The finance industry has embraced public relations enthusiastically over time, as keen PR plans in this sector have again and again proved their value: here as a showcase for good news, there as a shield against bad news, here as a wellspring of new talent or innovation, there as a signature for a brand. Communications Strategy Group® is well-versed in the world of financial PR and is here to help organizations tell their story exactly how they want to.
The benefits of financial PR are numerous and nuanced, which is why we’ve whipped up this article to answer, at length, some of the most common questions about financial services communications: What is financial services PR exactly? Why is it important? How is it best executed? And what are examples of good (or bad) financial PR in action? Whether you’re a marketer working with a new FinTech company yet to begin your first PR campaign, a well-known asset management firm with a great deal of experience, or somewhere in the middle, this one’s for you.
Understanding Financial Public Relations
A financial PR strategy is important in the financial services sector because it helps organizations manage and improve their reputation. Public relations is an important tool that helps businesses drive impactful outcomes.
Respond to Press
Financial public relations agencies work with media professionals such as journalists and editors to communicate important company news and events to the public. Public relations agencies can also play a role in providing reporters with reliable and timely information by providing an expert opinion, data, research and visuals. This collaboration plays an essential role in helping organizations build credibility, shape public opinion, and create an image that is in favor of the organization.
Create a Favorable Public Image
The reputation of a financial services business impacts the organization’s bottom line and the likeliness of consumers seeking out its services. A well-constructed financial public relations strategy doesn’t just circulate information about an organization. It positions the brand strategically to appeal to a target audience so that potential customers have a positive impression and are more inclined to purchase products and services.
Build Trust with Your Audience
Building trust with customers is important for any business, but especially for any organization in the finance industry. Whether it’s demonstrating that your organization knows how to do your job well or presenting the value your organization provides customers, trust is essential for attracting and retaining customers, partners, employees and the longevity of your company.
Attract and Retain Meaningful Relationships
A PR plan can help attract and retain meaningful relationships by helping a financial organization build a positive reputation and increase brand awareness. It can also help an organization respond to negative feedback in a way that aligns with other marketing efforts to ensure messaging backs the rest of the organization’s initiatives.
Crisis Management
A business should have a crisis management plan in place to help protect it from potentially damaging consequences of unexpected events. When a crisis communication management plan is executed well, it demonstrates that your company is honest and reliable. Most importantly, even through the noise of a crisis, an effective financial public relations strategy will guarantee that your organization is in control of the narrative.
Introduce New Products and Services
First impressions are a big deal, and that’s even the case with the introduction of new products and services. PR is a vital tool for successfully introducing new products and services because it helps brands reach the right audience with a value-defining message at the right time. The way new products and services are introduced can help generate more sales, build a stronger brand reputation and secure the success of the product launch.
What Is Financial PR?
Creating a financial PR strategy is the art of taking raw information to do with your financial services company and expressing it in terms that will elicit a favorable reaction from shareholders, investors, or customers. Although finance may seem straightforward in theory — it has a single output, money, and a single input, also money — in practice there are a million ways of announcing the money a company has made or stands to make, a million ways of announcing losses, a million ways of enticing potential investors or patrons, a million permutations of financial instruments and so a million places a company can insert itself in the exchange and redoubling of money, and so on. Somewhere in all this complexity, financial matters become a little less about cold hard math and a little more about human emotions. That’s where a communications strategy comes into play.
Why Is Financial PR So Important?
Financial services PR can perform many functions for your business. No less than in other industries, the shareholders of banks, wealth management companies, insurance companies, and the like respond positively to educational material, requests for engagement, and signs of authority, competence, and mutual understanding. Also, with all the financial services options available to consumers and B2B decision-makers, businesses in the field often turn to PR to distinguish themselves from their competitors. Campaigns centered on any of these objectives could fit the definition of financial PR.
Without some proficiency in PR tactics, a finance company leaves everything up to chance: a milestone you reach could be lost in a busy news cycle; the public could interpret your habitual silence as hauteur or lack of credibility; a disturbance in a market, left unexplained, could spook investors and send your stock price plummeting. The importance of PR lies in its ability to steer narratives that might otherwise stagnate or veer rapidly in directions contrary to your company’s interests.
Build a Financial PR Strategy in Five Steps
Any successful business has an effective and well-informed PR strategy. These are the five components that are key to creating a PR strategy that will help your organization intentionally tell its story.
1. Define Objectives and Metrics
Any effective PR strategy will have well-defined objectives and metrics. These metrics will play a pivotal role in determining how successful or unsuccessful a PR campaign is. Once objectives are defined, it is important to know how these factors will be measured. Not only will these elements be informative of the impact of your organization’s PR strategy, but they will also be building blocks for future campaigns, allowing your organization to make more informed decisions going forward.
2. Understand Your Audience
The audience you are communicating to will inform nearly every element of your financial PR strategy, from messaging and media placement to crisis management. Understanding your audience’s interests, needs and challenges will enhance the relevance and engagement levels of the message your organization wants to put out. It can also help PR professionals to intentionally focus their efforts toward areas that will be the most impactful.
3. Craft a Communication Plan
A structured communication plan is essential in order for a PR strategy to stand the test of time. It should outline the problem to be addressed, the messages to be conveyed, the target audiences and the methods that will be used to execute the plan, whether it’s email, news articles, social media, digital signage, or an open forum.
4. Implement, Test, Iterate
It’s rare that any strategy is executed flawlessly, however, mistakes and wins are essential to informing PR strategies going forward. You and your PR team should always monitor the progress of a campaign in real-time to understand what’s working, and what isn’t. From here, you can choose to go a different direction to replace those that simply aren’t working or double down on what you know is working.
5. Monitor and Respond
Everybody has an opinion, and while a good financial PR strategy will help shape public opinion, it cannot fully change it. Company leaders must understand the feedback they are receiving, both good and bad, in order to respond in a way that resonates with their audience. When possible, responding to specific questions and critiques can help to further engage the audience and reinforce the central elements of the campaign’s message. All interactions should be professional and brief to prevent your overall message from being looked over.
The Importance of Crisis Communications and Advising on Public-facing Actions
Speaking of narratives veering rapidly, remember what happened to the stock-trading app Robinhood right before its IPO? At first, the company was hailed as and held itself up as a champion of the 99%, a force for democratization in the stock market. Then, a group of Robinhood users, angry at what they saw as unethical trading by large hedge funds, began buying up specific stocks en masse to inflict losses on the hedge funds. The problem was, that because of its operating structure, Robinhood was required to have money to back the trades before they were completed, and its cash reserves couldn’t match the unnatural demand for these specific stocks. They hastily placed trading restrictions on the companies in question, and users were outraged.
Robinhood had no crisis communication plan ready to deploy; public opinion took its course without their voice being heard, at least not until they had taken time to marshal press releases about the controversy. In that interval, the company’s reputation suffered grievously, as people speculated that Robinhood had halted trades not because of SEC requirements but at the behest of the large hedge funds, the very entities the app purported to help everyday people compete against in the stock market.
Not a good look, and an instructive event as to the importance of a crisis communication plan in financial services PR. As part of your financial PR strategy, you should be sure to include a crisis communication element; any experienced financial communications agency can tell you how quickly a bad situation can get worse without a failsafe in place to manage public perception.
Examples of Financial Public Relations Strategies
So, now that you have a basic idea of why financial PR is important, let’s get more specific. What are some directions you could take a PR campaign that would breathe new life into your business? Three good objectives for your company’s PR, off the top of our head, are:
- Carving out a niche
- Adding personality to a brand
- Improving media relations
- What do these strategies involve?
Carving Out a Niche
Vying for attention alongside competitors doing basically exactly what your business does, you may find it difficult to make your enterprise stand out. However, financial PR plans can help with that. There is always variation between companies, and a financial communications agency can help you find a distinction your company can claim that gives an advantage of some kind to your customers. Whether your company is involved in a specific initiative or offers a unique financial service that others don’t, a PR agency will help you tease that value out and clearly communicate it to your audience. Then, they can help you emphasize that difference in a targeted way that may eventually make the distinction part of your brand, a calling card for your services.
Add Personality to the Brand
Entertaining people, showing that you understand and empathize with them, and otherwise revealing the humanity behind all the transactions can be powerful PR strategies in a financial communications toolbox. The finance industry’s reputation for dispassionate profit-seeking may have fed a certain harmful popular conception; in the public mind you may take the form of a gray-suited automaton with no face poring endlessly over spreadsheets. This is, of course, unfair and untrue, so give people a look at your actual personality! At the end of the day, people want to purchase products and services from other people, especially when it comes to hiring an organization to handle their finances.
As an example, check out the blog run by FirstBank, a community bank based in Colorado. The tone is light, the advice is useful to the audience they’re speaking to, and in short, the impression they create with their posts is one of warmth, ease, and heartfelt connection with the reader. This same kind of openness can help create trust between you and your stakeholders as part of your financial PR.
Improving Media Relations
We’ve touched on the public’s preference for earned media over paid media in previous posts. Within your financial PR campaign, devote some time to cultivating relationships with journalists, social media influencers, podcast hosts, and any other third-party agents of communication you think might be helpful. Getting the stamp of approval from a few micro-influencers with followers who trust their judgment could do more for your business in 2024, dollar for dollar than you could get from buying ads.
What’s Next for Your Financial Services PR Plans?
If you’re sold on the benefits of financial services PR and want some help getting started with your communication plan or building on existing momentum, get in touch with us. We’d love to hear from you!
