Financial content and copywriting are attempts to address your audience’s key questions.
How do pensions work? Do I have enough to retire? How do I develop the best investment strategy? These are just some of the pressing queries faced by your clients (and potential clients). Aside from sitting down with them – or meeting online – the best way to offer answers (and value) is to offer great content.
For the most part, this content will take a written form – i.e. financial copywriting – although financial videos are likely to continue becoming more popular in the years ahead. Yet how can you offer your audience great content? Why invest in copywriting at all?
Below, our team at CreativeAdviser offers a new guide to financial copywriting in 2022. Here, we answer the common questions we receive from financial firms about client content. We hope you find this useful.
Please get in touch if you’d like to discuss your own financial copywriting project with us via a free online conversation.
What does a financial copywriter do?
In short, a financial copywriter is a specialist who writes content for financial firms – typically, nowadays, for publication on the internet.
Your content may be published as a guest piece on another website (e.g. a news outlet), on your own website’s blog or perhaps in a client newsletter sent out via email. The purpose of the writer’s content is usually to inform, inspire and sometimes entertain the reader.
The greater overall purpose of financial copywriting is to build trust between the financial firm and their readers (e.g. clients) by offering great value in the content. This content, moreover, should encourage readers to do more of their own research.
Here, it helps to address some misconceptions. In light of the aforementioned, most financial copywriters are not advertising copywriters. Their primary goal is not to push a sale or to sensationalise a story. Also, copywriting is not the same as copyright law.
What distinguishes financial copywriters?
It takes considerable skill, specialist experience and knowledge to write good content for financial services.
There is a lot of jargon, meaning that generalist copywriters often struggle to grasp key concepts. Using such a writer, therefore, often ends up funding a learning curve.
Not only that, but a financial copywriter needs to strike a delicate balance. On the one hand, the content does typically need depth and so requires conveying fairly intricate information to the reader (e.g. pension transfer rules).
However, the reality is that technical content like this can often become boring for the reader. As such, a financial copywriter needs to be skilled in convey complex subject matter in a clear, engaging way.
One great way a copywriter can do this is by lacing the content with relatable, compelling stores – e.g. recent client testimonials, or short case studies/examples to illustrate the point being made. This helps give the reader a “break” from the more complex content, and allows them to catch their breath so they are ready to consume the next detailed point.
How does a financial copywriter work?
Producing great content for financial services requires a lot of different skills. Obviously, a financial copywriter spends a lot of their time writing. Yet other important skills and activities often include:
- Doing research. This might include primary research (e.g. running client surveys) and secondary research (e.g. using news articles).
- Interviewing. Sometimes, a writer might need to interview a client, company director or other key person to get useful information.
- Proofing. A good financial copywriter will take time to comb through articles for spelling, grammar and factual errors.
- Editing. If mistakes a found during the proofing process, a copywriter usually makes “Edits”/”Suggestions” in a revised version.
- Image sourcing. Most articles written by a financial copywriter do well with at least a featured image.
- Project management. Often, multiple articles need to be written, and deliverables need to be coordinated with other key people (e.g. internal marketing managers at the financial firm). Good organisation and management skills are vital here.
- SEO integration. Many financial firms want their content to help their website appear higher in relevant search engine results. A good financial copywriter, therefore, should have a good grasp of SEO and know how to write well for this purpose.
What do financial copywriters write, exactly?
A financial copywriter needs to be skilled in writing different types of content, for various contexts. These can include:
- Blog posts. These usually range between 700-2,000 words and often address a specific question asked by clients/prospects.
- White papers. Typically longer than a blog post, this might take the form of a downloadable PDF guide – offering an extensive exploration of a particular topic (e.g. remortgaging).
- Email campaigns. This could involve designing a MailChimp template for a client newsletter, including snippets of the articles the financial copywriter has produced for that month.
- Social media updates. Increasingly, financial firms are active on social media to ensure they are “in front” of clients who also use the platform. Yet writing social media posts and managing the accounts can be time-consuming. A copywriter can help here.
- Industry reports. Similar to a white paper, an industry report is often longer in form than a blog post. However, it usually focuses on how a specific aspect of the financial sector has changed and surveys the wider landscape (e.g. SEIS investments in 2022).
- Website copy. Finally, financial firms often need updated copy for their financial website. This might be new biographic information for the About US page, or new services copy. A copywriter can be useful in this respect.
