What Should an Established RIA Expect From a Financial Content Writer?
I think RIAs sometimes underestimate how much a good financial content writer can take off their plate.
Obviously, you have someone else to write your articles… but when working with the right content writer, your team shouldn’t have to handle nearly as much internally.
Your content writer should enable you to bring a half-formed idea from an advisor conversation to your strategy without building the entire assignment yourself. They should help you answer the questions that prospects keep asking without you having to create a brief around each question. They should be able to figure out what deserves research, where the angle is, how the piece should fit into the rest of the strategy, and what each piece of content is trying to accomplish.
It’s the relationship that RIAs get from working with a financial content writer that brings the real benefits. Working with someone who has experience in both the financial topics they’re writing about and the marketing structures behind them can make a massive difference for your firm.
So what does that relationship look like in practice?
Before We Talk Topics
As a financial content writer and copywriter, one of the first things I want to know – before we even start building out topics – is where the firm is actually trying to grow.
There’s a massive difference between a subject that advisors are qualified to talk about and a subject the firm actually wants to be known for. If leadership wants more business owner clients prepping for a sale, that completely changes how I research, what I prioritize, and which ideas make it onto the calendar.
Your financial content writer should then look at what those prospective clients are searching for and what’s coming up in real advisor conversations. That’s what gives depth to the content plan beyond just trying to upload something.
Your marketing team shouldn’t have to hand a writer a finished strategy and then ask them to execute it unless it’s a priority to handle that internally. Part of the value of working with someone who’s experienced in marketing systems is that they can help figure out what content is worth creating.
The Writer Should Come to You With Better Questions
When you work with a specialized financial content writer, they should be able to get pretty far on their own. You shouldn’t have to educate them on the material or coach them through the project.
If the assignment is about Roth conversions, equity comp, inherited IRAs, or another technical planning topic, they should research the rules and verify the details before writing the draft. They should know what your firm’s already posted on the subject. They should understand the basic planning context.
The questions that come back to you should be the ones only your firm can answer:
How does your team approach this decision with clients?
Do you have an example of what these conversations look like?
Is there a complication advisors see over and over?
Does your audience experience this issue differently than the general investor population?
Is there a compliance preference that changes how we should frame the topic?
That makes the input that you do give the writer so much more valuable; advisor and marketing time goes toward adding the perspective that makes the piece distinctly yours, rather than giving the background research the writer could’ve handled themselves.
Your Content Should Follow The Client Journey
Your financial content writer should be able to bridge what your firm knows about its ideal clients into a strategy that reflects how they make the decision to work with you.
That takes more than the keyword research. Search behavior is a big component here, and it can tell us what someone’s trying to understand in the process, but there’s so much more to the client journey than landing on your website.
Your content strategy should walk clients through the different stages from landing on your website to being ready for a call. Earlier pieces can meet someone around the problem that started their research, and evolve to include deeper material that shows real-life experience with that situation.
Your library should help move clients through the decision process instead of expecting each piece to fend for itself.
You Should See a Return Beyond Having a Calendar Filled
You’re not publishing articles just because it’s fun. On its own, publishing more articles is a pretty weak return.
Every time your advisors give the same 15-minute explanation to a new prospect, the firm is paying again for knowledge it already has. A financial content writer can turn those recurring conversations into assets that keep doing some of that work for the foreseeable future.
That makes an actual difference in your sales process. A prospect who can already see the firm’s thinking can come into a call with the first layer of education already taken care of. They already understand where the firm fits into the conversation. The advisor can spend more of that expensive hour on the things that will actually close the client.
The same investment also makes it easier to refer your firm. A CPA introducing a client has something to send them to get a feel for how you work, which can be worth way more than a home page.
Over time, that’s also what’s building the firm’s depth around the work you want more of. A prospect researching that problem can clearly see your expertise for themselves instead of blindly trusting a service page. Plus, you’re then telling AI and traditional search engines where you best serve clients.
That’s part of the return you should expect from a financial content writer. Does the content make it easier for more, better-fit clients to walk through the door? Does it help you get discovered and build relationships once your audience gets there?
Final Thoughts
Your entire content operation should become easier to run and more useful to your business when you work with the right financial content writer.
They should understand enough about your firm and the industry you operate in that they know what deserves attention and what your ideal clients need to hear. They should give you hours back to dedicate to other priorities.
You should see visible payoff in the places leadership is looking: less advisor time spent, a pipeline that comes in more informed and potentially presold, and a growing body of work that builds the firm’s authority and discoverability.
That’s the work I do with RIAs looking to get more from their content. If your team wants someone who can take ownership of the thinking and the writing, book a call here to talk about what that could look like.
