“I spent thousands on my website and haven’t gotten a single lead.”

That’s what a financial advisor told me last month. His site looked OK, but under the hood, it wasn’t doing anything to drive growth.

This isn’t unusual.

Too many advisors still treat their websites like digital brochures — something to be “done” and forgotten. A box to check. An online business card with a few pages of professional-sounding copy and a “Contact Us” button.

And that mindset is quietly costing them business every single day.

The brochure mindset is rooted in old habits

Many advisors came up in a time when marketing meant printed flyers, seminar handouts, and handshake referrals. The website was a formality — just get something up with your logo, your credentials, and a mission statement about “helping clients achieve financial peace of mind.”

The result is static, templated sites that are easy to ignore.

But modern consumers don’t browse advisor websites like they flip through a printed brochure. They scroll fast, skim headlines, and judge in seconds.

And if your site doesn’t stand out, offer value, and guide them to act, it’s invisible.

The core flaws of the brochure website

The biggest issue is that brochure-style websites weren’t designed to perform. They were designed to exist.

Here’s what we see again and again:

• ‍Generic, templated designs that look nearly identical across dozens of advisor sites. Same handshake photos. Same happy retirees. Same three-menu layout with “Home,” “About,” and “Contact.” No differentiation, no personality, no trust signal.

• No clear calls to action. Often the only option is “Contact Us” — a big ask for someone just browsing. There’s nothing for the visitor who’s curious but not ready to commit.
• No lead capture. If someone isn’t ready to book a meeting today, there’s no path for them to stay in touch — no newsletter sign-up, no free resource, no quiz, no value.
• No data or tracking. I ask advisors how much traffic they get. Most don’t know. They don’t have analytics installed — or if they do, they never check it.

It’s like buying a billboard in the desert and never driving by to see if anyone’s looking.

What a website should do instead

A modern website isn’t a digital brochure. It’s a conversion tool. Your website’s job isn’t to close the deal. It’s to earn the next conversation.

That could mean:

• Offering a lead magnet — like a “retirement readiness checklist” or “guide to tax-efficient investing” — to collect emails from qualified prospects.
• Embedding a simple, frictionless booking funnel, so someone who’s ready can schedule a meeting in under 30 seconds (no 10-field contact form required).
• Installing analytics tools to learn what visitors are doing, what they’re clicking on, and where they’re dropping off — so you can improve performance over time.

I’ve seen it work firsthand:

• One advisor added a gated checklist download and doubled their email list in a month.
• Another implemented a streamlined calendar integration with automated follow-ups, saved hours per month on admin tasks, and saw no-show rates drop by half.
• A third realized most visitors were bouncing from their homepage within five seconds — and rebuilt their hero section with a stronger value proposition, increasing time-on-site by more than 60%.

These are not marketing gimmicks. They’re upgrades to how your business connects with real people online.

First published in Advisor Perspectives

1. Design ≠ art.
2. Users are stupid.
3. Color wheel is cool.
4. Discovery never ends.
5. Marketing ≠ promotion.
6. People don’t read policies.
7. Specialists beat generalists.
8. Waterfall processes don’t work.
9. Trust = Competence × Integrity.
10. Using dark UX patterns isn’t smart.
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11. Most roadmaps are wishful thinking.
12. Good design won’t save a weak offer.
13. Great products don’t sell themselves.
14. Trust is hard to build and easy to lose.
15. Designers should understand business.
16. Trust is the most important thing in finance.
17. Design won’t help if you have nothing to say.
18. Copy without setup verbs is always stronger.
19. There are many design solutions to a problem.
20. Great products are only built through iterations.
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21. Not every UI needs to feel obvious at first glance.
22. Being busy usually means avoiding hard decisions.
23. Mobile-first approach is premium-grade nonsense.
24. If you think your clients are terrible, blame yourself.
25. Experience only lets you make slightly better mistakes.
26. Everything you say and do either builds trust or erodes it.
27. The rule of contrast makes the most difference in design.
28. “Sell the vacation, not the plane ticket” is a rubbish advice.
29. The more experience you have, the more control you want.
30. It’s impossible to create anything truly unique, don’t even try.
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31. A lot of ‘rebrands’ happen when teams can’t make real progress.
32. Most companies use regulation as an excuse for a lack of creativity.
33. The simplest way to write strong copy: remove evaluative adjectives.
34. ASAP projects signal bad planning and are avoidable most of the time.
35. When you’re early-stage, brand guides are a waste of time and money.
36. Offers that remove pain are stronger than offers that promise pleasure.
37. Even in a regulated industry, you can be genuine, authentic, and specific.
38. Clients tend to remember your worst moments more than your best ones.
39. Building a business is damn hard, and every entrepreneur deserves a statue.
40. If you need legal disclaimers to defend your integrity, you don’t have integrity.
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41. In finance, brand loyalty doesn’t exist. People only stay until they distrust you.
42. Simplistic color psychology is hogwash. Colors don’t have universal meanings.
43. For every manipulative tactic, hidden fee, and dark UI pattern, you’ll pay later with churn.
44. Good design only happens at the intersection of business objectives and constraints.
45. You can’t “design” trust. You can only live up to it and then use design to communicate it.
46. People who can switch between entrepreneurship and employment are extremely rare and talented.
47. From the outside, most founders look like they have a plan. Up close, it’s total chaos and continuous guessing.