8 TIPS TO DO FINANCIAL COPYWRITING THAT CAN BE ENGAGING FOR PEOPLE

The finance industry is booming in the country. There are many financial products and services available for the investors and the competition is very high among the companies.

It is important to create a financial sales copy in such a way that the business gets more customers and profit.

As the industry of finance is huge, the role of financial copywriters and financial copywriting services cannot be ignored. Finance is considered as a technical subject but there are certain tips for financial copywriting that can be engaging for people.

1. Focus On A Specific Niche

Finance is a very wide topic and there are many particular niches that you can focus on. If you hold some experience in a particular niche, then it is better to continue and become an expert.

Some of the preferences can be:

Day Trading

It is an interesting subject to write on. It includes regular and active trading of stocks, ETFs and some other financial instruments. Many people get attracted to day trading as it comes with the hope of getting rich quickly.

But when it comes to write about it or prepare a sales copy, then a lot of research is required. You must know different aspects like technical analysis, trading psychology, fundamental analysis, and so on.

If you have any experience in day trading, then it becomes easy to produce engaging and accurate content for the audience. There is a scope in writing for day trading websites and programs.

Personal Finance

If you are a finance writer, then personal finance is an evergreen niche for you. Everyone wants to know about budgeting, spending, saving and other general financial tips.

Credit and Debit Industry

As a writer, it is an amazing niche to write on. There are many people who have high debt due to loans, credit cards and mortgages. People want to get out of it and usually look for some service or tips for that. It is possible that your sales copy can offer them some solution.

Here your piece of writing can become profitable for the business.

2. Writing Should Be Customer Oriented

People are always attracted to benefits. Try to sell benefits rather than features in your sales copy. Know your target audience and try to provide them with some solution. By targeting beginners in stock market, you may write something that simplifies the process for them.

If writing about finance for a student, then you would write everything in a more informative way. If you are writing for people with great experience in finance, then you have to research well and add some advanced information in your content.

3. Be Accurate With Data and Numbers

There is no finance without numbers and properly analyzed data. You can’t provide wrong or incomplete information when it comes to financial copywriting. Try to write compelling headlines that includes some numbers.

People always click on a headline, where they see some specific number. The headline must solve the questions floating in the reader’s mind.

4. Too Much Technicality Is Confusing

If you want the client to pay for the service that you are promoting through the sales copy, then you must educate the customer in layman terms.  Everyone wants to manage their finances but not many know the technical jargon used in the finance industry.

To avoid any confusion, it is great to use simple and understandable language. Even if you have to use technical terms, then you can provide a glossary section or such terms.

5. Understand The Value Of Money

You must have an emotional impact on the customer to get any desired action. When we promote our service and provide benefits such as ‘make money’ or ‘save money’, then people may like it. But when you hit the other non-monetary aspects via financial services copywriting, then it creates an emotional connection.

Make people realize that the financial service can provide the power, peace, happy vacation with family, and so on. This is a great way to build a loyal customer base that can give financial gain for a longer time.

6. Try To Build A Partnership With The Customers

Human beings love to purchase a product or service from humans rather than a machine or company.  Especially in the finance industry where the money is involved, people look for trustworthy people. As a copywriter, try to assure people that you are there for guiding them.

7. The Sequence Should Be Proper

There should be a proper format for writing the sales copy. You must give the introduction of the financial product or service and then other details like features, benefits, drawbacks and payment related information. All the queries in the reader’s mind must be solved in a simple way.

8. Show The Achievements

If you are an owner of a finance company or a financial copywriter, then there is nothing wrong in showcasing the success stories or achievements of the financial service. Writing about impressive returns and happy customers builds a sense of trust in the audience. So, giving a social proof is not wrong.

Summary

Writing a good financial copy is important as every person has some interest in saving or making money. The customer would make the judgment of purchasing the service based on the benefits explained in the sales copy. The above mentioned are some tips that can be implemented to get financial copywriting services right.

13 Fintech Copywriting Tips

I believe Fintech marketing and Fintech copywriting is a niche like no other. 

At the intersection of finance and technology, building trust is at the core of any marketing strategy. That’s because as a Fintech company, you’re not managing someone’s social media or helping them buy clothes online: you’re helping them manage their money. And very often, it’s large amounts of money that will be used to fund education, retirement and emergencies. 

As more Fintech companies get serious with their marketing, many more are learning about the art of copywriting: figuring out their brand style and messaging, learning how to communicate with customers and building a relationship with users. As someone who helps Fintech companies acquire customers online with words, I’ve learnt a thing or two regarding good Fintech copywriting practices. 

These are tips that are useful for Fintech founders, Fintech marketers, content strategists and pretty much anyone who wants to market a Fintech product. These tips are also useful for both B2B and B2C Fintech companies, since at the end of the day it’s always a human who will be reading your content. 

1. Write your ideal customer at the top of the page

One of the main issues I see in the Fintech copywriting space is the lack of customer research. When you’re producing content for your audience, it’s essential to understand who your customer is, what their habits are and what they’re interested in reading. As a company, you’ve hopefully done some customer research for your products. It’s just as important to do this with content. 

But aren’t they the same persona? Sure, but make sure to include reading habits and content consumed when filling in the persona. At Mint Studios, I help Fintech companies define their content personas through my own framework. Then, when it’s time to write content, I paste a short paragraph describing the persona at the top of the page. This paragraph describes who they are, what their problem is and what customer stage they’re at. It’s important to do this because Gemma who’s at the beginning of the buyer journey and doesn’t know what the stock market is is a different person from Johnny, who regularly invests in stocks and is looking for a cheaper option.

I constantly refer to the paragraph as I’m writing, and this allows me to keep the persona constantly on my mind. 

2. Not everything has to be SEO

SEO is a great tool and is a large part of the strategy I produce for clients. It’s what allows a small Fintech to attract customers and build authority without spending thousands on ads. At the beginning, it makes sense to make every post SEO focused since traffic will be low and not many people will be reading your website content. But once your audience grows and website pageviews increase, you also want to be producing content that answers a question, talks about the founders or describes current events. I often implement a strategy where every third article is non-SEO focused. 

As John Bonini says: write for humans, then edit for SEO. My highest priority when writing is producing high quality content - that way, even if we don’t get the article ranking on Google it’s still a good piece of content that can be used for PR or other resources.

3. B2C and B2B are both B to Person

As I mentioned in the intro, both B2B and B2C are Business to Person. Even if you’re a B2B Fintech, your business client will have a human reading your report or white paper. The reason I say this is because reports and white papers don’t have to be dry, boring or use overcomplicated words. I read several white papers and reports per week, and I always enjoy and remember those that were easier to read. 

It’s important to mention that this doesn’t mean never use big words: sometimes you need a big word to describe something more accurately. And “easy to read” doesn’t mean using emojis or adding a paragraph break after every sentence. To me, easy to read means that it rolls off your tongue: if you had to read it out loud, would it sound natural? Bonus points if you can write with a bit of personality. Fintech is part of an industry that is democratising financial services, and we can be part of that transformation by making things more accessible and colloquial. Some examples of reports, articles and white papers that are easier to read:

• Fintech 2030: The Industry View

• The Future Of Money Management

• The Secret Financial Lives of Americans

4. Track those metrics

As a marketer or writer, you won’t know how you’re doing unless you track the metrics. And I don’t mean a quick glance at Google Analytics to see how everything’s doing, I mean an Excel spreadsheet or a Google Doc that is regularly updated.

Personally, I love Google Data Studio: it automatically syncs with Google Analytics and you can customize the presentation. Here’s what the Mint Studios one looks like:

And these are not the most interesting metrics. The best ones are when you can track conversions from a specific source, which you can also do with Data Studio.

5. Aesthetics matter

I’m not sure if this is because I read a lot online or it’s just me being picky, but I care a lot about how my blog articles look on screen. The font has to be large and clear, the paragraphs should be narrow and there shouldn’t be annoying ads or popups. Make the reading experience as smooth as possible, and your readers will spend more time on your website. I’m not sure how Forbes maintains it’s large readership with its horrendous reading experience (that second half of the screen is supposed to be the article!): 

Here’s a better experience:

6. Long form content is the way to go

It’s easy to think that people don’t like reading long form content and are obsessed with short form content such as tweets, stories and Facebook posts. But if there’s anything we can learn from the fail of Quibi is that this may not be entirely true. The issue seems to be that we can’t stand being bored - that’s definitely a problem in itself, but it doesn’t mean we don’t like consuming long form content. 

Don’t write short form content because you believe that’s what people prefer. In fact, people often prefer longer form content since it provides an opportunity to add even more value and build a long-term relationship with your customers. As a small Fintech company, you can turn this into a competitive advantage. Large incumbents and companies want immediate results for their boards and shareholders. As a small startup, you can invest into longer term marketing channels like SEO, which focus on long form content that genuinely adds value. 

7. Only add relevant images

People may disagree, but personally I don’t like seeing images in an article I’m reading, especially if they’re just generic images that don’t add any value. I never add random pictures into a blog post because it’s fluffy and takes up unnecessary space. A picture may add some colour and make the page look nice, but often they’re irritating and just encourage readers to scroll faster. If you want to make your article easier to read, add more paragraph breaks, not images!

If it makes sense to add a graph or an image that makes sense, then that’s a big bonus.

What does an image like this mean?

8. When you can, tell a story

The hardest part when it comes to acquiring customers with content is getting them to read the article in the first place. More than half of website viewers leave after 15 seconds, so how can we get them to stay? The key is in the first sentence and paragraph.

There are a few ways to make the first sentence intriguing. My favourite one is to start the article with just one line, like what I did at the beginning of this article:

I believe Fintech marketing and Fintech copywriting is a niche like no other.

Another great one is to begin with a question: 

Do you remember the first bank account you ever opened?

And the best one, to start with a story:

Mary knew it was time to have a serious conversation with her partner, John. She had opened up their joint bank account, and they had just gone further into overdraft. She knew it was time to get serious about their budget.

You can’t add a story every time - it gets a bit repetitive after a while. But I like to use the first sentence and paragraph as an opportunity to get a bit more creative. 

9. End every article with a Call to Action

Every time a reader finishes reading an article, you should tell them what to do next. If they’ve gone as far as reading your entire article, then it’s a lot more likely they’ll be willing to try your product.

You can keep it simple with a Call to Action button towards your product, or you can add a newsletter, related articles etc. Track conversion rates on that button and you’ll get good feedback on which articles are producing the most amount of customers. 

10. Focus on a solution or focus on a problem

I first got this tip from John Bonini’s Some Good Content: if you’re targeting a specific keyword, it’s good to know whether your keyword is “transactional” or “informational”. A transactional keyword is something like “buy stocks” or “cheap investment app”. An informational keyword is something like “how to buy stocks” and “what is a bond”. The content targeting transactional keywords should focus on describing the solution: your product. This type of content has higher conversion rates and are the pillars of your website. 

The content targeting informational keywords should focus on describing the problem: the reader has a problem and is looking for advice online. If your product doesn’t have many transactional keywords to rank for - like most b2b Fintechs - then you will need to target informational keywords. Conversions rates are also lower, so you may need to beef it up with lead magnets or webinars. 

11. Give constant feedback

Whether you’re managing writers, marketers or a team, it’s incredibly important to give constant feedback; both positive and negative. As a writer, I cannot read people’s minds, and I often won’t know if you like the piece until you tell me. If the messaging is off, if that word I used didn’t work or if the structure is completely wrong - you need to say. And if something is bang on, you must say so too because then we’ll know to do it more often. Simply adding comments to a Google doc with your positive and negative feedback can go a long way.

Feedback is also very motivating, and encourages a working relationship that is a lot more healthy. Writers, in general, are great at receiving feedback. That’s because it’s in our DNA: in order to get better at writing, we need to constantly receive and implement the feedback we receive. 

12. Transparency wins

This is especially true in the world of Fintech where companies are trying to disrupt the financial industry and make finance more accessible. That’s why we’re trying to differentiate ourselves from incumbents and financial institutions that are not transparent, and that customers no longer trust. 

This means that it’s ok to mention your product and company’s weaknesses - in fact, it’s likely to build trust even more. Instead of saying “our product/platform is always the best”, admit that sometimes other products are better. If you are truly confident about your product, you won’t have a problem talking about its weaknesses.

TransferWise even put their weaknesses within their own product:

13. Remember that finance is not boring!

I never quite understood why people say finance is boring or dull; money is what moves the world. It is an integral part of our society and it is fascinating to see how much our behaviours, daily habits and even personalities revolve around money. As Joe Biden says:

“Don't tell me what you value, show me your budget, and I'll tell you what you value.”

As someone who regularly writes about the Fintech space, I see firsthand how people are curious and eager to learn more about personal finance management. Most people have no idea how to manage their money, but are aware of the importance of financial education. Both B2C and B2B Fintechs are paving the way to a world where money is no longer a taboo and mistifying concept. 

Personally, I write about Fintech for 3 main reasons: 

• Accessibility: I don’t want jargon and confusing concepts to get in the way of everyone taking part in the finance and tech industry.

• Understanding: I am someone who is fascinated by the finance and tech industry - I use writing as a tool to understand subjects thoroughly. 

• Education: I get to work with companies that offer tools that can change people’s lives’. My content helps spread financial literacy.

What’s beautiful about writing is that it quickly spread across the internet, and enables worldwide education. By teaching someone how to manage their money more effectively, you give them the power to improve every part of their life. As copywriters, we are key to spreading financial education.