Elizabeth Holt, MD of Holt PR, outlines how members can utilise the IFP’s Financial Planning Week 2011 to build their own PR strategy.

This issue of Financial Planner coincides with the run up to this year’s Financial Planning Week organised on a national basis by the Institute of Financial Planning and taking place from 21-27 November. 

This initiative by the IFP to get the message out to the man-in-the-street regarding the need to plan ahead when it comes to finances and, where appropriate, to seek the advice of a qualified Financial Planner, has to contend with numerous other initiatives in the UK, all believing they are worthy causes and as such warranting attention.

And the fact is that you could have the best idea or the most worthy cause yet unless people get to know about it there is every chance it will be missed in the hurly- burly of our fast-paced lives in the UK. The key is getting that message across to the people you are targeting, in the most efficient and cost effective way possible.

In the same way, rising competition in the Financial Planning marketplace - as the financial advice sector in general including private banks targets high net worth clients - means it is ever more important for Financial Planners to differentiate themselves publicly as well as in the minds of their existing and prospective clients.

Marketing is one way to get the message out there but that can be overly expensive not only in terms of cost, but also time and internal resource. Another means that is often underestimated, and in consequence often under valued, is through targeted PR.

The IFP has used PR - provided for the past three years, I am pleased to say, by my company Holt PR - to actively push Financial Planning Week not just with the personal finance press but in other directions too. The whole purpose of FPW is to get as many people thinking and talking about Financial Planning as possible.

Hence, as well as being covered in titles like the Mail on Sunday (Jeff Prestridge, Personal Finance Editor, praised the IFP’s campaign in one of his weekly financial columns) FPW achieved coverage in publications such as The Lady. This may not be an obvious first port of call but the editor soon cottoned on that her readers were probably those most in need of Financial Planning advice and most likely to take it up.

So how does this translate into the business model of a Financial Planning firm? In building a business strategy, where the sales team and the marketing personnel fit in when promoting the products and services of a company is apparent. PR is less tangible but it can bring something totally different to the mix. PR gives a business the opportunity to present its character to the market by means that most marketing does not, and so raises the profile of the company in a totally different way. While marketing can be focused on creating an image of the company, presenting its credentials or focusing on promoting one aspect of its services, a public relations campaign can present the character of the firm.

In Financial Planning, for example, this can be through securing regular or ad hoc features and opinion columns, where the writer is able to put over the firm’s views on certain issues but also to demonstrate the knowledge and experience of the company. A CEO of a Financial Planning firm commenting in the national press or writing in the local media on stock market volatility and what investors can do to mitigate losses or to maintain a decent income stream, is likely to receive considerably more attention from the investing public than, say, a radio commercial - pound for pound it will probably cost less as well!

So what makes for an effective PR campaign? PR is about delivering information, creating perception and communicating with your target market. A good PR campaign can build awareness, mould that perception, enhance or create reputation and stimulate action.

A common mistake made is to confuse the boundaries between PR and marketing. They sit side by side and should complement each other’s activity to benefit the company but they are different disciplines.

The effect of marketing is often measurable, through coding and client feedback and so on, whereas PR is far less tangible and communicating a company’s values and engendering trust in a firm or brand can be a long-term project. The first rule of PR is to establish exactly what it is you want to achieve from it. In other words, to set your goals. As with any project the preparation is as important as the implementation.

Establishing the business goals you want to aim at gives PR companies like my own a clear direction on which to build the PR plan. Importantly, it enables the plan to stay on track and while, as I have stated, the effects of PR can often be intangible, they can be measured to some extent in relation to the end goals. For example, if one goal is to raise the profile of the company, the level of coverage obtained can be an indicator of how well that has been achieved.

Part of that initial process is also to identify who your target audience is and what they want to hear from you. If you are aiming at high net worth investors then the target newspapers might be different to those aimed at the mass affluent investor (although not exclusively so).

One way of finding out the best medium to use is actually to ask your current clients. What do they read, which television programmes do they watch, which investment columnists do they regard highly? What interests your clients is also likely to interest prospective clients too. This will give you a fast and fairly accurate indication of the media a PR plan should be targeting.

Once you have set your objective, identified the result you want to achieve, and agreed the target audience, the next stage in the process is to determine the message(s) you want to convey to your audience. Your message will be how you want to be seen externally and should be a blend of what you want to say and what your audience wants to hear. (Note here that PR works both externally and internally. The message you are delivering to the public should be the one that you are following internally and letting staff see the press releases, features and blogs being written is an effective way to ensure everyone is “on message”).

That message at its core should be to convey what is different about your firm. Of course, to do that you have to know what makes you different in the market and you need to be able to both describe and demonstrate that. Here a PR company can help. As a third party we can look at your firm with a dispassionate eye and see where your strengths lie and how they can best be brought out in a public relations plan. A PR message can be aspirational but it must always be grounded in reality.

The next stage is actually implementing the plan. This means meeting the media. Face to face contact is essential to start building the relationship you will need to drive an effective PR campaign. A brief meeting over coffee to outline what your company does, what makes it different and what you can provide to journalists, goes a long way to establishing your initial media presence.

It is important that you have a selected spokesperson who will interact with the press and who is trusted and willing to give comment to journalists when they call. You control how much time and resource you invest in this but the more you put in, the more you will get back in terms of coverage. Of course, in the second decade of the 21st century the avenues of communication have opened up tremendously. While millions of people still get their news and opinions, facts and figures from print-based publications, online and social media is essential to any good PR strategy.

The most common means to deliver messages online are Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook and YouTube. As the more business-orientated of these LinkedIn can be viewed as the more ‘professional’. However, increasingly, the media is using Twitter to both put stories and opinions into the market and to follow companies and source stories. With millions of people using Facebook and viewing YouTube – and statistics show these mediums being increasingly used by the over 40s - having a corporate presence on Facebook or, if you produce company videos, putting them on YouTube can help raise your presence in areas you might not have considered that nevertheless, potential clients are using.

PR also differs from marketing in that whereas with an advert or brochure it is expected that you will say what makes your company better than all the rest, from the journalist’s point of view that is not what they are going to be interested in or will write about. A journalist wants your news and your opinions on the industry and the market. Try to sneak in self promotion with some journalists and editors and you will get short shrift indeed. The same applies to social media – in fact more so. Blatantly advertising your company and its services will turn people away from you. Effective use of social media is about listening and engaging with your target audience.

Hopefully you can see from this why it is that PR is difficult to measure. Yet it works. Small firms with a handful of overall employees can have a massive media presence if they get the message right, if they have a spokesperson willing to talk to the press when they call for comment and if they deliver the kind of information and opinion that is newsworthy.