What do you think about “What do you think?”

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“What do you think?” is a weak ending to an email, according to Power Sales Writing: Using Communication to Turn Prospects into Clients by Sue Hershkowitz-Coore.

I said “uh oh” to myself upon reading this because I’ve used this in emails accompanying proposals. Hershkowitz-Coore suggests you encourage your reader “to give you the result you want by offering your opinion and asking for her approval.” She prefers a closing such as “Please let me know which direction you prefer, and with your approval, I’ll move ahead. “

I like the idea of nudging prospects in the right direction, but I also want to show that I’m open to my prospect’s feedback.

There must be a middle ground. What do YOU think?

What professional writers know

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Financial bloggers, investment professionals, and wealth managers can benefit from learning a few things that professional writers know.

Photo: edmittance

Everyone can benefit from a good proofreader and editor

It’s hard to read your writing with fresh eyes. This is why professional writers feel grateful when someone checks their work for them. If you’re on your own, put your draft away for a day – or even an hour – before rereading it.

Put the good stuff first

You need to snare your readers with the first paragraph, if not the first sentence or even the title. So, share information your readers will care about at the very beginning of your blog post, white paper, or other written communication.

Keep it short

Like you, your audience has too much to read. So keep it short.

Avoid errors of the illiterate

When you make elementary school students’ mistakes – such as confusing its and it’s – your readers question your expertise in other areas, too. An editor can help you identify your common errors, so you can review a checklist before releasing error-riddled communications to clients and prospects.

Make your webinar a magnet for audience participation

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If you’re planning your first webinar, don’t forget to plan for audience participation. People who participate learn more and will give you better evaluations. I first

Photo: Mario's Planet

learned this when I developed and led custom workshops on “How to Do Business with the Japanese” back in the 1980s. My financial writing workshops have only reinforced this lesson. In this post, I’ll share some practical tips I learned preparing for my first webinar.

1. Ask up front for participation

People won’t make comments or ask questions if you don’t encourage them. Tell people at the beginning of your presentation that you’d like them to participate.

2. Tell your audience where and how to pose questions

It may not be obvious to your audience where they can type in their questions. Tell them where to go. You might even point to it in one of your slides.

3. Ask them questions

Prepare questions to ask your audience early on. This will get them involved. Plus, it will give you a sense of how they’re responding to your material.

You have options.

  • Polls are easy for your audience to answer.
  • Yes-no questions require only a little typing.
  • More complex questions can also work.

4. Don’t expect instantaneous responses by your audience

It takes time for people to input their responses, even when they simply click a button to answer your poll. Don’t get caught off guard by this. Instead, plan some patter to fill the time as you wait.

5. Encourage participation by responding

If you ask for participation, but fail to acknowledge audience participation, your audience will stop responding. Plan to integrate audience responses into your presentation. Answer their questions and mention at least some of their responses to questions you pose. I took this one step further by basing a blog post on some of the responses I received to a question I posed in a webinar.

6. Have a colleague help you

You may find it overwhelming to sort through your audience’s input. So, don’t go it alone. Ask a colleague to view the audience’s questions or answers and feed them to you. I found this very helpful in reducing my stress while I was presenting.

Can YOU add suggestions?

If you can add suggestions for attracting audience participation, please do. I look forward to hearing from you.

Quarterly investment letters–Tell me “What makes them great?”

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Quarterly investment letters are central to many asset managers’ communications with their clients. That’s why I’m asking your help in defining what makes them great.

Please answer my six-question survey (NOTE: I’ve removed the link to this expired survey]. I’ll report on the results in a future blog post.

You inspired me. Thanks!

Investment professionals care intensely about these letters, as I learned when I asked members of  my LinkedIn Groups the following question:

The responses to this “one word” question inspired this survey. I feel fortunate to belong to this community. Thank you!

You vs me — or we: A rant on financial marketing

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Investment and wealth management executives like to talk about themselves. Who doesn’t? But this hurts their firms when it’s reflected in their marketing.

Photo: World Series Boxing

What financial advisors say about you vs. me–or we

A group of financial professionals helped me test my belief that talking about “you,” the audience, is more powerful than discussing “me”–or, by extension, “we,” the company that’s marketing to you.

Here’s the question I asked participants in “The Power of You: The Secret of Great Blogs that Boost Your Readership”:

Which introduction do you prefer? Introduction #1 focused on you, the audience or Introduction #2 focused on me, Susan. Explain your choice.

Prior to asking the question, I’d introduced my webinar in two ways. In Introduction #1, I’d discussed the benefits my audience would receive from watching my webinar. In Introduction #2, I described my blogging success and other credentials related to the webinar’s topic.

You may wonder how my two introductions relate to you, if you’re a financial advisor, investment manager, or wealth manager. In my experience, many financial websites – and other marketing pieces – use Introduction #2. They are about “we, the firm,” not “you,” the prospective client.

The results? A knockout by “you”

Respondents unanimously preferred the introduction focused on “you.” Here are some of their comments about why they preferred a focus on “you” over a focus on the speaker.

  • When you spoke about yourself, I stopped listening
  • You connects with me, lets me know whether it’s useful
  • I don’t care about you, but I do care about what I can do to be successful
  • “I” sounds pompous
  • It’s not about the speaker, it’s about meeting the need of the target audience.

What this means for you

When writing marketing materials or client communications for your firm,

  1. Use “you” more than “we”
  2. Communicate in terms of benefits to your readers more than products, services, or characteristics of your firm
  3. After you write something, ask yourself, “Why will my reader care about this?” If it’s not obvious, then delete or re-write.

Which do you prefer for your company – marketing materials that use “you” or “we”? Why?

Please comment on your opinions.

“Cut Adjective and Adverb Clutter,” says Booher

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Minimize your use of adjectives and adverbs to communicate more effectively, suggests Dianna Booher in Communicate with Confidence! Instead, rely on nouns and verbs to convey your message.

Booher illustrates the power of her recommendation by comparing the following two sentences:

  1. Haste makes waste.
  2. Too much speed in carrying out tasks results in extra time being spent to redo things that were done inefficiently to being with.

I think you can see the difference. This comes from Tip 110 of 1,254 tips in Booher’s book.

Disclosure: I received a free copy of Booher’s book in return for agreeing to write about it.

POLL: How do you edit your writing for Compliance?

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Financial writers and compliance departments are often at odds. But the two sides must learn to get along. Nobody wins if flat writing turns off prospective clients. Or if marketers create unrealistic expectations in the minds of current or prospective clients.

Photo: winged photography

“Weasel words” help writers and compliance officers coexist. Writers can often defuse compliance officers’ anxieties about guarantees by using words and phrases such as “may,” “we believe,” and “seek to.”

Disclosures are another tool. However, long disclosures are daunting. Sometimes I’d rather delete a topic than introduce a scary disclosure. For example, I’d talk about an investment strategy without referring to the mutual fund using the strategy.

Capitulation is the path taken by some. I don’t recommend that writers always cave in to compliance officers. Caving in is easy, but it doesn’t serve your material well. Sometimes compliance officers’ suggestions are based on their editorial preferences rather than a perception of legal or regulatory risk. When you point this out, compliance professionals are often open to negotiation.

Sometimes you can call in back-up. It’s helpful if a senior person in your organization backs you up by saying, “Our business is willing to take the risk of not making changes.” I’ve also achieved good results by presenting examples of similar companies with sterling reputations using the language questioned by my compliance officer.

I’m curious to learn more about how other writers–and compliance professionals–cope. Please answer the poll asking, “What’s your favorite way to make your financial writing acceptable to compliance?” You’ll find the poll in the right-hand column of my blog.

Here are your potential answers:

  • Add disclosures
  • Cave in to every request by compliance
  • Insert “may” in sentences challenged by compliance
  • Insert “we believe” at the beginning of sentences challenged by compliance
  • Negotiate the most important points, cave in on the rest
  • Say your business is willing to accept the risks of publishing without changes
  • [Your own answer]

Writers, organize or else! A lesson from Barry Tarshis

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Does your writing suffer from this problem?

“…if your thoughts aren’t well organized, it doesn’t matter how large or varied your vocabulary is, how vivid an imagination you have, or how lyrically you compose a sentence; your writing, more often than not, will puzzle your readers.” –Barry Tarshis, How to Write Like a Pro, p. 63

Tarshis offers many ideas about how to write well.

You can whip your thoughts into shape with a five-step process.

  1. Brainstorm ideas
  2. Organize your thoughts before writing
  3. Write a first draft
  4. Edit–Consider hiring an editor if you struggle with this phase.
  5. Rewrite

Most popular 2011 Investment Writing posts

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Google Analytics revealed my most popular blog posts of 2011. Wordle.net created the image of the most popular words in this top 10 post. Enjoy!

  1. Writing resources for equity research analysts–There are some specialized resources for analysts.
  2. My fill-in-the-blanks approach for structuring articles–Bloggers can use this powerful technique to quickly produce a post.
  3. Career strategies for wealth managers without a book of business–My CFA charterholder colleagues contributed valuable advice to this article.
  4. White paper marketing: Walk a fine line–There are three key characteristics of white papers.
  5. Quick check for writers, with an economic commentary example–An easy-to-use technique for checking whether your writing is easy to read.

    Image created using Wordle.com

  6. The 10-postcard approach to financial advisor marketing
  7. Mark Tibergien’s one thing for financial advisors’ business improvement
  8. Best practices for institutional asset manager websites
  9. Financial advisor prescription by Statman evokes strong response
  10. Mind mapping technology for financial advisors

Guest post: “A Magazine Editor’s Top Tips for Improving Advisors’ Writing”

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Morningstar is a company that values good writing as well as robust content. So I’m delighted to have Ryun Patterson, managing editor of Morningstar Advisor, as a guest blogger with some great tips to help advisors improve their writing.

A Magazine Editor’s Top Tips for Improving Advisors’ Writing

By Ryun Patterson

As our team assembles Morningstar Advisor magazine every other month, I read and edit lots of investment-related writing. This experience (as with most reading) has given me some strong opinions on what constitutes good finance writing and what is, shall we say, suboptimal. One of Morningstar’s core values is “Investors Come First,” so I’d love to share some tips that advisors can keep in mind when they’re writing for their clients or the general public.

Do: Simplify

Advisors read a lot of technical writing, from white papers to prospectuses. This familiarity can lead to imitation, but unless you’re writing a white paper or prospectus, you should avoid the temptations of jargon and alphabet soup. Yes, it sounds extremely classy (fancy and sophisticated, even) to say that something is “accumulating size,” but it’s really just growing. And the allure of ROAs, ROEs, and ROICs is great, but your writing will be better understood, especially in shorter pieces, if you just spell these abbreviations out. You readers may not thank you for it, but they’ll definitely read the whole article instead of quitting in frustration halfway through.

Don’t: Assume

The ranks of advisors and investors has grown so much in the past couple of decades that investing writers have got to stop making assumptions about their audience. The use of figures of speech that are normally reserved for sports broadcasters is a prime culprit here. Football fans might easily understand “keep your head on a swivel,” but the audience for investment writing has grown to the point that this kind of language can now be a barrier to comprehension rather than a connection formed through a shared interest. This extends to commentary that extends to political and religious references as well; being “politically correct” doesn’t have to be a priority, but readers will lose sight of genuine wisdom if it’s cloaked in a contentious point of view.

Do: Explain

There’s a class of investment words that pose as regular words but pull double-duty in the investment world to describe complex ideas. One example pulled from Morningstar’s writing guide is the word “duration.” Because this word has the temerity to be both noun that regular folks use in everyday conversation AND a noun that represents a measure of interest-rate sensitivity, Morningstar writers and editors always write “duration, a measure of interest-rate sensitivity” on first reference, just to make it clear that this duration is not your standard one. A little bit of thought in this arena goes a long way, as do hyperlinks or referrals to sites like Investopedia or Morningstar.com’s investing classroom.

Don’t: Dumb Down

Advisors writing for their clients or other investors should embrace the chance to be educators. Topics like basic asset allocation are no-brainers for investing professionals, but the key to explaining these isn’t using phrases like “everybody knows that…” or, more extremely, “Only an idiot would…” Instead, use concrete facts and figures to show, rather than tell, your readers why investing basics exist. This kind of communication is the best way to form a resonant, lasting relationship with your readers. Nobody likes to be patronized, and investors that feel like alienated idiots are less likely to ask important questions when it’s time to make important decisions.

Recommended Reading

If you’ve got a day for reading and want to improve your writing, there’s no better book I can recommend than Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style. It’s less than 100 pages long, but it’s as essential for writers as Graham and Dodd’s Security Analysis is for investing professionals. It has never steered me wrong, and it can do a lot for any aspiring writer.

Ryun Patterson is managing editor of Morningstar Advisor magazine, the magazine of investment insights for independent-minded advisors. Advisors can get a free subscription by going to Morningstaradvisor.com and clicking the “Subscribe” link on the upper right-hand side of the page.