14 May Financial Copywriters: Cutting through Complexity for Your Customers
As a financial planner or accountant, a large part of your role is to educate and advise your clients on the functions and technicalities of the financial vehicle you’re building for them. Clients need some level of working knowledge to be able to give you the direction you need. Yet, how do you make complex topics like the intricacies of long-term asset structuring accessible time-poor and overworked clients?
One way is through the use of financial copywriters, professional writers who have a background in journalism, finance or marketing. Their role: helping the right kind of reader find the right path through the financial jargon jungle.
This article will explore the role of financial copywriters and how they can help your business by cutting through complexity for your customers. The key concept here is financial literacy – and how much of it your clients need to be able to make effective choices under your guidance.
Financial literacy deficit
In Australia, there are surprisingly few demographics that have high financial literacy. Even high-income professionals and corporate managers often have no personal wealth-building plans, asset strategy or spending controls. You, like most financial professionals, probably don’t have to think too hard to recall a client earning well into six figures, whose net worth is well into seven figures, yet whose personal and family finances are chaos. How do you even help them when they know they need you but admitting their incompetence is such a hit to their ego and “head in sand” sense of security?
Part of the answer is improving your written comms. And writing the right stuff to get the message across to your customers takes some combination of talent, time and tenacity. But unless you have a lot of talent, the time and tenacity parts of the equation are simply not going to work out. All your energy is going towards running your practice: you don’t have the leisure to write brochures, blog posts, white papers, case studies and webpages. So, who does? Answer: a professional copywriter.
So, a successful financial planner or accountant has a deep responsibility for educating and advising their customers. The problem is that complex topics like retirement, insurance, stocks, bonds etc., can be difficult to understand in detail. How do you make these things accessible? Financial copywriters have the skills to manage this kind of work because they have techniques to match the high-level knowledge in virtually any field and make it “friendly” for various kinds of readership – that is, your target audience.
Engagement through simple clarity
The key theme here is engagement. Unless your customers engage with your advice and services, it is likely they won’t become good clients. That is, if your customers don’t understand financial talk, they’ll become confused and frustrated. They switch off or zone out. Sure, they may stay with you on your bronze package because they know they “need someone to look after their money”. In this case, however, they’re hardly going to be receptive to your innovative thinking or upsell efforts because they simply don’t “get” what you’re doing – even if you can see that certain moves clearly make sense for their circumstances. Why? Because THEY don’t see how what you do makes any sense at all.
This is not to say you have to explain the financial concepts, products or strategies in a simplistic way. Not at all. Why? Well, that sentence holds the key to what good financial copywriting is all about: the distinction between the simple and the simplistic. Functionally speaking, when you make a concept simple it still “works” – although perhaps more broadly than the complex version. When you make a concept simplistic, all the basic parts are still represented but they do not “work” anymore. Where simple makes things clear by removing excess detail, simplistic goes too far. It removes so much detail that the concepts become blurred.Financial copywriting is therefore the process of making things as simple as necessary to get the right message across to the right sort of client, while still making the expert speaking sound like an expert.
Getting started with financial copywriting
In the world of finance, there are a variety of different types of clients. Every type has its own set of needs and preferences for how they want to be communicated with. Whether you’ve been in business for 40 years or just opened your doors last month, financial copywriting is an essential skill to have on hand if you care about your image and reputation as an expert.
If all this sounds complicated and overwhelming, don’t worry – we can help! Our team at Search And Site Authoring know what it takes to get simple messages across effectively so that your clientele feels respected while still being well informed about their options. Contact us today by emailing info@searchandsite.com.au.
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