In this episode of Craft On Tap, Stephen Beach and Faustin Weber explain exactly how Craft Impact handles copywriting and brand voice development for financial advisory firms.
👇 Watch the full discussion below:
Co-Founder Stephen Beach & Strategist Faustin Weber discuss copywriting and brand voice.
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Transcript:
Stephen Beach: Hi folks. Welcome back to another episode of Craft on Tap Growth Marketing for RIAs. I'm your host, Stephen Beach. My co-host is Faustin Weber. Today we're gonna talk about copywriting. We're gonna talk about how we can be a good partner for you when we're not financial advisors ourselves. How can we write compelling, concise copy on some of these more complex technical topics when we are not CFPs, we don't have the designations, we don't come from the space as you do.
This is a really common topic of conversation that we've discussed with clients. Also, I'll say we've been in business since 2012ish, 2013 when we finally got an LLC together. We've gotten better at it over the years. But Traci, my wife and I, our approach has always been kind of from her journalism background - it's just always been subject matter expert, interview-based copywriting at its core.
So we've got a few different ways we can do it, but what we're trying to do is extrapolate your subject matter expertise when we personally aren't as integrated into your firm. How do we do that in a way that requires very little of your time, but then also produces a high quality output in terms of copy that can be used in different marketing materials?
So we're gonna talk a little bit about that today. Faustin, do you want to kick us off with some of the ways you think about doing this? How we ensure that our copy's at a high quality level, but we're also speaking from the client's voice.
Faustin Weber: Yeah, absolutely. So I would say first and foremost, Stephen, you and Traci, we as a company hire good writers. I think that's step one - hire people that can write. Our strategists can write, our project managers can write, our copywriters can write.
I think that's an important element because so many times when people or firms talk about brand voice, really what they're looking for is somebody that can write simply and persuasively. Really, the two key components of good copywriting and digital marketing is: can things be communicated in a simple manner so that it's easily understood, so that you're not including multiple thoughts or clauses in many sentences at once so that it gets unreadable. Is it formatted with a combination of longer sentences and shorter sentences? Does it get to the point clearly and concisely? And then from a persuasive aspect, if the writing calls for it, does it communicate in a way that prompts the reader to be able to take the next step?
I think that is the number one thing that we do as a firm - we just have good writers that can write simply and persuasively. And I think that could take on the form of any of the firms that we work with.
Subject matter-wise, obviously, the sophistication in the financial services industry is unlike many others. It's very complicated, especially when you start getting into some of the more complex topics. Not even all advisors have a lot of experience with navigating the specific elements of stock compensation and how that impacts your Alternative Minimum Tax (AMT) liability at the end of the year and how exercising at this point versus this point can better help you in that situation. These are nuances that not even all advisors have a lot of expertise on, and so we do rely a lot on the advisors to help communicate the most important elements of that as it relates to your target audience.
We are able to interview and extrapolate based on those interviews to talk about the topics. But I will say that as we've taken on more and more clients in the space, our entire collective knowledge as a team, and expertise as a team in writing about these topics, is something that has expanded and improved and been bolstered tremendously. Each new topic, and just to give you an example, like the tax bill that just came out, the Big Beautiful act signed by President Trump on July 4th - we're dating ourselves here because we're recording this on July 8th - but right away we were able to consolidate all the different changes to that bill and share that content internally across our entire team about how to write simply and concisely to communicate that.
Then we're able to go directly to our clients and strategize with them about how to communicate that to their clients. So simply, concisely, we have good writers that can write persuasively. And there's a lot of shared knowledge that's been built - brain power has been built for multiple years working with RIAs where we're able to cross-share about how we've written about particular topics, relying on the subject matter experts to sort of be our guiding light into what's most relevant. But then the output has been improved tremendously since our expertise has been increased.
Stephen Beach: Really good. Yeah, I think the journalism background - you made me think of it with the way that we've hired people. So one of our first hires was Mary Coughlin. She has a journalism degree just like Traci. We've got Laura on our team, she's got a background in journalism as well. So I think that kind of runs as a theme among our people and where we come from - this journalistic view of producing content. And then that feeds everything you just said.
When we get into how do we actually do it, ideally, we've got a concise amount of time where we can be efficient with the advisor and ask the advisor about whatever the topic is. For example, how you want to leverage tax planning for efficient investment management? Talk to me about that topic for 20 minutes. And most advisors can be comfortable with just us on Zoom talking and just going - they've got a lot of materials and supporting documents. They can talk, we can record that, turn it into a transcript, we can clean up the transcript and then produce whatever we need out of it. If it's a blog article, a video script, an email newsletter, social media post, whatever that may be.
So usually what happens is we try to be efficient with the advisor's time on whatever the topic is. And then we can turn it into multiple pieces of content and build from there.
Faustin Weber: Yeah, I would say the how has been improved pretty dramatically since we've become more well-versed as a firm using these Large Language Models (LLMs) like Claude or ChatGPT. What we're able to do is create a project to put in all of your information - all your website pages, all of our workshop transcripts, all of our messaging guides that we work with you on to really try to refine what your tone and style would be like. Do you want to be more humorous, do you want to be more casual, do you want to be more formal and sophisticated and elegant based on the target audience that you're going after and what you're trying to communicate with your firm?
We're able to put all that as well as important content topics that you're really familiar with and you talk through - all in a project with our LLM. And then we have this directly directed to each client, and we're able to generate and proactively anticipate some of the challenges and items around each financial planning topic and put that in front of the advisor for the interview.
Because ChatGPT, Claude, they can get pretty far in terms of thinking through all the insights around using tax planning for investments throughout the year, stock options throughout the year. They can give us a good runway, a good starting point. We can leverage our past expertise writing about these topics, eliminate what's not relevant, emphasize the parts that are relevant, and revise for the company's brand voice. A lot of times with AI copywriting, it's not good - it's not compelling, it's not persuasive, it's too long. So we can use the human element of being good writers, go through, get it to a really good spot where it mirrors that simplicity and persuasiveness that we're going for, then put it proactively in front of the advisor in that interview.
We're already 85, 90% of the way there. Then the advisor comes in, they're presented this beautiful document where they can say, "Oh yes, I want to emphasize those two points. I don't really want that. The messaging is not great for that third point, let's cut that out." Boom. Now we have an efficient way of getting out whatever the message is, whatever the topic is, whatever the content is.
The collective infrastructure of our company as we've worked for five years with advisors has improved, but also our commitment to becoming much more well-developed in terms of the AI tools. Not relying on them to do all the writing, but relying on them to proactively get us to the point where we're saving the advisor time and we're able to get something across the finish line faster.
Stephen Beach: Yeah. Really good. Couple things you went through quickly, but I just want to double tap on them. So yes, the messaging guide that we work on with advisors in the first couple months. We work on a messaging guide where we run you through different workshops, internal and external. By external, I mean we interview your clients with your permission. So we feed that into a messaging guide that then establishes your voice, your tone. We've got takeaways from your clients, some insights that we've gained, word-for-word phrases that they've used. We've got your buyer persona research in there, what you've given us feedback on so far like your existing content that you like or don't like, we've got a keyword phrase bank that we've established that anybody can pull from that are just simple phrases that are pre-approved by you.
We've got differentiators that we've drawn out for your firm versus other firms in your space. We've got a lot of information on your buyer personas, challenges and how you help them solve for those and what makes you really qualified to serve them. Obviously, your core services and your offerings and so on. That all goes into a messaging guide that gets fed into a project in the tool, ChatGPT or Claude or whatever the tool is, then feeds off of that. So it's really important what we feed it to establish those things.
One other thing I'll point out - you hit on this too - but in the workshop, we will ask you these sort of open-ended questions just to get you talking and get you open with us. For example, we've got a brand worksheet that applies to both visual and written brand, where we ask on a scale of one to five, from traditional to progressive, where does your brand fall? Mark the X on 1, 2, 3, 4, or 5. And then include some notes. Corporate versus friendly, serious versus playful, understated versus loud, things like that. We've got about 20 different ones, and really it's a way for us to sort of get to know you - how you want to represent yourself, both visually and from a copy standpoint.
It's really hard for us - if you say from serious to playful on a scale of one to five, if you say you want to be a two on serious versus a one on serious, that's really hard. I don't know how copy's gonna reflect that, but what it does is it gives us a good idea of where you fall on that spectrum. Then we look at this and we talk it out with you. What we're trying to do is really embed ourselves into your company and try to represent your brand in everything that we're doing from a marketing standpoint.
Those little things like that, when you pile all those up, they can really help us do that effectively. So again, all with the end goal being concise and compelling in what we're delivering, because that's what registers and that's what resonates with your ideal audience.
Faustin Weber: Nice. Yeah, it really comes down to like, do we want to be serious or do you want to be a little bit humorous every now and then? Do you want to give saucy takes on stuff or do you want to stay above the fold with more formal-type language? And do you want to be casual at all based on your clientele?
We have all those different characteristics that our clients assess themselves on, but really it comes down to those few things. Like, how do you want to present the topics in a very casual, simple, persuasive way, or a more formal, simple, persuasive way? Do we want to throw in the occasional joke every now and then? Do we want to take edgy type slants? And I think if we can get that from our clients, we have the skills to be able to talk - not as financial planning experts, but definitely financial planning copywriting experts on almost any of the topics.
Stephen Beach: Right.
Faustin Weber: I will say there are some exceptions. We're helping a couple of advisors on a B2B level right now, trying to recruit other advisors around technical investment language in terms of the models on Morningstar and the particular characteristics of asset allocation as it relates to some very specific elements. And I do think that requires a little bit more insight, more diligence. But for the majority of our clients that are going after retail investors, the level of sophistication around the topics, I think can be cross-shared a lot of times between us internally so that we can get to where we want to be in terms of communicating clearly in the brand voice of the firm.
Stephen Beach: Nice. Really good. That's all I have. Anything else to add?
Faustin Weber: No, I think that's it.
Stephen Beach: All right. Then we wrap up.
Faustin Weber: I don't have anything here to try to extend this episode, but yeah, I think we're gonna have to do maybe we've just been simple and persuasive for our podcasts.
Stephen Beach: I guess so. Yeah, no jokes to make fun of ourselves today. We're just gonna skip over that, I guess.
Faustin Weber: Yeah, I think that's it.
Stephen Beach: Okay. All right. Great. Well, thanks for listening, everybody. We'll be back with more soon.
Faustin Weber: Bye.
Key Takeaways:
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The Journalist's Approach to Financial Copy: The foundation of effective copywriting is pairing skilled writers with subject matter experts. By conducting efficient, targeted interviews with advisors, it's possible to translate complex financial topics into simple, persuasive, and jargon-free content that resonates with the end client, all without requiring the writer to be a CFP®.
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Codifying Your Firm's Unique Voice: A distinct brand voice doesn't happen by accident. It's built through a deliberate process that includes in-depth workshops and client interviews to create a comprehensive "messaging guide." This guide acts as a blueprint, defining everything from your tone (e.g., formal vs. friendly) to your core differentiators, ensuring all marketing materials sound authentically like you.
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AI as an Accelerator, Not an Author: Large Language Models (LLMs) are powerful tools for efficiency. By feeding an AI the firm-specific messaging guide and existing content, a strong, on-brand first draft can be generated quickly. A human writer then refines this draft to about 90% completion before it goes to the advisor for review, saving the firm significant time while maintaining high quality.
Shameless plug for Craft on Tap
Craft Impact can create accurate copy and a distinct brand voice for your RIA firm through blending expert writing, insightful interviews with financial advisors, and the strategic application of AI, all guided by comprehensive messaging and brand style guides.
This conversation is only a starting point. For ongoing insights and practical strategies for RIA growth, listen to the new Craft on Tap marketing podcast. Available now, wherever you find your podcasts. Ready to chat? Get in Touch
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