I’ve provided to them.”

You’ve experienced this challenge before. The challenge of adoption. After investing a significant portion of your budget, time and effort, your advisors don’t end up using the tools you’ve provided to them. In a research study we performed in which we surveyed 25 financial institutions and broker-dealers, the unfortunate result of the lack of adoption came complacency and the simple acceptance that advisors simply would not take the time to use these tools. As a result, important questions weren’t being asked to evaluate why. Well, we did and our advisor population distilled it down into three key areas of improvement:

1. “It’s hard to be productive with the current tool.” Many advisors gave up on the tools they were provided and cited reasons due to usability and the fact that the tools weren’t intuitive enough or sufficient enough for them to customize their websites. Moreover, content review times took too long if they used the tool.
2. “The website designs provided by marketing are not modern and do not accurately reflect my practice.” Advisors felt that they wanted more choice with respect to the website templates. Additionally, many of them demanded mobile website functionality.
3. “I don’t have enough time to maintain my website.” Advisors want to spend time in front of their customers, not in front of a phone or computer screen managing and maintaining their website. Many of them found it to be a time consuming task and many were looking to their enterprise marketing departments to manage their individual web properties for them. A challenge that would prove to be difficult to scale when we asked marketing departments if they take on that task.

Adoption of a technology relies on two key factors: risk and payoff. For example, advisors feel that spending time on their website will take away from time spent with clients and hence less revenue. This is their perceived risk measured against an unknown payoff. So their decision to give up on the tool is actually quite logical. You as a marketer believe that an investment in more modern tools can benefit advisors but as you implement those new technologies, you need to ensure you are solving these issues while balancing your corporate objectives:

• Can I provide better design choices for advisors without fragmenting my brand?
• What is the investment profile to provide mobile websites for my advisors?
• How do I implement a content distribution strategy that adds value for my advisors in a scalable and cost effective way?
• Am I stress testing the usability of the tools before I deploy them? Do I have the right advisor engagement strategy?

These are just some of the key questions that you should be asking yourself to help set you on a path to increased and improved advisor technology adoption. Ideally, this not only leads to better business results overall but also positively impacts advisor practices. If you’d like a more in-depth view of your advisor technology adoption strategy or would like to speak with us about improving technology adoption, simply fill out the form below.