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The Ultimate Guide to Financial Services PR

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.

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With 2024 just around the corner, most marketing teams are deep into strategy planning for the year ahead. It is during these times it is useful to revisit and analyse the social media strategy to make sure it is fine tuned to be working in your favour.

In financial services it is important to have a LinkedIn company page as part of the B2B marketing strategy – not just for sharing content with existing customers but for lead generation as well. But it can be overwhelming knowing what to post, in what format and when.

For example, video content has been gaining importance year on year across all social media platforms. For many companies it may seem like a lot of work to be developing video content, but there are simple things and tools out there that can help make branded video content appealing to followers.

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But wait, I don’t have any video content

Most organisations already have suitable content, but just need to tweak it to fit the purposes of social media. One of the most common types of content produced by financial services companies is webinars. Webinars are great way to generate new leads and also provide valuable content to existing clients and customers. Using programs like Canva, you can take a45-minute webinar and find several important statements made by the presenter and cut those into several short 30 – 60 second videos with sound waves as animation.

In addition, these snippets from the webinar can be used to generate new leads, by giving listeners a taste of what was addresses in the webinar, encouraging them to sign up to get access to the entire recording.

For those who want to get more creative, mini interviews with key experts within the organisation can be recorded with a phone and simple microphone or use programs like PowToon or Canva to develop short explainer videos with animations.

Keep it short and sweet

Time is money, and the majority of social media users like to squeeze in as much content as they can while scrolling through their social media feeds. According to HubSpot research, the optimal length of a video on social media is between 1 – 3 minutes. With such a limited time to get your message across, think about how best to quickly pull viewers into the video and keep their attention for that limited time. Rethink lengthy branded openings, and any unnecessary scripts, as the goal is to showcase expertise and message in a quick and interesting manner, and hopefully get that click through to your call to action.

Add captions and subtitles

According to social media management platform, SproutSocial, most LinkedIn videos are played without sound. Facebook’s recent study on video content also found 85 per cent of users did not play video with sound.These statistics justify why it is important to add subtitles to videos.LinkedIn provides the option of uploading an SRT (SubRip Subtitle) file or automatic caption creation. If you don’t have the time or means of creating aSRT file, LinkedIn’s automatic caption creator allows you to review and edit the auto-generated captions before publishing the video.

Location, location, location

Location matters in many things – including LinkedIn. Unlike other social network platforms, LinkedIn algorithms are not programmed to make content go viral. Instead, its purpose is to show the best content given a user’s preferences and behaviours on the platform. In addition, the algorithm prefers content that sits on the LinkedIn platform, not that which has been shared from another platform such as YouTube. That is why it is important to consider publishing video content directly on LinkedIn as opposed to republishing the link from other sources.

#Hastag…

Yes, hashtags are just as important for video content as for any other post on LinkedIn. Make sure the tags are relevant and have been researched to understand what others are using that tag for. Research also ensures the hashtag relates to the content you are posting about, the audience you want to capture, and has a good number of users following/searching for that tag. Over-tagging on LinkedIn posts is not recommended, and the platform itself recommends limiting tags to three per post, so for content to not look like spam. Be strategic about the tags you include, as it will give you a better chance of reaching your target audience.

Keeping all these things in mind will help you and your team to get started with developing good video content for LinkedIn, and gettingmore users engaging with your posts and business.