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We all know that while public relations (PR) is still one of the most effective tools in the financial services marketer’s kit, best practice calls for an integrated approach that will amplify your company’s PR and drive leads. And you don’t need a magic wand to get great results.
Instead, try an integrated PR/marketing approach that uses earned, paid and owned media tactics to promote your content. Here are some quick tips on how to get started.
1. Use analytics and paid media to drive traffic to your earned media coverage
If you have some stellar media coverage you want to share further, use paid tools to amplify your coverage across multiple channels to increase the reach.
An example of this tactic in action is the company selling low-end consumer goods online which placed one article on Buzzfeed. Tracking showed this one article drove $30k worth of traffic to their website, a huge deal for this relatively small outlet – especially given the low spend.
The company tracked the source of this traffic using Google Analytics – which showed exactly how many of the people who read the article went on to buy the product.
The company got further mileage from the article by running a paid media campaign using AdWords, which kept the article in circulation, reinforcing the return on the earned media and earning them another $22k in revenue.
The moral of this story is: track with analytics and amplify with paid media.
2. Remember the call to action
Ideally, all of our earned online media coverage would include links back to our company websites or products, but when you are not in complete control of the content this can be difficult to achieve.
The good news is that even if you have a great online media article without a link back to your content, there are other ways of attracting visitors to your website.
One free tool that helps to do this is Snip.ly, which essentially enables you to clone the webpage that contains the media article in a way that can bring them back to your website. It does this by adding a pop-up box to the article, which links back to your company page or prompts readers to give you their email address.
3. Promote the article on social media
Whatever you do with your earned and owned media content, it should always be aligned with your social media content and your social media content should always reflect your overall branding.
Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter are great tools for amplifying your key messages and maintaining engagement and each platform also has paid components which can boost your content even further.
Here are some examples:
- Targeted Facebook and LinkedIn ads – Facebook and LinkedIn enables you to target both sponsored posts and conventional ads according to a wide variety of criteria. For financial services content promotion, you might want to target people that work as financial planners, or employees of financial services companies
- Promoted tweets – Twitter now enables you to promote individual tweets, which can be a great way to get in front of the right people and join the social conversation. You can target users by interest, gender, geography, or device
- Outbrain – is another content promotion ad network that enables you to cost effectively attract traffic that’s likely to be interested in your product or service. This is determined by the other material they’re reading, sharing or liking across the internet
- Another great platform is Dianomi - a platform that has allowed us to integrate our messaging seamlessly alongside relevant editorial content within premium publications. Dianomi helped us gain massive reach in a previous campaign (6.3 million impressions) and also drove quality traffic to our client's website, which in turn converted into high quality marketing qualified leads (MQLs)
How it can work for you too
This year, BlueChip worked with our client Hyperion Asset Management to develop and execute an integrated PR/marketing campaign, promoting the new launch of their active exchange-traded fund (ETF).
The aim of the campaign was to generate awareness of the active ETF, generate high-quality leads, and encourage both retail investors and advisers to invest into the listed fund.
Our approach included:
- Building two optimised landing pages; one prior to the product launch to capture all interested investors, and another to officially display the product, iNAV and performance after the launch
- Driving traffic and readership of the campaign content to the website and pre-registration page, which included weekly email direct marketing (eDM) campaigns, media mentions of the active ETF launch in national, regional and trade publications and awards received by Morningstar – and targeting Hyperion's specific demographics on social media
- Assessing the best fit digital and traditional PR and marketing tools whilst being mindful of budget
- Creating an integrated campaign, leveraging value, niche content and digital assets across a number of earned, owned and paid channels
Results:
- 462% increase in hits to the website (compared to 2020)
- 202% increase in new website visitors to the site compared to 2020, average page visits per visitor were 3-4 and average bounce rate improved by 88%
- 80% of pre-registrations generated from the campaign were new leads
- 382% increase in leads generated (compared to previous campaigns)
So the message is: get your integrated hats on now! It’s a simple strategy that can deliver results for your company way beyond traditional PR.
Related: Getting Your Email on in 2021: Human Behavior Hacks Every Financial Services Marketer Should Know