Are you a financial planner or adviser looking to inform and engage your clients about pensions? One of the best ways is to provide a downloadable, relevant guide on pensions – such as a PDF.
A resource like this can serve multiple purposes. First of all, it can be offered as a type of “lead magnet” to potential clients on your website or landing page. Secondly, it could be also compatible as a printed document which you might offer to existing clients in meetings.
Yet financial advisers and IFAs often have lots of questions about pension guides. How long should it be, and what kind of information should be included? How formal/informal should it be, and how much jargon should it contain?
What sort of call to action (CTA) might be appropriate? Should you aim to create one large, comprehensive pension guide or a set of smaller ones – perhaps broken down into topics?
In this post, our marketing and content team here at CreativeAdviser offer their thoughts on these sorts of commonly-asked questions about pension guides. We hope you find this resource helpful.
Please get in touch, moreover, if you’d like to discuss your own pension guide with our team.
What kinds of pension guides might you use for clients?
As alluded to above, there is no universal or “set way” of creating a pension guide. The final result could take a range of different forms depending on the topic, your brand and your unique clients.
Yet there are some broad types of pension guide which we can describe here:
- The “sales-oriented” pension guide. Is your pension guide intended, primarily, to target new business opportunities? If so, then your use of tone, layout and content might need to take a more “sales-y” nature. This might include references to specific pension products that you offer, for instance, and the distinct advantages they give to potential clients.
- The “client-focused” pension guide. Perhaps you want your pension guide to be more of a helpful “to go” resource for current clients, especially if they need reassuring about how your process works and protects their wealth.
- The “business partner” pension guide. Sometimes, financial planners and advisers like to offer a special pension guide to other businesses which serve as important sources of client referrals (e.g. accountants and lawyers). In which case, the language and brand assets used in the guide will need to be tailored to the needs of these businesses’ clients.
- The “taster” pension guide. As mentioned in the introduction, it could be that you want to use your pension guide as a “lead magnet” in your marketing campaigns – whetting the appetites of people in your sales pipeline. In which case, you might seek to strike a delicate balance with the amount of information you choose to include – giving just enough to provide value, but not so much that they go away not needing anything further from you.
- The “full” pension guide. Other IFAs and financial planners like to take a “content-driven” approach to their marketing. Here, instead of “teasing” the reader, the pension guide offers a comprehensive overview of the subject – providing as much value as possible. As a result, the aim is that the reader will appreciate the transparency, and come to realise that the work involved is too much to take on alone. Rather, they need the help of a financial planner/adviser.
What should I include in my pension guide?
As you may have realised by now, the exact information you include will depend very much on the type of pension guide you want to produce. However, you’ll likely want to feature the following as a minimum:
- Front & back cover. This needs to be beautiful-designed, true to your brand (e.g. logo) and with a compelling title. You might also want your contact information on the back.
- Contents page. This provides reassurances to the reader about what’s in the pension guide, and what to expect.
- Imagery. Readers of pension guides hate to be confronted with a huge wall of text. As such, make sure you break everything up with appropriate imagery which supports the content.
- Helpful, value-driven content. Have you ever read a guide which was, bluntly, full of “filler” and left you more frustrated and confused than before? You want to avoid this outcome at all costs with readers of your pension guide. Make sure the content is useful and answers their questions.
How long should my pension guide be?
Designing a pension guide yourself often brings the following realisation: “This is getting quite long, quite quickly!” This is where a financial graphic designer can be helpful, since they can identify areas which make the guide unnecessarily long.
However, you also need to avoid the opposite trap – offering a guide which is too short. A prospect is unlikely to be impressed, for instance, if they enter their email into your contact form, download your pension guide and find that it is only two pages long.
If you want to print your pension guide, moreover, then you also need to factor the physical aspect. Here, some common total page-counts might be 4, 8 or 12.
What is the best call to action for a pension guide?
After people have finished reading your pension guide, what do you want them to do? It is unlikely that you simply want them to walk away with a warm feeling. Rather, this piece of marketing communication needs to drive a desired action from your audience.
As such, consider your call to action (CTA) carefully. What kinds of steps might they be prepared to take at the end of reading your pension guide? They may be unwilling, even at this stage, to fully commit to your business. Yet they may be open to booking a free consultation with you. If so, let that be your main invitation in the pension guide.
