October 27, 2022
5 minutes
The advancement of technology has revolutionised the finance world, from laying the first transatlantic cable in 1866, to Barclays introducing the first ATM machine in 1967, fast forwarding to the cryptocurrencies and branchless banks of today. Over the years finance technology has moved from analogue to digital, and PR has gone digital too.
Firstly, your reputation is everything. You can’t just create a good business and expect people to recognise it. Public relations can help fintech businesses build a positive image, boosting the credibility of your brand and raising awareness of your company.
Like traditional PR campaigns, digital PR can allow you to reach your target audience, present financial performance figures, debunk myths and fake news, and share thoughts on trending topics like the cost of living crisis. But, unlike traditional PR, digital PR can also help improve your online performance – boosting organic traffic and creating a natural backlink profile to help you climb to the top of the SERPs (search engine results page).
In an industry fuelled by technology the need to have a strong website is a given, but it’s not enough to just look the part, people need to be able to find you too. Google launched PageRank back in 1998, as a way of measuring the reputation of a website – the number of links and quality of websites pointing to you determined how high you’d appear in search engines. Today, after hundreds of updates to their algorithm, backlinks are still counted as one of the most important influences to the ranking of a website and are recognised as one of the key cornerstones of the SEO triangle.
As humans we all worry about two things – our health and our wealth, in digital PR land we refer to this as YMYL (your money or your life), and Google takes YMYL into consideration in its Page Quality Rater Guidelines. Any conversation around topics that could impact the happiness, health, financial stability, safety of users, or the welfare or well-being of society are met with extreme caution.
Bearing this in mind, It’s extremely important that you’re accurate with the information you present, but it’s also important to remember that you’re talking to real life human beings too. Great finance PR answers the problems and questions people are facing day-to-day. Your content needs to be relatable, written for humans, and can be used to simplify complex topics too. Just think for a minute, how many of your friends or family have mentioned tips from Martin Lewis to you? He’s relatable, doesn’t talk in waffle or jargon and simplifies extremely complex topics. When building content, be more like Martin.
And, if you wanna get creative, imagine creating a story ranking each Batman movie by how much it would cost to repair Gotham City, or illustrating a map showing how expensive each English town is by the cost of a pint of milk. These pop-culture references and every day topics are relatable, click-worthy and attractive to journalists and publications, helping build coverage and gain those much-needed and sought-after backlinks.
We seem to love a good acronym in Marketing land, from SEO (search engine optimisation) to CTR (click through rate) and the good old trusty CMS (content management system). And, Google loves them too. We’ve spoken about YMYL, and another key consideration in the Page Quality Rater Guidelines is E-A-T (expertise, authority, and trust).
When scoring E-A-T, Google considers:
Therefore, any content you create should be accurate, truthful and useful. From Google’s point of view, a thorough, truthful and factual article written from the perspective of a finance expert is much more valuable to searchers than a random blog without any financial background sharing opinions – this is great news for you. As well as the content on your site, the content off site that points to you needs to follow these guidelines too, and that’s where we can help.
Expertise, authority, and trust may be important ranking factors for Google, but these values are extremely important to your audience too. Well planned, and thoroughly-thought-out public relations campaigns will help build your image, credibility and reputation, earning the trust of potential customers and establishing your business in the fintech world.
In the age of social media, with quicker access to new news, public relations has become extremely reactive but also extremely competitive. Brands are battling it out at pace to be the first to get involved in the current conversation, spinning the news to create relatable stories for their industry, demographic and business.
By introducing reactive digital PR tactics into your strategy, your company could leverage news stories around; Brexit, inflation, rising energy prices, business performance, and even the price of butter. Adopting this approach can deliver quick wins without the need for big budgets, heavy resources or time, but as we’ve pointed out already it’s highly competitive and having a dedicated team is key to succeed.
If you’d like to know more about digital PR, then head over to our What is Digital PR blog.
If you need someone to create a digital PR strategy for your business, then get in touch with us today. We have the experience needed to take your business to the next level and maximise your online performance.