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The Clarus Group
Clarus is a leading wealth consultancy and investment advisory in Cincinnati serving high net worth individuals and businesses.
Opportunity
After 25 years operating under an obscure and somewhat conventional business name, the owner renamed the company to evoke what wealthy clients are searching for - turning confusion about financial decisions into clarity and confidence. They wanted to extend the reach of their brand by opening new relationships with wealthy clients outside traditional areas and to provide donor motivation programs for charities and foundations. The website had to stand apart in a crowded marketplace and provide meaningful content to a targeted audience.
Engagement
Primary site visitors were defined as high net worth individuals, with the secondary visitor being planned giving officers and executives from nonprofit organizations looking to educate potential donors.
The overall look and feel of the site was designed to reinforce the company’s printed marketing material that carried the “confusion to clarity and confidence” theme. A muted color scheme of cream and grays support vivid imagery that is distinctively different for each main section, but carries the branding throughout.
The typography scheme combines serif and sans serif fonts in a template-based style sheet. Updates to content automatically maintain the integrity of site’s design scheme.
Language is a relaxed business style, calming, confident, friendly, and self-assured. Users will likely visit either the financial planning section or the wealth section, but rarely both. So both sections follow similar content outlines with introductory text, questions and answers, and relevant resources or case studies.
Every page has frequent hints to take action. Visitors are directed to the Contact page where they choose to communicate with Clarus via a drop-down interest form or directly by e-mail.
The site required a disclaimer for the financial planning section only. To keep with the graceful page layout and intuitive behavior of the navigation scheme, we allowed the compliance page to be a page in itself, rather than carry the disclaimer at the bottom of some pages (but not others) as is typical. We created interest for the visitor by asking “What is a disclaimer?”