Mastering Financial PR: Expressing Your Firm Through Compelling Viewpoints

If you had a chance to absorb one of our recent posts here, a blog on simplifying financial content writing, you might be wondering: What are my next steps? In that post, we offered writing tips for tackling complex financial topics, including how to avoid stiff corporate-speak, industry acronyms, and incomprehensible prose.

Once you’ve mastered those techniques, the next step is to implement them. This is the process where you, as a financial services or tech firm, decide which viewpoints are the most appropriate and advantageous for you to embrace, then shape them in compelling ways to maximize positive exposure.

Are you a tech firm that wants to be a go-to source on issues of cyber security? Are you an asset manager with a new quant fund trying to distance yourself from competitors who’ve racked up violations? Maybe you’re a mutual fund firm simply trying to find a voice for a plain vanilla fund?

Whatever your goals are, there are a few basic steps everyone should follow:

 

Identifying Your Voice

The first step is figuring out which viewpoints are best for you to claim. If you’ve launched a new product, service or fund, capturing attention might be an easy task. But sometimes, those new offerings lack a clear differentiator in the marketplace: What might be new to your company may not be new to anyone else. Sometimes, there’s no new development at all.

So for this step, let’s focus on a challenge that stumps most firms: finding a voice in the absence of a newsworthy internal development. In these cases, the focus shouldn’t be on what you say—but how you say it. In other words, find a new entry point to an old issue. Or create a new connection to an existing trend.

Consider how you fit into the media terrain. If you are that nuts-and-bolts investment advisor that’s been around for years—what can you say that’s fresh? There has been a high-profile discussion on setting a uniform fiduciary standard for broker-dealers and investment advisors. Seize the opportunity to talk about how you determine which behaviors build trust in advisory relationships. What are your best practices for listening to your clients and understanding their financial goals? How do you effectively communicate issues of risk? How do you help guide their priorities?

Maybe there’s been a news development in the sales space, and you’re an asset manager that has always dedicated ample resources to wholesale distribution. Talk about how to select the best distribution model, how to install a highly-skilled sales team, and how to identify what compels advisors to buy. Mutual fund firms may not want to directly enter the current regulatory debate on stress testing, but they can use the coverage as a hook to talk about how they manage liquidity risk. What controls and analytics do you have in place to handle significant redemptions?

Maybe you just have a compelling personal story. It’s not so much that what you’re offering is different, but that you have a personal connection that inspires you to think differently about how and why it’s offered. And if that connection influences the decisions you make about the firm or product strategy, consider sharing that viewpoint.

Even though you may not have direct involvement in whatever is driving the news, you can still find ways to make yourself relevant. Determine how you fit into the coverage and how best to inject your core values into the discussion. The idea is to develop a viewpoint that establishes your strengths and showcases your expertise.

 

Anticipating Conflict; Changing Course

It’s always wise to think comprehensively about your viewpoints. That means anticipating how negative associations, including past, current or future events, might dilute your viewpoint or make it otherwise appear irrelevant. Bond fund managers have been forced to be vocal on what a Fed interest rate hike would mean for them. By proactively acknowledging potential adversity, they can exercise more control over the conversation when confronted by critics.

Some developments, however, aren’t so predictable. It’s not exactly an option to tinker with a fund strategy or overhaul a service every time some external event weakens its effect. But you can reframe an issue when adversity creeps in. For example, it can be effective to paint a picture of how your strategy has thrived over the long term to take the focus off the short term.

 

Other times, it’s better to make a more dramatic shift. Traditional wealth advisors who have long touted the importance of solid, bottom-line advice can refocus on the role of personalized service and long track records when confronted by the “robo-advisor.” Are you a liquid alts manager? There was a time when a liquid alt launch was an interesting story. But they’ve since proliferated and come under increased regulatory scrutiny. Your viewpoint may need to shift from your ability to please that retail investor craving diversification and uncorrelated returns, to how a fund manager can best manage derivative risk.

 

Good Luck!

A new fund may simply need name recognition; while a more established institution might be looking to reinvent itself. Some may be trying to educate investors about a new asset class. Others may be looking to contain negative information about an issue. Whether you realize it or not, you always have opportunities to showcase yourself in a positive way, no matter what your end goal is.

Remember, it’s always important to humanize your story. Even with the most technical of topics, there is an investor, client or customer that still needs to understand how your viewpoint relates to them. You should understand how the topic furthers the objectives of your firm. But you also need to be able to explain, directly or indirectly, how that viewpoint advances the interests of those you serve. Be persuasive, relevant, and adaptable, and your firm, sooner or later, will reap the benefits.