As a financial sector CMO — whether you work for an alternative asset firm, an ESG firm, a FinTech Saas, or another financial sector organization — we know you are under more pressure to get results.
PR is one tactic you can use to:
- Improve brand awareness
- Increase web traffic
- Build backlinks = Boost SEO
- Help you win awards (or more awards)
- Become known for being a thought leader in your niche
- Support sales and lead nurturing
It’s becoming even more important to future-proof your SEO by making it AI-friendly by using Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) strategies.
PR can help you do that.
In this article, we show you how to leverage PR to your advantage and how to implement a campaign successfully.
Is PR Different for Alternative Asset and ESG Investment Firms?
In some ways, yes. PR in the financial sector is not the same as others.
B2C PR is always going to be different than traditional B2B PR.
And financial sector PR is more niche because it’s not dealing with anything physical, tangible, or real in that sense.
Finance is the movement and manipulation of money.
That’s not an easy subject to weave a story around, and stories are what journalists want to tell their audiences.
Numbers and brand names — in both cases, the bigger the numbers, the more prominent the names you can cite (e.g., big, well-known clients, etc.) — the more likely you can secure positive coverage in this sector.
At the same time, the PR playbook for alternative asset, ESG investment firms, and FinTech SaaS businesses is the same as any B2B PR strategy.
PR is an interwoven and integral part of brand storytelling.
Done right, PR should naturally support every piece of content marketing, thought-leadership, and technical content your firm publishes.
Digital PR helps you reach different audiences: senior professionals and younger generations.
Want to build trust online and establish your firm as a brand? PR is as much an ingredient as SEO, visual brand guidelines, and a user-friendly website.
Ultimately, PR is and always will be one of the most important pillars of any financial services sector company’s marketing strategy.
It’s even more important in this era of Generative Engine Optimization (GEO), which is SEO with an AI twist.
PR will help your brand become a source that AIs quote and cite, making your company a more important authority in your niche sector.
With that in mind, here are 5 steps to develop a PR strategy, followed by 5 things you need to do to prepare for a PR campaign.
5 Steps to Develop a PR Strategy
- Define Specific PR Goals
Let’s assume you’re starting from scratch.
In the financial sector, almost every CEO and CMO would love to see their name, their firm, in articles by the big players in this sector:
- The Financial Times (FT)
- The Wall Street Journal (WSJ)
- Bloomberg
- Reuters
- Forbes
- MarketWatch
- CNBC
- Investopedia
- The Economist
However, we need to align expectations with what’s possible, to begin with.
PR is climbing a mountain, not a sprint.
It’s a series of upward steps that you take, and the more PR you do, the more likely the relevant big players will be interested in publishing stories about you and hearing from you as an established expert in your field.
The best way to approach this is to think about your company from a media perspective. That’s why having experienced PR professionals can play such a vital role in defining and implementing your PR campaign.
A PR campaign isn’t simply putting out press releases and hoping for the best.
Nor is it paying for coverage (organic is always better, whenever possible), unless there are specific media outlets that will only accept “advertorial” pieces, and it’s worth the investment.
PR goals need to be framed in the following ways:
- Securing coverage in media outlets that matter to us;
- Understanding that an engaged niche audience is more likely to want to find out more about us than millions of readers (only a small percentage of whom might click on any particular audience);
- Backlinks are more valuable than vanity metrics;
- Print coverage can be just as useful as digital (but only digital can secure a backlink, and you need that for SEO and GEO)
- Brand authority and awareness take time to build.
- Understand Where Your Audience is Online
Like we said above, an engaged niche audience is more likely to want to find out more about you than millions of readers (only a small percentage of whom might click on any particular audience).
Hence why any PR campaign — especially in the first 3 to 6 months — is more effective when it focuses on securing organic coverage in more niche/trade publications first.
Make sure that any PR or communications studio you work with has researched your audience and the media outlets/blogs they read.
Understanding your audience is fundamental.
It’s the first step on your PR journey.
Further down the road, if it makes sense for your brand, then you can pitch articles to be the big league publications (like the FT and WSJ, etc).
- Create the Communications Plan
With an in-depth understanding of your audience and goals, the next step is to create the communications plan.
This can include a mix of:
- Announcements you know the company wants to make in the next 3, 6, and 12 months;
- Any events you are planning to:
- Attend
- Sponsor
- Speak at
- Any awards you are likely to be nominated for;
- Ideas for thought-leadership topics you’d like to have articles published about.
- Do you have access to proprietary data? If there is a way to turn data or surveys you can ask into unique content pieces and articles, perhaps with a big brand partner, then that will help in winning the media’s attention.
While at the same time, leaving space for being reactive to world events.
Journalists want stories, and they want to know they’re talking to experts.
So, if you are an expert in a particular field (e.g., trade finance) and there are big world events that require a reactive response (like trade wars and tariffs), then you are uniquely positioned to give statements.
Reactive media can be as effective and powerful as proactive.
The first thing journalists will do is Google your name and company.
Hence why a PR campaign is an upward climb, not a sprint.
The more they find out about you online, the greater confidence they’ll have in quoting you and publishing articles submitted by your PR team/agents.
- Implement, Test, and Iterate
Once you’ve got a plan agreed with a PR team, they will implement it, like we’ve done for LiquidX.
PR campaigns are always iterative in nature, and should be a combination of reactive — to world events that impact your industry — and proactive, with PR’s pitching articles published under your name (known as a byline) and ideally, with backlinks that will take interested readers to your website.
The first 3 to 6 months especially, are about implementing, testing, and iterating, to find a process that works and can be built on.
- Build on Early Wins
Early wins are crucial for long-term PR success.
Once you’ve got a small body of articles published in trade/niche media publications, then it gets easier to win the bigger pitches.
Journalists will trust you more because they’ll see that other media outlets have published your commentaries or thought-leadership articles, and then getting into more high-profile media outlets, like the FT and Bloomberg.
Now, let’s look at the essentials that businesses often overlook before they approve going ahead with a PR campaign.
5 Must-Haves Before Launching a PR Campaign
If you want any PR campaign to succeed, it’s important to know it’s not as simple as “Let’s get a PR firm on this, that will solve everything.”
If by everything, you mean:
- Improve brand awareness
- Increase web traffic
- Build backlinks = Boost SEO
- Help you win awards (or more awards)
- Become known for being a thought leader in your niche
- Support sales and lead nurturing
Then yes, PR can help with all of those things, especially now in a zero-click SEO environment.
However, there are a few steps you need to take first to ensure that your PR campaign is going to be successful.
- Have Your Go-to Media Person
One of the first things you need to do is appoint a spokesperson.
This could be your CEO, CMO, or someone else in an outward-facing, sales, or revenue-generating role.
No matter how much PR can be done remotely (ghost-writing, thought-leadership articles, etc.), there are always going to be times when journalists and editors will want to speak with one of your team.
These are golden opportunities.
Don’t waste them. If a journalist is interested, make the time.
It means that you’ve got a newsworthy story, or there’s sufficient interest to do a profile of your company, team, senior leadership figure, or Founder/CEO.
Make sure the spokesperson knows they could be called upon at a moment’s notice to do an interview.
A strong PR partner should always prepare the spokesperson in advance, as we do for our client, LiquidX.
We’ve created a PR page for them, and our PR campaign is securing thought-leadership articles and press interviews with their CRO, Dominic Capolongo (when they attended an industry-leading trade conference in June 2025, in London; resulting in an award nomination).
All of this is helping them with this year’s goal of expanding their presence in the European market: everywhere that financial services and trade finance are heavily concentrated, like London, Amsterdam, and Paris.
Above: An example of the type of articles a strong PR campaign can generate for alternative asset, ESG, and FinTech SaaS businesses.
- Have a 12-Month Media Plan
As we covered previously, a 12-month media plan is an essential part of the strategy. This could include:
- Announcements you know the company wants to make in the next 3, 6, and 12 months;
- Any events you are planning to:
- Attend
- Sponsor
- Speak at
- Any awards you are likely to be nominated for;
- Ideas for thought-leadership topics you’d like to have articles published about.
- Do you have access to proprietary data? If there is a way to turn data or surveys you can ask into unique content pieces and articles, perhaps with a big brand partner, then that will help in winning the media’s attention.
One thing that many businesses don’t understand to begin with is that this needs to come from them.
A PR’s job is to secure media coverage.
Media coverage depends on having stories to tell, something to say, something worth publishing.
You need to have a few ideas to get started with so that a PR can run with those ideas, turning announcements into stories. Comments into thought-leadership pieces.
Data into a marketing asset that gets picked up originally, going beyond a target group of journalists and media outlets.
PR campaigns work better when the work with clients is collaborative.
- Know Which Content, Events, or Stats Can Be Used as Media Assets
As part of your media plan, you should know which content (that you’ve already published or is in the pipeline), events, and stats can be used in media articles.
We advise staying well clear of any AI-generated content, as we’ve found that’s a big negative trust signal, and not worth the effort.
When it comes to useful stats. Let’s say you are an ESG-focused investment firm. The following could be very useful in media articles:
- A huge meta-analysis of 2200 research papers showed that returns from sustainable investing are 60% higher than traditional, unsustainable investments (Fried et al, ESG and financial performance, Journal of Sustainable Finance & Investment, 2015).
- Sustainable investments have a higher aggregate ROI than oil, gas, weapons, and other harmful investments.
- A recent survey by Stanford Graduate School of Business researchers and the MSCI Sustainability Institute of 47 institutional investors with $250 billion AuM found that the main reason that investors put money into ESG funds is:
- “Most see ESG primarily as a way of reducing volatility and risk in their portfolios — especially tail risk, the probability that a rare but catastrophic event could tank a company’s performance.”
- Nordea looked at the C02 savings from sustainable investing (vs. traditional investing), and found it to be 27X more impactful than making lifestyle changes.
As part of your marketing activities, have a fact sheet of useful information put together that your PR team can use.
- Don’t Test Regulators’ Limits
Before you do any marketing, make sure you are legally allowed.
We’ve included a useful guide in this article for financial service firms in the US and UK.
Assuming marketing and PR is allowed, then make sure any press releases and articles are checked for the usual dos and don’ts in financial services (e.g., wild claims or missing boilerplate legal text, as needed).
Don’t risk having anything published that you may need to retract. Make sure that PR activities don’t require any damage limitation, so always have at least one team member with some basic legal training check things first.
Or have anything run quickly through compliance, although we do only suggest for legal reasons. Don’t risk regulatory checks, which should be minimal, ruining getting a good article published. Journalists are always on a deadline.
- Have Client or Partner Brands You Can Mention
It’s always useful to have big-name clients, partners, or investors you can mention.
In the growth-stages, big-name investors give you credibility. So do awards. Or hiring key staff from big players or even competitors.
Strategic investors/partners are always useful too, especially if they’ve got more brand awareness.
As you grow, it’s the big-ticket client brand names or figures, like an asset management firm saying you’ve got $X billions of AuM. All of that makes a difference when it comes to securing PR.
Success attracts success.
If you’ve got it, PR is the time to flaunt it.
Key Takeaways: PR for Alternative Asset and ESG Investment Firms
PR is an important, we can even say, integral part of marketing, especially in this age of AI-powered search.
It’s a worthwhile investment for several reasons:
- Increased brand awareness
- Increases web traffic
- Improves your personal and brand authority and expertise
- Better for SEO and GEO
- Supports sales efforts
- Strengthens and amplifies marketing efforts
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Now more than ever, alternative asset firms need to stand out and get noticed. You need investors to see the advantages of investing in your offering.
You can’t sit out another cycle waiting for investors to notice you. We can help you with that.
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