Whatever you invest in as a financial firm, you want to be confident that – ultimately – it will deliver a return on investment (ROI). The same holds true for financial copywriting.
Strong copywriting is an integral part to a financial brand, its public relations (PR) efforts and wider marketing campaigns. Yet how, exactly, does financial copywriting contribute to your success as a business? How can you measure the ROI – establishing where resources are being deployed effectively and also where improvements can be made?
Below, our financial copywriters at CreativeAdviser offer some ideas about how ROI can be attained through great written content and how it can be measured. We hope these insights are useful to you.
Get in touch if you’d like to discuss your own financial copywriting needs with us.
Why financial firms need good copywriting
It is difficult to achieve a successful marketing strategy without strong copywriting underpinning your campaign(s). At a basic level, if your text-based content is full of spelling/grammar mistakes or just appears to be childishly written, your audience will not be impressed.
Quite often, financial firms make the opposite mistake. Their financial copywriting is laden with jargon and is overly technical, putting off clients who cannot penetrate the meaning. A good financial copywriter, therefore, can balance the need to offer “depth of content” (whilst satisfying compliance) and also the need to be understandable – and engaging – to the reader.
Think about any type of marketing or communication in financial services. They all rest upon strong copywriting. These include blogs for SEO, ad copy for Google Ads (or Facebook/LinkedIn ads), client brochures, pop-up banners and more.
So, financial copywriting is clearly important. But how can it drive ROI for financial services businesses?
Improving visibility
What if your financial copywriting could get your brand in front of more pairs of eyes (especially those which you are most interested in targeting)? The good news is, it can. This is especially true for financial SEO, which rests heavily on having a good content strategy.
SEO (search engine optimisation) involves positioning your website higher in relevant search engine results. The aim is to generate more traffic from “organic” visitors who browse your content and, hopefully, take some kind of “conversion” action – like downloading a PDF guide or booking a meeting with one of your financial advisers.
Google has made it clear that “credibility” for your financial website is vital to help it rank highly in its search engine. How can it know if you are relevant, trustworthy and authoritative? A website devoid of content will be difficult to judge. Yet a financial website rich in high-quality content (e.g. blogs, guides and videos) gives the Google “bots” something to go on.
How can you build strong financial copywriting into an SEO strategy? One good starting point is to identify the keywords you want to rank highly for in search engines. Then, write about them. For instance, suppose you want to improve your visibility for the search phrase “pension transfer advice”. Here, you could try and write a “definitive guide” on the subject – perhaps offering it as a PDF guide.
You will need to establish that the search term(s) you want to target have decent search engine “volume”. You should also be confident that the keyword would likely bring in some high-quality traffic (e.g. potential clients in the area) and that it is realistic to “rank for”. If you are a small financial planner competing with a large UK bank or government website for a certain keyword, for instance, then you will likely struggle to beat these other websites in the Google search results.
However, if the target keyword produces search results with a lot of forums, old blog posts or local news articles, you likely have more of a chance to beat competitors with an excellently-written piece.
Driving conversions
Suppose you get 100 visitors to a specific web page in a given month. If 2 of these visitors complete your contact form (i.e. a “goal” which you have defined as a “conversion”) then your conversion rate is 2%. Yet what would it take to push this percentage higher?
Financial copywriting has an important role to play in driving up conversion rates. Firstly, it can help improve the quality of the traffic coming to the page. If 80 out of the 100 visitors do not fall into your “target client” description, then perhaps you could improve this to 70 or even lower. Copywriting can help by getting your website into more relevant search engine results. Yet it can also help users to “qualify” themselves before even arriving at your website. For instance, if the “meta description” for your web page clearly suggests that you only work with a specific type of client (e.g. British expats), then non-relevant visitors are less likely to click on your link in Google search results.
Secondly, good financial copywriting can help drive further engagement from people who arrive on your website. A key area is your calls to action (CTA) – i.e. buttons on your website which invite the visitor to do something meaningful, like fill out your contact form. If these can be written in a more effective manner, then users are more likely to obey the CTA – driving up your conversion rate.
Here, you might need to do some “A/B testing” to see how different variations of your CTA perform. After the testing period for your page is over – say, a week or two – you can check the results and see if there was a meaningful difference in conversion rate. If so, perhaps your financial copywriting was the key. Other possibilities include the positioning, size and colour of the CTA.
