On Saturday 9 March, the Times distributed the 2024 edition of the VouchedFor Top Rated guide.
Many of you will be aware of the platform already, which is the UK’s leading review site for financial advisers and planners. The guide details the highest-rated firms and advisers across the country, with only a small percentage of the 30,000+ financial advisers in the UK qualifying.
In light of this publication, we’d like to take the opportunity to help you become an expert in the VouchedFor platform, making the absolute most of your profile.
The basics
If you’re starting totally from scratch, or you’ve set up an account but never really invested much time in VouchedFor, here’s a checklist for anyone who wants to get their profile up and running.
Profile picture
First impressions count, and a good profile picture is an ever-underestimated part of your profile. A high-quality, professional headshot akin to that you’d use on a website team member page or LinkedIn profile is perfectly acceptable.
About Me
The About Me section is your first real chance to show off and set yourself apart from the crowd. It’s so important, that VouchedFor themselves have written a guide on how to write the ‘perfect’ About Me section.
TL;DR – Be clear about what sets you apart, consider clarity of communication at all times, and write about more than just your professional life. People want to work with someone they can get on with at a personal level, as well as professionally.
Services
Having an accurate list of your service offerings and their regulatory status is not just to help prospective clients understand what you do, but it’s also to help them find you. Visitors to the VouchedFor website can search the site for advisers by specific services.
If you haven’t listed services that you do offer, you may not be getting in front of the right audience.
Minimum Investment Criteria
At the end of the day, it often comes down to what level of assets a client has to invest. Ensure this is accurate, as you may be getting enquiries from people outside of your target audience if it’s not. Being clear and upfront about your ideal client can only be of benefit further down the line.
Location
As basic as it comes – where do you operate?
Whilst advisers are becoming more able to facilitate clients across the country, most still prefer to have a largely local client bank. Presuming you don’t want to regularly visit clients in Edinburgh if you’re based in Exeter, it’s worth ensuring your location is accurate and your “distance willing to travel” is clearly marked.
Expanding on your profile
Having an accurate profile with all the basic information completed is one thing, but almost every adviser on the platform will have that. What else can you do to really set yourself apart?
Minimum Introductory Offer
It goes without saying that people will pay more attention if they believe they are getting a good deal. With that in mind, being upfront about a free initial consultation or discount on fees can be an effective way to differentiate yourself from other advisers that a prospective client is weighing up.
Qualifications, Education and Experience
The client-adviser relationship is often very personal, requiring lots of trust between both parties. As a result, transparency is key. Having a comprehensive background helps build a picture of who you are to a prospective client, allowing them to get a feel for you as a person and as a professional.
By providing details of your education, the professional qualifications you have undertaken, and your experience in financial services, your profile can feel much more complete. A prospective client doesn’t always want a snapshot of who you are now, they often want to understand your background as well.
Awards
Whilst awards aren’t everything, the opportunity to show off the successes you’ve had can be invaluable, and potentially a deciding factor in whether or not a prospect reaches out to you or someone else. Adding onto your profile these achievements can help to further differentiate you.
Getting ahead of the crowd
So you’ve got all the basic info on your profile, and you’ve added in some background about yourself. You’ve even got in some bluster about your professional successes.
All finished now, right? We can call it a day and go home?
Not quite yet, I’m afraid. There are some excellent advisers out there on VouchedFor and even now you’ve got a bit more work to do if you want to truly set yourself apart.
Meeting Locations
With the growing expectations around flexibility amongst clients and the different expectations across generations, advisers need to be clear about their availability.
As well as providing details about your location, VouchedFor enables you to provide more details on about your willingness to engage with clients in a way that best suits them. You can see this as an opportunity to demonstrate your willingness to provide a service which takes clients’ needs as a priority.
The settings in this section enable you to provide greater details on the different ways you can set up meetings with your clients: “My Office”, “Your Home”, “Video Call”, and “Other”.
Explaining how you can incorporate video calls into your service, discussing your willingness to meet in your client’s home, or talking about the experience a client will receive when visiting your office are all subtle opportunities to demonstrate your commitment to client satisfaction, which often go unheeded.
Advice Fees
The Advice Fees tool allows you to provide information about how you charge for your services, which is then available on your profile as an interactive calculator. This gives visitors to your profile the opportunity to quickly get an estimate of your fees for different services and different levels of assets invested.
The benefits of taking the time to provide this information is two-fold:
- It saves you time – potential enquiries from people who fall outside your target audience will filter themselves out, preventing you from spending time with irrelevant enquiries.
- It further exemplifies your willingness for transparency – building trust with visitors to your page before they have necessarily even spoken to you.
Additionally, you can download a shareable report which details your clients’ opinions of your fees, including how they rate your services’ value for money, and the clarity of your charges.
VouchedFor will compare your fees to the UK average and will provide you with a level – ranging from “Highly competitive” to “Premium” – for each service and investment level, which you can share with prospects to provide third-party verification of the competitiveness of your fees.
If you’re curious about getting started, VouchedFor has written a guide on how to add your fees to your profile.
From zero to hero
Whilst I’m certain you’re brain is now whirring away with a multitude of ideas of how you can bring your VouchedFor profile in line with the best of the best, sometimes it can take some time.
All in all, a prospective client wants to know who you are, what sets you apart, and whether you can actually help them.
Bear that in mind at all times and you can’t go too far wrong.
But, if you would like some help, don’t hesitate to reach out to Yardstick’s team of marketing experts, designers, and writers. Get in touch with us at hi@theyardstickagency.co.uk or call 0115 8965 300.
