Ladenburg Thalmann & Co. Inc
Website Design & Development
Summary
Ladenburg Thalmann & Co. Inc. is a proud member of the New York Stock Exchange that offers a full suite of investment banking and capital markets products and services. DynamiX will work with your team to create a memorable site experience for users that serves to educate, support, and guide the companies you work with.
Furthermore, we will build the backend in a way that is easy to edit, so your team can easily update content to evolve with your growing business.
Furthermore, we will build the backend in a way that is easy to edit, so your team can easily update content to evolve with your growing business.
The History
Ladenburg has played a significant role in financing the growth of American industry, especially in regards to railroads, utilities, and other emerging industries.
The Experience
Your team's expertise, professionalism, and success is not reflected on the current site. The content is outdated, the design is not engaging, and the overall user experience is negatively impacted by poor formatting, slow page speed and unclear navigation.
The Future
A new website is needed to modernize the brand, tell your story, and reposition the brand as an industry leader, so that Ladenburg can strengthen existing client relationships and attract new clients.
Your Creative Brief
| When speaking with customers, what do you like to highlight about your business?: | Ladenburg's long rich history as well as our products and services. We have been a member of the New York Stock Exchange since 1879 and offers a full suite of investment banking and capital markets products and services, including proprietary equity research. Ladenburg became one of the most influential private merchant banking firms, a major financial intermediary between America, Great Britain, and the European Continent. Important role in financing the growth of American industry—particularly America's railroads, utilities, and emerging industries. |
| What information is missing from your website that customers need to know?: | A strong homepage that includes a tagline and a relevant image that represents our firm. News highlights with a link to take someone to more news. Mission, vision, culture (which we would need to update before it can go on the site). Highlighted investment banking transactions. Clear menu at the top of the page not on the side. All the tabs related to the blurbs and pieces highlighted on the homepage |
| What works well on your current website?: | The site is mobile responsive and actually looks better on a phone. The data on most of the tabs is okay it is just formatted horribly |
| What is broken/frustrating on your current website?: | The first impression is uninviting. Our (desired) brand isn't reflected. We need to modernize |
| What is the most important thing you want your new website to have or do?: | Strengthening our brand. I feel that if we can accomplish this it will drive high quality employees and clients to our business. |
| Do you have a budget in mind for the new website?: | $25k-$40k |
| Tell us about your ideal customer. What makes them great to work with?: | Our clients are comprised of corporate issuers, institutional investors, and other financial institutions. We love working with our corporate issuers to help facilitate their capital raising needs, unlocking access to institutional investor capital, and helping investors better understand the companies they allocate capital to. |
| If you were to divide your current customer base into two or more groups (in terms of their demographics, goals, attitudes, etc.), how would you define them?: | Institutional accounts generally include registered investment companies, insurance companies, banks, SEC registered broker-dealers, SEC registered investment advisers, certain retirement plans, governmental entities, and individual investors and other entities with at least $50 million in assets. Retail investors are typically classified as non-professional investors. |
| What are the top 3 questions you get from customers before, during or after you work with them?: | I never heard of you guys, what is Ladenburg? How can we work with you? What other companies have they worked with (capital raising)? |
| What questions should your customers ask, but often don't?: | Not really sure how to answer this one. |
| What do you need to do to make your customers feel like you've exceeded their expectations?: | All clients needs are different, but at the end of the day its how much value we can bring that wins. Issuers want access to capital and investors want access to companies. Maintaining strong relationships with investors and corporate management teams is important to our success. |
| Who are your biggest competitors?: | B. Riley, Janney, Oppenheimer, William Blair, HC Wainwright & Co. |
| What's unique about your company, products, or services, when compared to competitors in your space?: | Ladenburg research department focuses on 4 different sectors Healthcare, Yield Oriented, Utilities, and Technology, Media, & Telecom (TMT). We have 10 research analysts covering over 200 public companies. We've been around forever and continuously adapted to serve the market's needs. We have (or will have) a strong investment banking team focusing on each issuer's capital needs. Our bankers and analysts have extensive contacts and connections that span beyond what our competition has. We have experts in the sectors we work in. We are transparent with the issuers and give advice and suggestions that are helpful not just what the issuer wants to hear. We have strong employee retention, which may be a nice stat/ number to include on a careers page. |
| What obstacles are your customers facing that create a need for your service?: | For smaller issuers, they struggle to find an investment bank (IB) that isn't afraid of the small-cap and is able to support them through the whole raising process. For smaller companies, they will do a raise with a "better brand" but never get post-raise support from sales and trading or analysts and often feel lied to. For larger companies, they are looking for additional connections including investors, broker dealer (BD), hospital networks etc. all of which we have. |
| What in particular makes your customers hesitate to choose your company as their solution?: | We are outdated and slow to make changes. We have no social presence or consistent flow of news. We have become known for being excluded from larger deals (including covered companies) and only on deals with warrants, converts, etc. even though we are capable of much more. |
| Why should they trust your company above others?: | We are honest with the companies we work with. We provide advice, suggestions, and guidance that is catered to the issuers' needs. We offer excellent post-raise support with consistent analyst reports, virtual events, and introductions through our comprehensive network of individuals (distribution lists upwards of 3,000 people). |
| At the highest level, what are 3 goals you want to reach with your new website?: | Raise brand perception, strengthen our position in investment banking, and attract new exciting talent. |
| Are there any websites, inside or outside of your industry, that you like?: | https://www.pipersandler.com/ |
| What is your favorite thing about your company's brand?: | Love our history and really want to highlight this. We have some cool memorabilia we could have photographed or scanned to be displayed on the site. Do not want the feel to be ornate. Needs to be modern but reflect a robust history. We need to get across that we a trusted brand. |
| What motivates your team to make your service better for your clients?: | Ultimately if we can give our client a better experience it will make everyone work and feel better. Our team is dedicated to our clients and strives to provide anything and everything to address their needs. Having better tools and a better brand awareness will start to change the perception. |
| What else should we know about your project or business?: | Would love a way for compliance disclosures to be updated on the site and versions tracked. We have so many disclosures will all different formatting that it doesn't have any continuity, that is a mess in my opinion. |
Your stated goal:
To strengthen the brand and drive clients to the business.
Scope of Work
New Site Capabilities
AKA "What We Think About So You Don't Have To"
Site Styler
Octane's Site Styler allows for sweeping changes to the look and feel of the
site experience, as well as smaller, nuance changes where appropriate. This
tool is faster and more nimble than any Wordpress or similar builder out there.
SEO Explorer
Our
exclusive SEO explorer lets you know where you stand in real time, pointing out
issues on pages across the website. We use it when building the site, and
you'll have access to keep it moving forward as content is added.
Audit Trail
We consider Octane to be a "single source of truth" for how a site is being worked on and improved over time, and have designed many features into the platform that allow for easy access to data that can assist in decision making and understanding.
- Input-Based: See any adjustments made to an input on a given page
simply by clicking on the history tool. You can use this area to revise back to
a previous version as well simply by clicking on the text and confirming!
- Page-Based: Want to see what changes have been made to a given page? This lives next to
each page and shows every adjustment since the moment the page was made.
- Global Trail: The left navigation bar includes a link to the site's global audit trail, which provides all changes made to the site and lets you filter by user.
Site Speed
Octane is designed to allow for lightning fast page loads and optimization at scale, ensuring your site loads quickly for visitors at all times.
Octane Form Builder
Our Form Builder allows you to customize form inputs, choose where you want submissions sent, and integrates with Google Sheets for easy onramp into other platforms.
Octane AI Tool
Leveraging the latest in artificial intelligence technology, Octane has been designed to augment your team's content needs directly within each individual page.
Layout Store Inclusion
Octane's new Layout Store is a phenomenal technology stack designed to allow your site to do more without needing us to create custom components. Currently there are over 180 layouts inside the store, and more are being added regularly. We will add all current useful layouts during the build process for you.
