The fascination with the Fed (and what it should tell you about your financial services PR strategy)
Top financial services PR firm gives tips on leveraging breaking news
If you are an asset manager or registered investment advisory firm, you are in the business of dispensing advice and making investment decisions on your clients’ behalf. By the very nature of your vocation, you are expected to be a subject matter expert. So, it’s reasonable to assume that when there are headline financial, political or global events that might impact your investment decisions, your clients would expect that you would have an opinion on the relative impact and significance of that event. This is not just a responsibility, it’s an opportunity.
Mark my words: in the next five business days there will be a big breaking news event that your investment firm can capitalize on to secure an interview on CNBC or Fox Business or to find yourself quoted in Barron’s or the Wall Street Journal.
How do I know this? Because next week is the Federal Reserve Open Market Committee’s (FOMC) routine policy meeting. At the end of that meeting, the FOMC will release an update on the Fed’s policy in regards to interest rates, quantitative easing and the immediate future of “tapering” its purchases of US government issued debt. The business media will be glued to this event, providing pre-announcement speculation and analysis for at least 24 hours before. Likewise, the post-announcement coverage will last through the end of the following market day as inevitably there will be some analysts that read into the market’s immediate response. For some, they see this and call it “noise,” but for others it represents something else: opportunity.
As a top financial PR firm, we have executed public relations campaigns for investment management firms of all stripes. Their ability to respond quickly in this media environment can be the difference between watching the news opportunity go by and scoring impactful media coverage that support their marketing objectives.
Here are three reasons why opportunity abounds for those firms savvy enough to realize that their clients are looking for information and nimble enough to seize the opportunities as they whiz by in this 24-7 hyper drive media environment:
1) Content is king: make no mistake, generating interesting professional content is difficult. The media is ready to do that for you, if only you can find a way to hitch your story to what they need to cover.
2) Distribution is queen: to borrow a phrase from Jonathan Perelman of BuzzFeed “Content is king, but distribution is queen and she wears the pants” – and the top media outlets generally have built-in distribution.
3) You can’t stay on the radar screen without getting on the radar screen first: breaking news creates a news crunch, a time when even the journalists with the deepest bench of go-to sources are looking for the next edgy idea or angle that hasn’t been covered five times over. This is where new insightful sources can make their mark and join the ranks of the go to crowd.