Case Study: Leveraging PR + event marketing for a small wealth advisory firm
Fluent IMC was engaged by a well-known Maine community bank to support its Marketing Director with public relations efforts for the Wealth Advisors division. When Fluent was first engaged, the group’s leadership lacked clarity on its business development strategy and was reluctant to name a target audience.
In order to focus our marketing efforts, Fluent helped them pinpoint their preferred clients and developed an annual marketing/communications plan to reach that audience.
Focusing primarily on Baby Boomers who are either planning to retire or dealing with “sandwich generation” financial issues, Fluent developed a multi-channel public relations approach to both build credibility and generate leads for one-on-one consultations with the group’s financial advisors. Recognizing that earned media and sales are intentionally exclusive of one another, we needed an approach that best maximized our PR efforts and budget. First, we focused on identifying the topics that would generate the most interest. We developed quarterly educational events on those topics and enhanced their presentation slides and event marketing process. Once the event concluded, we repurposed the presentation content into articles, blog posts and other publishable content. In addition to pitching topics for authored submissions, Fluent also identified and secured speaking engagements for the group’s director and senior financial advisors.
Over the course of a year, our marketing/PR plan resulted in a dramatic increase in PR impressions, through both published content and speaking engagements. We also hosted several seminars that generated hundreds of new leads. The group then focused on executing its business development strategy of cultivating the new leads through an ongoing email nurturing campaign and sales outreach. Additionally, the group gained a robust inventory of articles and content for use in emails, newsletters and even sales kits.