Public
Relations

Financial PR:
Your brand, skillfully elevated.

Building brand through PR requires partnering with an experienced agency with long-standing relationships and a deep knowledge of the investment business.

Our strategic PR support will take your communications to the next level. It starts with message development—what we call a message triangle—to help you connect with the audiences you want to reach. We identify your goals and build a plan that includes media relations to build meaningful relationships with journalists and earn high-value media coverage.

Our services also include: media and presentation training to prepare and accelerate the impact of your spokespeople, thought leadership to position your executives and investment professionals with compelling content and speaking opportunities, influencer outreach to expand your reach and credibility, and content placement to get your ideas in front of the right audiences.

We also support our clients with reputation management and crisis communications to protect and defend your reputation with swift, strategic communications management.

And our program includes measurement and analytics through custom reporting that captures progress and tracks the key KPIs that matter to you.

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Since 2003, Lowe Group has taken a results-oriented approach to PR to help investment firms grow visibility and achieve results. We combine deep industry experience, meaningful media relationships, community connections and impeccable execution to help you earn the PR outcomes that get you further, faster.

Your frequently asked questions, answered.

What does FurtherFaster mean for Public Relations?

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Transcript

PR is really important to helping our clients get where they want to go. It gets you further first by helping you craft the messages that your clients and investors really need to hear to connect with them.

You know, we really believe in Gini Dietrich's peso model. This is the model that puts together paid things like advertising and direct mail, earned PR—that's what we do, shared things like social media, and owned—your website.

All of those things work together to elevate your brand. And of those four, we really believe that PR is probably the most important. It gets you there faster because our clients want to be seen and known in the media that are important to investors. Publications like the Wall Street Journal and Barron's, TV programs like CNBC and Bloomberg, and important industry publications like Pensions & Investments, and Ignites. We work hard to get our clients in there and get them earned coverage. They’re authorities.

It also gets our clients onto stages where they're able to meet with and see and have the authority on those stages to talk about topics that are important to their customers.

And then PR helps us take their content, the editorials, the articles they write, and we try to get those into publications like industry publications or editorial pages where they can really truly be seen as the experts in their area.

So all of those things working together really do help get our clients further faster.

Can you help us with crisis communications?

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Transcript

I want to talk to you a little bit today about our reputation and crisis management services. What are we talking about? An SEC investigation, maybe a data breach, the loss of a key executive, or a full-on crisis, workplace violence, a natural disaster.

Reputation management is all about trust. In financial services, our clients place their trust in us. And that reputation and that trust can be lost in a day. So how we manage through difficult situations can really be make or break our companies.

So, what we do is we drop everything. We assemble a team, your executives, your communications leaders, perhaps inside or even outside legal counsel. We gather all the facts, and we think carefully about who needs to be communicated with and when, and maybe if at all.

Sometimes you may be preparing for negative news that never materializes, and in that case, you want to craft a comment and have it in your back pocket just in case it becomes public. Other times you may be facing a situation where you're going to have to be proactive and reach out to either clients or more broadly to the public or to the media. In all cases, we work hard to manage your reputation so that you can maintain that trust. And after the dust settles, we work hard to try to get our clients back out there to help rebuild the reputation that they've had.

So in all cases, reputation management is about really carefully managing through to maintain trust and help you get through difficult situations with your reputation intact.

How do you approach placing content with a publication?

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Before starting on a fresh piece of content or editing a piece of existing content, we will discuss with our client the goals that they have. One goal that we hear a lot is that they're hoping to get a piece placed externally in a media publication. So if that’s one of our goals, we will talk a little bit about what editors are looking for. That can include the length of the piece, your take on a specific topic, and the tone of how the piece is written. After that, we'll talk a little bit with the client about the audiences that they are hoping to reach.

With the audiences in mind, our media team, after everything is finalized and compliance approved, will then pitch the content externally for placement, finding a publication that has the audiences that are most important for our clients.

After it is pitched and placed in an external publication, our clients will often ask how they can get more eyes on that specific content. We’ll often suggest that they post on social media, tagging the publication as a way to get more eyes on the content that they have worked so tirelessly to create.

Public Relations Philosophy

Deliver smart sources to media, on time, when they need them. A reporter friend once told us, “I know you can always help me find smart people for any story.” We don’t ascribe to the belief that “all press is good press.” When dealing with negative news, less can be more. Each situation requires crafting a thoughtful message and being purposeful and deliberate in determining if and when to share it.

Pricing Philosophy

As media relations requires always being “on” and available for media and clients, it is hard to track our work hourly. That said, we do seek to project a client’s scope of work, estimate the amount of time we will need to complete it, and identify a retainer that reflects the time commitment we believe is necessary to achieve the objective. If the scope of work changes or we find that our time commitment needs to increase or decrease, we revisit the retainer.

Reputation Management and Crisis Communications.

In financial services, trust is everything. When your firm faces a crisis, how you communicate with your key stakeholders can make the difference between a minor blip and a major disaster.

Lowe Group acts as a trusted communications advisor to clients facing legal or regulatory action or other sensitive matters such as mergers and acquisitions, divestitures, restructurings, data breaches or changes in senior personnel. We work with company leaders, compliance teams and attorneys to develop communication strategies that ensure the appropriate message is delivered to internal and external stakeholders to protect your reputation…and bottom line.

The Lowe Group has helped numerous firms navigate delicate and challenging news. Our strategic thinking and experience help you manage through a crisis with confidence. We also help you rebuild trust in the aftermath, limiting the long-term impact and helping you get back to normal.

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Media Relations

Public Relations FurtherFaster Proofpoints.

Helping a core bond
manager grow assets

Helping an advisor
address an SEC complaint

Disrupting an industry and creating a new model

Helping a core bond
manager grow assets

Background

Lowe Group began working with the fixed income asset management division of a large financial services firm in 2005. The division then managed less than $5 billion and today the firm manages more than $160 billion.

Scope of work

Lowe Group helped elevate messaging around the client’s “core of the core” high quality fixed income track record. We developed a targeted strategy to get the team in front of institutional and intermediary audiences. Our efforts included helping to coordinate the firm’s reengagement and communications with Morningstar, an important rating firm covering mutual funds. We helped craft and share the firm’s annual outlook and pitched stories about the firm’s highly successful taxable and tax-exempt bond strategies. We also helped elevate the topic of the team’s diversity in a white male-dominated industry.

Outcome

The client was profiled in Barron’s, Fortune, Pensions & Investments, and FA Magazine and is regularly covered in key media outlets such as the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, CNBC, Kiplinger’s, Bloomberg and others.

Lowe Group helped the team promote recognition for the firm’s CIO as Morningstar’s Outstanding Portfolio Manager, P&I’s Influential Women in Institutional Investing and Barron’s Most Powerful Women in Finance.

Helping an advisor
address an SEC complaint

Background

After leading a firm for more than 30 years with a pristine reputation, the founder of a financial advisory firm found his firm dealing with an SEC complaint in which he was personally named. The firm needed help communicating with clients, employees and the community, and a plan to recover its reputation.

Scope of work

Lowe Group gathered information and worked closely with a small group of the firm’s leaders and outside legal counsel to craft a message about the regulatory matter and put it into context. We identified the firm’s stakeholders including its owners and board, employees, clients and key vendors/partners. We prepared a timeline and communications plan that identified when and how each constituency would be contacted and helped craft communications materials. We also prepared a strategy to respond to media inquiries.

Outcome

The firm briefed its staff and when the SEC settlement was finally announced, the team proactively reached out to clients. While the firm was expecting broad media attention, the firm only a few inquiries and released a written comment. We worked with the firm to try to offset negative news with placed content and other strategies to eventually push down negative news. The firm was well prepared to answer client questions and did not lose any clients.

Disrupting an industry and creating a new model

Background

A serial entrepreneur began a new venture to change the way consumers buy annuities. The company’s innovative platform offers commission-free insurance products to RIAs and consumers. The firm’s technology is disrupting the traditional insurance model that relies heavily on commission-based salespeople.

Scope of work

Lowe Group helped the team focus its message, announce the platform’s launch and raise awareness of the founder as a disrupter and thought leader in the RIA and insurance space. We released milestone news as the firm steadily grew, adding both advisory firms and carrier partners to its platform.

We shared RIA surveys gathering their perceptions on retirement planning and annuities and held well attended media roundtables to change media attitudes and correct misperceptions. We positioned well-known academics as product experts to support the broader story and enlisted a group of advisors to discuss how they used the platform and technology.

We also helped announce private equity investments in the firm from leading family office and strategic investors.

Outcome

The platform today touches more than 10,000 advisors from more than 1,200 firms and is the main technology on several leading advisor platforms including SS&C, Orion and Envestnet.

The Lowe Group secured coverage for the firm in RIA industry publications including RIA Biz, Financial Planning, Investment News, ThinkAdvisor, Financial Advisor IQ and others. We coordinated interviews with the founder for features in the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Barron’s, Bloomberg, Kiplinger and others and scheduled the founder as a guest on financial podcasts and as a speaker at advisor conferences.

We placed several articles in industry publications and applied for and earned the firm recognition with awards from Wealth Management, ThinkAdvisor and Investment News.

Lowe Group has been our partner for more than a decade. Their deep asset management and financial services experience and longstanding media relationships have led to important outcomes for Baird. They are a key part of our team.

ANGELA PITTMAN TAYLOR, SENIOR VICE PRESIDENT, ROBERT W. BAIRD & CO.

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