How to: Where you can publish your financial calculators

Providing financial guidance on your website only really benefits you if people can find them and use them. 

So while we definitely applaud you for investing in financial calculators (really, that was super smart of you!), we’re not going to take your money and leave you hanging. We want you to squeeze the most possible amount of value out of every dollar of your spend by strategically placing and promoting the heck out of your beautiful calculators.

Before we explain how to do just that, though, let’s quickly review the main purpose of financial calculators:

• Calculators are an easy way to provide personalized answers at scale on your website.
• They provide an interactive experience to supplement your content.
• With customizable features and an SEO-friendly build, calculators can help drive new traffic to your pages when people perform Google searches.

So, sure, once you place calculators on your site and they are crawled, you will score some traffic and maybe even delight your audience and spur them to take future action on your site. But what about people who land on your site in a different way? What about existing customers who you could potentially attract into other lines of business? In other words, are you doing all you can to make sure that your calculators are visible? 

Calculators can be used in so many different ways to help all sorts of campaigns, they pay for themselves 5x over if you’re creative. 

But hold up... If you’re running calculators on your site that aren’t exactly modern (aka, they’re built in iFrames, are kind of ugly, and you don’t actually want to point any traffic their way), then stop reading. Bookmark this page for future reference, and go learn why you should upgrade your calculators ASAP. 

For the rest of you who are implementing Chimney calculators or have them on site already, here’s how you can reuse and recycle them in many different places across your digital ecosystem to get the most out of them.

Here are the different places you can publish your calculators:

1. Across any page of your website as a Floating Widget. We listed this suggestion first because it’s definitely the #1 way that our customers unleash the power of their calculators (if we do say so ourselves). This widget is designed to easily to drop onto any relevant page of your site in which users might benefit from a little on-the-spot number-crunching. Consider it a sleek and supercharged call-to-action button that drives great results.

https://www.loom.com/share/2cd006eb626a419187e8f2ad39d8cd52

1. In your resource section. Calculators are definitely a sophisticated resource for you to promote, right up there with your FAQs or other “knowledge base” type content. The reason? Calculators give your customers highly personalized, instant answers to  questions like “how much house can I afford?” or “what’s the best way to save up for a purchase?” in seconds.
2. Directly in the top navigation of your site header. Putting a link to your calculator page in the navigation lets users find them wherever they are in their site exploration. They won’t have to keep clicking the back button or run a search, which makes for a better user experience.
3. Within content marketing articles. Content marketing is a very powerful strategy for building trust and setting up your brand as a credible source of financial information. You can help enhance your content – and increase engagement – by combining stories with relevant interactive elements like a financial calculator. 
4. On loan officer/banker pages. Calculators can be used to help prompt potential customers to take the next step and request a call from one of your loan officers or banking professionals. For instance, if someone is thinking of applying for a mortgage or refinancing, they might want to run their numbers quickly and then if they like what they see, they can get in touch.
5. On marketing campaign landing pages. If you’re paying for traffic, you want that audience to have a great experience and take action when they arrive. Calculators can be the main feature of your promotion, whether it’s to showcase your auto loan rates or prompting people to think about their retirement savings plan.
6. On product pages. When people head to a product page, whether it’s a deposit account or a home loan, a calculator may help them decide that they’re ready to open an account. Having the tool right there for them eliminates the risk of them searching elsewhere and not coming back.
7. In social media promotions. It’s always a smart idea to publish links to your calculators on social media since it’s not a hard sell. Instead, you’re showing your audience that you have a free tool available for them.
8. In email marketing promotions. Have a CD promotion coming up? Calculators could be the showpiece of your email marketing campaign. You can invite users to see how much they can earn, or in the case of a loan, how much they can save with your low interest rates.

The great thing about partnering with Chimney is that the possibilities and customization options for our calculators unlimited. Put them all around your site, link to them, share them on social media – the more you use them, the better! Helping you build great calculators for your site is just the start – we will do everything we can to help maximize their performance.

One final tip: The Chimney team has a growing list of happy clients, and many years of experience in the financial services marketing industry. In other words, we’ve got a lot of secrets to share. Our clients are always encouraged to reach out so we can collaborate and help you grow.

CTA: Start a free trial for a specific calculator campaign and see for yourself.