In financial services, many firms are focused on providing bottom-line value to their clients. What most of them forget is how to properly communicate that value.
A good PR strategy has a greater impact on the bottom line than most firms realise. This book shows how to put in place an effective PR program in the financial services industry, and how great communications can add significant value to a firm.
Between them, Claudia Pritchitt and Leeanne Bland have over 50 years’ experience in public relations, communications, and marketing. Here, they explain the key tools needed in an effective communications strategy as well as why plain English is imperative in the jargon-heavy world of financial services.
Behind the scenes with the authors of 'The ultimate guide to financial services PR'
At the beginning of this year, Claudia Pritchitt and Leeanne Bland, principals at PritchittBland Communications, co-authored their first book “The ultimate guide to financial services PR: Maximising value from your PR investment.”How did they do it? Why did they do it? What was the process? Find out in their Q&A below.
What inspired you to write this book?
There are already a lot of books about public relations (PR) but not many that are expressly focused on financial services, which is a specialist industry and one that we know very well! We thought it would be valuable to put down in writing some of the PR considerations that are particular to this sector, as a way of helping others who work in it, or who are thinking of working in this area. It also seemed a useful way of adding value to the work that we do for clients.
What was your process of working together to create this book?
Having worked together for over a decade, we know each other’s views and opinions pretty well. It was straight-forward for each of us to work on different sections of the book but feel confident that it would reflect the other person’s thinking as well as their writing style. We each wrote chapters about areas that particularly interested us, and then pulled the chapters together into an overall structure and framework. The advice outlined in each chapter is an amalgam of our views that we feel strongly about, have spoken to clients about, and written blogs about, in the past. It was a creative process that initially seemed almost ad-hoc, but in the end it came together very well.
What has been the feedback and reactions so far from readers?
We have been genuinely touched by the universally positive feedback we have received. A number of our clients, and other friends in the industry, have contacted us to tell us how much they enjoyed reading it, and how useful they have found it.
What do you hope readers will take away from it? Could we expect to see a sequel in the future?
We’d like people to understand the value of public relations – particularly our point about how all organisation have public relations, it’s just a question of whether they manage it or not. And then, if they do decide to manage their PR, after reading this book they will have a better idea of the best way to go about it.
There are no current plans for a sequel – but never say never! Both PR and financial services are ever-changing industries, so our thinking will no doubt need to change over time as well.
