A Quick Guide To Financial Copywriting
Financial copywriting is a lucrative copywriting niche. Some of the biggest direct marketing companies are based around financial newsletters. They have millions of subscribers and make tens of millions a year. There are also countless other opportunities and they pop up all the time.
It’s an evergreen market and you an specialise in just financial copywriting and do very well for yourself.
I’ve written a guide to financial copywriting, and that’s what this article is all about.
Let’s get to it.
This guide is pretty comprehensive and filled with useful information, so I might remove it in the future and put it elsewhere. Enjoy it while you can!
The Market
Financial copywriting is one of the most lucrative copywriting niches you can get into. There are multiple publishing companies who pay big fees pus royalties. There are also many affiliate marketers and other one-man bands who’ll pay a lot for you to write sales letters.
This makes competition quite fierce, so you’ll have to be good at copywriting if you want to succeed. But there’s plenty of opportunity.
That’s for the clients.
For the market in general, you’ll be writing things like:
- Investment opportunities
- Cryptocurrency (Massive right now)
- Offshore Investments
- Retirement stuff
- Forex (Seems to have died down a little – it was massive a while back like crypto is now)
There are a few things you have to bear in mind as regards the audience. Let’s talk about that now.
The Audience
Your market is almost universally middle-class people who work careers but have enough disposable income to invest some of it.
Now you don’t talk to the audience as though that’s what they are. Remember you must speak to your audience as their aspirational self.
That’s why the average financial sales letter pits our reader against the evil communist government. They’re a James Bond/Julian Assange hybrid who is bound to be a billionaire sooner or later.
Due to this archetype, the audience for financial copywriting is mixed between hyper-optimistic and super-pessimistic. You have to address their scepticism pretty heavily in the funnel, because a lot of these people have been subscribed to financial newsletters for years. They’ve spent more money on subscriptions than they’ve ever bet on the markets. They’re wise to the “It’s all going to collapse soon!” marketing messages.
By all means do those things, but you have to go a bit meta and address them.
The only place you won’t have to do this so much is crypto-currency, because everyone’s still in wide-eyed wonder at this new game-changing-disruptor technology.
The Sales Letter
When you’re writing your sales letters and funnels, you have to spend a lot of time on a few things:
- Research the market heavily
- Use correct terminology
These two things come under “having a general financial knowledge.” You can’t skip this step because you simply won’t sell anything. Get a handful of investing books. Start paper trading or paper-investing whatever commodity/investment you’re writing about. This isn’t negotiable. If you’re writing about offshore investing, you’d better know enough to convince a smart guy that you know what you’re talking about, because nobody is investing in “Hey I’m a secret agent investor! Buy my shares in Belize and we’ll talk about how to make a billion dollars.”
Once you have that general knowledge:
- Get specific. To take the offshore investing example, you need to know tax havens and tax law inside out. Those are objections you’re going to have to address.
- Build up a swipe file of facts; when was the last depression/recession/fall in your area? What makes a good investment? Who are the big players and what are the wonder stories?
- Get a profile of your target market and archetypal customer.
This section is important because in finance everything varies massively depending on the audience and their location/status. I get financial sales pitches in my inbox all the time that are poorly targeted for one reason.
I’m Not American
In other niches, this isn’t a problem. In fitness, my body needs protein as much as my American friends’ does. But in the finance niche it’s a totally different story:
- I don’t care about Obama taking my guns
- No, I don’t have to worry about an unforeseen medical expense
- I (mostly) can’t take advantage of tax loopholes by driving to another state
- The US government can’t tax me on worldwide income forever even if I renounce my citizenship
Those are just examples that come to mind. My point is that a middle-class investor in the US has completely different triggers to one in the UK.
As a total aside: There is a massive gap between the financial advice sector in the US and elsewhere. The average US customer in the personal finance niche knows a lot more than someone from the UK. That’s probably due to the US healthcare system being a massive financial concern, but whatever. This isn’t a political blog. My point here is that if you want a niche that’s ripe for the taking, you now know what to do.
My larger point is that you need to be very specific.
Finally, let’s talk about writing the letter and your voice. With the specific nature of your audience taken care of, here’s what typifies the financial copywriting niche.
You swing massively between NIGHTMARE and DREAM.
The nightmare is filled with real and hypothetical stories of bankruptcies, the government confiscating assets and having to steal your dinner from the grocery store.
The dream is once-in-a-lifetime investments that return 50%, 123% or even 9043% year on year!
It’s easy to see why financial copywriting is so lucrative, because imagine being able to put your reader in a position where:
- They can retire early
- Everyone will be jealous of the car they bought cash-down with passive investment earnings
- They’ll never have to worry about emergency expenses
- Their kids will have a trust fund that the government can’t touch
In short, the financial sector plays to all of our deepest fears and our deadly sins. But it also plays to our virtues and greatest ambitions.
Final Thoughts On Financial Copywriting
This short article gives you a basic beginner’s guide to writing in the financial copywriting niche.
We’ve covered:
- The market
- Your clients
- The audience you’re writing for
- How to research
- How to write sales letters
Now, it’s not a “step-by-step” or “fool-proof” guide that gives you everything. The reason for that is that a) I don’t have time to write that, and b) you’re going to have to take a lot of time and effort to research if you want to be good at financial copywriting, so spoon-feeding people seems a bit counterproductive.
For those of you who are willing to put in the groundwork, I hope this helps!