Why ‘competitive rates’ costs you clients

I went looking through broker profiles last week, about sixty of them, mostly around Perth and Melbourne. Forty-one used the phrase ‘competitive rates’. Nine used ‘great rates’. Four managed both, in the same paragraph.

Nobody reading those profiles believes the claim is false. That is not the problem. The problem is that nobody reads it at all.

What happens when a claim is vague

A general claim asks the reader to do work. ‘Competitive rates’ means nothing until they imagine what competitive might be, compare it to what they are paying, and decide whether the gap is worth a phone call. That is three steps of mental effort, for a stranger, about money.

Most people will not bother. The few who do tend to imagine the least flattering version, because an unfamiliar financial decision already feels risky, and a vague promise gives that feeling nothing to push against.

There is a second problem. Every competitor says it too. A claim that forty-one out of sixty people make is not a claim, it is wallpaper.

What a number does instead

Compare these two lines.

Competitive rates and personalised service.

$2,962 a month on $500,000, over 30 years, at today’s rates.

The second one is less flattering to write. It also does four things the first cannot.

It is checkable. A number someone could verify reads as a promise rather than a pitch, and the brain treats it accordingly. It is specific enough to feel like it came from somewhere. It gives the reader an immediate comparison to their own repayment, which is the only comparison they care about. And it takes no effort at all to process, which matters more than most people realise.

• A number someone could check is trusted more than a claim they have to imagine
• One figure per post is enough. Two competing figures cancel each other out
• If a competitor could copy your sentence word for word, it is not doing any work

Where the specificity should sit

Not everywhere. A post stuffed with figures reads like a spreadsheet and gets scrolled past just as fast as the vague version.

The pattern that works: one number, early, with the thing it applies to attached. ‘On $750,000.’ ‘Over 30 years.’ ‘At 5.89% p.a.’ The qualifier is not fine print, it is the part that makes the number believable.

Then stop. The rest of the post can be plain English.

Three swaps to make this week

Go through your profile, your pinned post and your last five captions. Look for these.

• ‘Competitive rates‘ becomes the actual repayment on a common loan size in your area, with the rate and term named.
• ‘We help first home buyers‘ becomes ‘Forty-one first home buyers into their first home this year’, if that is true, or the number that is.
• ‘Fast approvals‘ becomes ‘Six weeks from first call to settlement’, or whatever your actual average is. If you do not know it, that is worth finding out for reasons beyond marketing.

The compliance question

This is where most brokers stop, so it is worth being clear. Specific numbers make people nervous because they feel closer to advice.

Illustrative figures, clearly labelled as illustrative, not tailored to any individual, and stated with the assumptions attached, are general information. That is the same category your existing content already sits in. What changes is that the information is now useful.

Your licensee or aggregator will have a view on how you label it, and that view is the one that counts. Ask them before you publish, not after. In our experience the conversation takes about ten minutes and ends with a format you can use every week.

Why this is the first principle we teach

Of the twelve principles behind our content, specificity is the one that changes results fastest, because it costs nothing to apply. You do not need a bigger audience, a better camera or a content strategy. You need the number you already know, in the first line instead of the fourth.

Most finance professionals are sitting on dozens of them. Average settlement time. Typical borrowing capacity on two incomes in their suburb. The difference between the best rate on their panel and the average variable. Every one of those is a post, and every one of them beats ‘competitive rates’ without trying.