What Topics Work Best for Financial Advisor eBooks and Whitepapers?

As a financial advisor, your primary marketing goal is likely to turn website traffic into leads. After all, traffic is only good if it brings potential clients in the door. Because you’re selling something complex, it’s not a short sales cycle. It might be weeks or even months before a website visitor decides to contact you for a consultation.

Anything that can speed up that process is critical. One of the best strategies for turning traffic into leads faster is to use a “lead magnet”.

A “lead magnet” is an item you offer on your website to entice website visitors to give you their contact information. Good lead magnets for financial firms include whitepapers, eBooks, or guides. To be effective, as you can imagine, the document must simply provide some value.

Creating a Lead Magnet

Lead magnets don’t have to be lengthy.  In fact, the key is to make them a short, light read, either through less text or through attractive graphic design.

If you’re targeting the mass market, a short lead magnet can work well (even just a few pages).  If you’re seeking to attract higher net worth clients, however, slightly longer documents often are the best strategy. Why? Well, someone who has more at stake is usually willing to read more.

Good lead magnets have one other important feature. They should provide an easy way for someone to get a taste of what it’s like to work with your firm.

Arguably the most important aspect of a lead magnet is the topic itself. What should your whitepaper or eBook be about?

What are the best financial lead magnet topics?

Many financial advisors automatically go to areas they know best. For example, they might choose to create an eBook about converting an IRA to a Roth IRA.  Or they might talk about the importance of asset allocation.

While these topics may be very practical, we find the best ones focus on pain points instead.

While of course, we’re seeking to inform, we’re also wanting the reader to take action. In this case, we want them to contact your firm for a consultation.

Purely providing information is unlikely to do that. What can? Engaging the potential client emotionally. You want the guide to create some concern or discomfort, so it motivates them to act.

Let’s face it….life would be easier for most everyone if humans were naturally motivated to do what is rationally smart. Instead, most of us tend to stick with the status quo until strong feelings tell us to do otherwise. So the more emotionally engaging your topic, the better.

Here’s an example.  Instead of:

• How to improve your investment returns by incorporating technical analysis

How about this?

• How to feel confident about your financial future no matter what happens next year

Which title evokes more emotion? That’s your key.

Aim for the Right Target

Of course, your target audience is important too. If you’re looking to work with other financial professionals or engineers, for example, you might be able to get away with a more technical topic.

But for most demographics, you’ll want to stick with pain points. And the more specific the pain point, the better.

Is your goal to work with recently retired people who may be concerned about stable income? Then consider something like this:

• 3 expensive retirement mistakes you’re probably making and what to do instead

Want to work with more affluent business owners? Think about their concerns.  There are your potential topics:

• How to keep your wealth safe through pandemics and other crises
• How to secure your retirement income in today’s ultra-low interest rate environment

What to Avoid

As you probably see, you want to create a guide that builds awareness. But avoid the biggest eBook sin: do not write a do-it-yourself guide.

Why not? Financial advisors are natural problem-solvers, so the temptation is often there to write a how-to guide. You must resist!

If you do, you’ll give that lucky person the means to do it themselves. There are two problems with that. First, you’ll put yourself out of a job–they can either do it themselves or hand the book to their existing advisor to implement it for them. Second, and more importantly, you won’t attract the clients that will probably be the best fit.

After all, do you really want to work with the person who might consider doing everything themselves? That new client may end up leaving in a year or two. Instead, you probably want to attract those who know they need help. These are usually the best clients; they are looking for a solution and prefer to have a professional manage all the details on their behalf.

Bottom line, your guide must be general enough to engage the person to think about the issue, but not so specific that they can follow the steps to take care of the problem.

Instead, your guide should be educational and should naturally infer that your firm offers an ideal solution.

Your Options for Creating a Lead Magnet

Of course, if you’re like most advisors, you’re extremely busy and have little time to sit down and write. Thankfully you have several options along with developing this piece yourself. For one, you can hire a freelance writer to help you put it together. Just be careful to find one with knowledge of the industry and compliance, or you may find yourself frustrated with the process or the results. Or you can work with a firm that specializes in financial content development.

Of course, doing anything from scratch requires time and/or money to pay for development.  There is one other option that is faster and more affordable; that’s white label financial content. By choosing a white label option, you’ll get a high quality product, usually much faster.  These white label products include your logo, company name, and contact information, so they will look like you’re the author.

You’ll usually pay an affordable one-time fee for a license to use this material. Some firms, however, will charge that fee annually—so be sure to read the terms of the license.

Just Do It

Many advisors start on a white paper or eBook, run out of time, and get frustrated.  Keep in mind that these are not full books. Instead, they should be short documents. It’s easy for a perfectionist to get caught up in this process, but the key is to take action. Whether you write it yourself or use another resource, you will likely find it well worth the effort.

Once it is complete, you’ll have a handy, multipurpose pdf guide. Along with using this document as a lead magnet on your website, you can also promote it on social media, give it out to clients, and email it to your existing prospects. Having these professional resources reflects well on your brand and gives those with interest a reason to contact your firm sooner.

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