Reflections of a Content Writer - Part 1
Your position in the financial sector is truly global, even if physically you aren’t. Because virtually you are. It’s no longer sufficient to target a ‘local’ audience or a ‘traditional’ client base. Because local is short sighted and tradition is a blindspot.
A creative content writer should warn you that if your corporate prospectus reads as it did twenty years ago, you’ve been asleep on the job. If your website has the same pages as when first built, you’re in cryogenic suspension.
That might sounds harsh, but the financial sector evolves fast and creative content writers should:
- speak their minds
- challenge the status quo
- ask a pain-in-the-butt number of questions
- obtain broad-spectrum staff feedback relevant to the project
Is your brand ready to engage with social media platforms for both retail and institutional clients? Are you ready for a content revolution? Do you need one? Do you truly know if you need one?
As any good content writer will tell you, the first step forward is being prepared to accept critique, accept the need for change, and understand your position in the market: your USP, strengths and weaknesses. Then raise your head above the din and look down at your sector.
Like all heights, it can cause vertigo. But floor-level comfort zones are deadly.
Identifying your culture
Being clear on your corporate culture is the precursor to using the right language. Large financial institutions have articles of association and memoranda like national constitutions; some are just as old and venerated with turning circles of container ships.
Start ups have personalities which largely reflect the founders; fleet footed, hip, and baggage free, they tack and gybe like sailing dingies. But this can make them self-absorbed and miss the bigger picture.
Can you describe your corporate culture? Is it ‘classic’ or ‘innovative’, industry ‘disruptive’ or industry ‘mainstream’, ‘proactive’ or ‘reactive’, ‘friendly’ or ‘formidable’, and is it ‘relaxed’ for ‘formal’? Has anyone ever asked? A content writer should.
Write for your clients, not yourself
One of the biggest errors of financial institutions is using in-house or industry-specific terminology on ‘outsiders’. Another is failing to differentiate between board-level missives, more-general staff announcements, BSB outreaches and client engagement.
Derivatives traders don’t think like index-tracker portfolio managers. Compliance officers use different language to hedge funds programmers. Financial advisers are motivated by different rewards compared to company analysts. But they all need engaging with words.
The language of financial interaction has changed; todays it needs to be ‘inclusive’ not ‘exclusive’. Complex terms are out, technical speak isn’t smart, legals jargon should be avoided anywhere except a contract, and even then, it should be dispensed with as far as possible.
With no preconceptions, bias, or mental grooving from the sector, content writers can identify stale language, inject fresh speak, and optimise client and B2B comms, both internally and externally.
Reconciling tradition with the new age
The digital transformation always presents a challenge to the financial sector. It has a new language which may not dovetail with a company prospectus’ think three-hundred-year-old Swiss ban out to lunch with bitcoin; a cheque book on a date with Paypal, or a bank teller having drinks with Zoom. Creative content writers need to smooth the linguistic and syntax transition, or the mismatch will only get wider.
Building trust for online transactions
The language of engagement is nowhere more critical than in online financial transactions. Retails calls to action must be simple, fast and painless, with the benefits clearly broadcast. While brevity is crucial, ambiguity is dangerous. At this point, a customer or website browser should be sufficiently confident of your voice to press the transaction button. However, don’t be too linguistically casual: this is a business deal. Just give it a friendly handshake.
Use of branding language
Financial institutions may have been in the slowest sector to adopt social media platforms, but they are necessary to your model. This comes with the commitment to client outreach , web transactions, and ‘loyalty’ recognitions.
A new term is ‘gamification’, used when ‘gaming principles’ are used to manoeuvre the behaviour of retail clients. Virtual wallets, points credits, and real money incentives are linked to loyalty, spending thresholds, and financial ‘good housekeeping’.
These are implemented via customer portals and marketed by social media and emails, or by website pop ups. Do you ‘gamify’? Are you fully conversant with the word of engagement? Is your written client outreach as sharp as it ought to be?
Complying with compliance
Like the Sword of Damocles hanging over the head of every creative content writer, compliance officers have sleepless nights over truly colourful, creative wording: euphemisms, analogies, promissory words, and god forbid, use of the subjunctive tense. Complying means front-end engagement, a clear understanding of rules at outset, and then research.
How relevant is all this to your business?