Video Gallery.
Your frequently asked questions, answered by our team.
Public Relations.
What does FurtherFaster mean for Public Relations?
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?
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 place content with a publication?
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.
Media Relations.
What does FurtherFaster mean for Media Relations?
In the context of our media practice, the Lowe Group’s Further Faster ethos takes on several dimensions. It means being able to quickly get up to speed on complex organizations and their differentiators. That's where our financial services backgrounds come into play. And then knowing just where to go with the pitch.
Faster also means making sure that your spokespeople are ready when opportunities come up. Before they do, we will have gotten to know them, train them on how to handle themselves in an interview, and train them on how to pivot to those key messages that we helped you develop.
Faster also means being efficient with your senior people's time. Whether it's a single broadcast hit or a full day of meetings in New York or at a conference, we sweat all the details because we know that's how you make sure that they walk away feeling that their time was respected and productively spent.
Now, what about further? That can mean casting a wider net to tell your story. Our relationships with major print and broadcast outlets run deep, but we also understand the power of trade publications, niche podcasts, and influencers in many markets.
Further is also helping you do more with those hard-won media outcomes. So, leveraging them to get additional coverage, teaching your spokespeople to answer questions in a way that's not going to give your compliance officer indigestion so that you can amplify those outcomes on social or even teaming up with our colleagues in Lowe Group's digital marketing practice to help you ensure that your media campaigns are integrated with your marketing and lead gen programs.
What do financial services pros need to know?
Our media training puts a lot of emphasis on understanding where reporters are coming from. As the former editor of several capital markets publications, I can share that reporters tend to be smart, curious and overworked—which means you can go a long way toward building a relationship if you can prove yourself to be a resource. I'd say they tend to be more literate than numerate.
So that means maybe don't share that fancy chart or the 3D implied volatility surface you brought with you. Instead, tell them a story about the biggest tail risk that investors are facing and how it compares to 2008.
Now, what reporters are not, at least the good ones, is your friend or your stenographer. And that can come as a bit of a shock to senior people on Wall Street who are used to bending markets, not to mention people working at a more junior pay grade, to their will. So, a reporter may ask a shockingly basic question or an impertinent one and we can't guarantee that they read that research report of yours that we sent them several days ago, or even your bio for that matter.
What we can promise is that you'll be ready even if they're not. You will have their background, clips of some recent stories, a list of questions they're likely to ask, and more often than not, a little bit of color on their interview style that we've picked up over the years. More importantly, from your media training, you'll be prepared to handle those tough questions and to pivot to the key points that you want to make.
Content Services.
What does FurtherFaster mean for Content Services?
I guess the starting place with further faster when it comes to content is furthering your business goals and making sure the process doesn't bog you down. When we start a content engagement, we start with an assumption that there are people in your organization that have interesting things to say. That's almost definitely true.
Think of all the conversations you have on a regular basis, your business leaders and subject matter experts among each other with clients and prospects, others in the industry. There are people in your organization who are thinking thoughts that your audience wants to hear. And in order to capture those thoughts, write them down, get them out the door in whatever format makes sense for the purpose. We need to come in with an understanding of your business, capture the confidence of the person that we're talking to so we can have a conversation that can get at the interesting material, right?
Get beyond just what is the value proposition of the business line say that we're that's relevant to the conversation at hand and get to what might mean something to a center of influence who could pass along your content to a third party of mutual interest say a prospect of yours. That's a good test by the way about a topic. It's something I raise sometimes when I'm on the phone with somebody who might be an author of a bylined article, you know, how can we frame this topic in a way that's going to educate without being too salesy? It's going to make a difference for your business and further your business objectives.
So the key thing is to understand your audience and then whatever the context is, whatever the type of material, to make that process easy, sensitive to compliance restrictions, sensitive to your brand voice, and get it out the door. That's FurtherFaster.
How do you help with presentation decks?
Okay, the big thing about PowerPoint presentations is that they can be awful. PowerPoint is a tool, and it's a tool that can be used in an unlimited number of terrible ways.
Whether we're talking about a slide presentation in front of a bunch of people, or using PowerPoint to produce a presentation book or some other kind of leave-behind or follow-up, we need to use the tool in a way that delivers the message in a way that the audience cares about and will connect with.
So like anything else, any other piece of content, that starts with understanding the audience. Say it's a presentation, an in-person presentation. Who's going to be in the room? What questions do they have? What knowledge base are they starting with? What are you trying to convince them of? How do we structure it in a way that leads them from one idea to the next, one idea at a time? Sometimes with the takeaway on every slide and an emphasis on how that takeaway leads to the topic of the next slide, so people feel comfortable and taken care of, so people aren't distracted by what you have on the screen and have that material conflict with what you're saying with your words. So critical.
And, it has to look good too. And that doesn't necessarily mean fancy. That might mean really minimal. But everything about how it looks needs to be consistent with the message that you're delivering with your words.
The same, of course, is true if you're using PowerPoint to leave behind materials, presentation books, as I said. In that case, you can accommodate a lot more words, but the same use of the tool applies unless you're using it to develop something that maybe your design partners would be better to do in InDesign. You're using this tool for a reason, and it's to deliver information in a structured way that takes ideas one at a time, does it in a visually engaging way, and makes people feel at ease.
That connects beautifully with the message development we do at the heart of every engagement, certainly with any piece of content, and it connects to our media practice as well.
How does the message triangle relate to content?
Usually, the hardest part about a content activity is not the writing itself, but rather the idea and framing the idea in a way that doesn't accidentally break the implicit contract you have with your readers not to sell too hard to them. This is especially true in a blog context. Nobody wants to come to your blog and read about your value proposition again and again. They just won't come back.
That doesn't mean that you can't fold in reference to your value proposition in discussion of, say, your process. Or, connected to your views on the industry.
There's lots of ways to take your key messages, and we develop those in our media practice, say, for journalists. And those messages for journalists needs to be expressive or connected to your value proposition, but certainly not overwhelmed by it because journalists don't care about helping further your business. They care about what you have to say about the industry that connects to a broader story, a broader trend, something new, something that their readers care about.
And you can think like that and find ways to express what you have to say that does connect to your value proposition in just about anything that you produce.
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Digital Marketing.
What does FurtherFaster mean for Digital Marketing?
I can offer three reasons the Lowe Group's digital business can help you go further, faster.
Number one, we're familiar with the people you want to engage. Whether they're financial advisors, institutional investors, fund selectors, end investors, your sales team, the media, people who use the media. You're in a complex business and it takes years to understand these channels and how to effectively reach them and communicate with them.
We understand. You're not going to need to burn up a lot of time explaining things to us.
Number two, digital has to get things done. There has never been a time when more has been expected of digital marketing leadership and of your team overall. You'll save time working with a partner who understands the expectations and can focus on helping you deliver on them, even as everything, face it, business priorities, technologies, reporting structures, everything tends to be in a constant state of flux in digital. One of the reasons we like it!
Number three, and this is the further part, if you're like most firms, you're trying to pull out the stops, trying to win the hearts, minds, eyeballs, and engagement of clients and prospects. This is such a competitive realm. Many find that there just aren't enough hours in the day to do your work, stay current with what everyone else is doing, and then think of ways to innovate.
Luckily, that is part of our job. When we work with you, you can count on us knowing what's out there, what's been done. And more important to zero in on where we see opportunity for you based on what we understand, based on what you've told us, your firm's objectives are. We know you're special and we're going to be obsessed with surfacing ways for you to stand out.
So, we specialize in your audience, we understand what's expected of you and our intel will keep you fresh on point, maybe a little ahead, ideally a lot ahead. It's all pretty high level, but you'll find lots of detail on the rest of the website.
Can you help us with our analytics?
Our specialty is pulling together everything you do, website, email, advertising, social, and helping you look at its aggregate effect in a single dashboard. We work with you to establish goals and KPIs that are tailored to your firm's objectives, whether it's driving meme acquisition, advisor engagement, content downloads, maybe it's heightened visibility in search, heightened traffic from search.
You know, I've been fortunate to work with many firms over the years, firms that are in the same space you're in, trying to engage similar audiences, working with similar partners to drive website traffic to what are often very similar strategies or product pages. When we look at your analytics, we know what to look for. There are patterns and there are anomalies that we quickly pick up on, and we know how to address and optimize.
What's working? You know, that's the essential question, isn't it? Our goal is to help you be more effective in getting to that answer. There's nothing more fun and really nothing more satisfying than helping a marketing team get a handle on the analytics that are available to measure the results of their hard work, to inform strategy development and refinement, and to report to the business, and to ultimately drive growth in the business.
How can you help us with social media?
Social media is a key part of every client's digital strategy. Each client tends to have different needs, and at Lowe Group we're happy to help collaborate wherever you and your team need help. We can support the work in a range of ways, from the development or refinement of strategy, and even in some cases, the execution too. Social media objectives can be high level, as in we just want to raise awareness or be seen in the mix. This discussion also involves an evaluation of the social networks likely to be most appropriate or effective for your brand.
In other cases, social is part of an overall campaign with distinct objectives that could include building followers or driving clicks. At Lowe Group, our work includes establishing profiles, building out follower strategies, and managing editorial calendars for organic posting. We can create and run paid social campaigns if that's what you need too.
For everything we do regarding your social posts, we'll provide you with analytics and insights to enable you to measure the effectiveness of the work.