Write for the person they’re trying to become

Someone told me once that she’d started calling herself ‘an investor’ about four months before she bought anything.

She wasn’t one yet. She had a deposit and a spreadsheet and a lot of browser tabs. But that’s what she’d decided she was, and when I think about what finally made her act, I’m fairly sure the gap between what she was calling herself and what she’d actually done had a lot to do with it.

Identity does more work than incentive

There’s a strand of research showing that when people take on a label, their behaviour shifts to match it. Ask people whether they’re ‘a voter’ rather than whether they’ll ‘vote’ and turnout goes up. Give someone a tidy self-description and they’ll work to stay consistent with it.

Most of us would rather act in a way that matches who we think we are than act in a way that’s merely sensible.

For anyone writing finance content, that’s an enormous lever and almost nobody pulls it, because we’re all busy writing about products to demographics.

The difference it makes to a post

Most broker content addresses a situation. ‘First home buyers.’ ‘Self-employed borrowers.’ ‘Refinancers.’

Those are categories someone falls into. Nobody wants to be in them. Nobody has ever thought ‘yes, I am a refinancer, that is who I am’.

Now write to an identity instead:

• ‘People who’ve decided this is the year they stop renting’
• ‘Business owners who’d rather hear a straight no than a maybe’
• ‘The sort of person who reads the whole contract’
• ‘Anyone who’s been doing the sums for months without telling anybody’

Each one describes somebody the reader might want to be, or already secretly thinks they are. That’s a very different feeling from being sorted into a product category.

Why this works especially well in finance

Money decisions are tangled up with self-image more than almost anything else people buy.

Someone avoiding a conversation about their statements isn’t avoiding a number – they’re avoiding being seen as the kind of person who has that on their statements. Someone who won’t test their borrowing capacity is protecting a version of themselves who’s going to buy a house next year.

When you write to an identity someone’s reaching for, you’re working with the thing that’s actually driving them, rather than the surface reason they’d give you if you asked.

How to find the right one

Go through the last twenty people you helped and ask what they’d have wanted to be called.

Not their demographic. Not their loan type. The sentence they’d have been happy to see about themselves. ‘Finally getting organised.’ ‘Done with the big four.’ ‘Taking the business seriously this year.’

Those sentences are sitting in your own client files and almost nobody goes looking for them.

The line to be careful about

There’s a manipulative version, which is telling someone they’re already the thing so they feel obliged to prove it. Flattery with a hook in it.

The honest version names something true that they’re reaching for, and then makes the next step small enough that reaching feels possible. If your post makes someone feel like a fraud for not having acted yet, you’ve done the first bit without the second.

Name the identity and then make the first step tiny. Both halves or neither.

The short version

• People act to stay consistent with who they think they are, which beats incentive most of the time
• Demographics and product categories are things people get sorted into; identities are things they reach for
• ‘People who’ve decided this is the year’ does work that ‘first home buyers’ never will
• The right words are in your own client files, in what people said about themselves
• Name the identity, then make the next step small, or you’ve just made someone feel behind

Write to the person on the other side of the decision. They’re already imagining being her.