Making room for PR in thought leadership marketing

Thought leadership has long been a go-to tactic for asset managers seeking to grow relationships and foster trust with prospective investors. But developing thought leadership that people want to read is getting harder, even as they remain hungry for it. 

To better understand how to connect with audiences, we spoke with Frank Sommerfield of Sommerfield Communications, a NYC-based PR firm specializing in establishing businesses and individuals as thought leaders. 

We’re seeing more financial services firms engaging in thought leadership by commissioning original research. Is this effective?

Yes. Thought leadership based on quantitative research is one of the best ways for investment managers to maintain a consistent presence, convey a clear message, and differentiate themselves. It’s not the only way to accomplish these goals. But if you can commission research, it could be the cornerstone of a communications strategy.

One of the challenges for investment managers in particular is avoiding their tendency to talk about performance and product all the time. They need to talk about investors’ concerns, their pain points, their aspirations. And the best way to do that authoritatively is with insights that have data behind them.

In this way, investors are like any consumer—you engage with them through education, guidance, and, most important, an empathetic message. By tapping into what they’re concerned about and bringing it to life. Doing that with survey-driven data is a highly credible approach. 

Is that expecting too much of investment managers? Are there really that many things they can talk about?

There's very little original news or insight out there. You become compelling to people when you make your themes and insights seem new, and newsy, and talk about them in a new way. 

Frank Sommerfield

You don't have to always talk about investing per se. Instead, explore generational attitudes, views on legacy, nonmonetary assets, lifestyle in retirement. There is a whole range of things you can ask people about and bring to life in stories and articles that are indirectly related to investing. 

It's a great way to relate to people and say something interesting. Many people are more likely to read something on educating children about money than they are about whether you should be investing in a passive or active strategy. 

And for asset managers who want to get the attention of institutional audiences?

The same holds true. There are tons of things institutional investors think about other than their investment strategy. 

For example, you could uncover some really interesting attitudes with an anonymous survey of CIOs at endowments on their concerns and insights on trustees, and how well they’re running the endowment, whether they’re forward thinking enough, how they’re managing the competing needs of making enough money to fund their spending requirements, of growing the corpus over time, of anticipating the changing needs of the institution the endowment supports.

Or the whole question of active versus passive. Institutions will be interested in whether their peers are looking more intently at active, given the economy. Or their thoughts on economic conditions and whether the business and investment environment is offering more or fewer opportunities. 

There's an endless range of interesting topics. And if you explore them in the context of what real people think, with data behind it, then you’re seen as authoritative. And your audience knows that you really care about them and issues they face.

What is PR’s goal in all of this?

Our objective is to get you endorsement as a pure thought leader. That endorsement comes mainly through unpaid channels (for example, coverage in media or in an owned article that people actually read). Your “payment” for being featured in unpaid media is to say something interesting and credible and not self-serving, or not self-serving-sounding. So the findings and insights of your research need to lend themselves to that kind of communication. 

That’s why it's important to bring in the PR mindset early on. Because when it's mainly a marketing driven project, there's a selling dimension to it, there's a market research dimension (which is really important), but there's not a broader “what this means for the world” dimension. And that last dimension is what's really interesting to the media. 

When the PR team is brought in later in the process, we have to make do with the insights and data and mold it into a newsy framework. But if you bring us in early, we can contribute to the questionnaire, to the design of the survey, to how you get the survey population and whether it's projectable for the population as a whole, so the survey serves your selling purposes, research purposes, and thought leadership purposes. 

What PR wants from the quantitative research is the basis for our outreach to journalists, through articles, press releases, blogs, interviews, and so on. For our work to be effective, we need to do the media's work for them. That includes writing the articles and fashioning the message. So in addition to everything that marketing is producing for the thought leadership campaign, we need to create the PR materials—the stories. 

It’s a whole set of complementary but separate materials. The core research report might be the same, or there might be a media version, but other items need to be produced: pitches to journalists, press releases, LinkedIn articles for senior leaders at investment management firms, bylined articles for outlets like Barron's, soundbites for CNBC interviews. 

From a PR perspective, what are the top three things asset managers should do in developing thought leadership campaigns? 

First, bring PR in early. Get their input on the questionnaire. Let them look at it through a PR/media lens and develop headlines that the responses might support. Get the full benefit of the momentum effect from a bringing the PR team in early.

Second, give the PR team runway to create their own set of materials and tools that will leverage the research and the report. Recognize that PR needs to do the media’s work and create the story. That's critical in today’s media environment. 

Third, and most important, make sure the subject matter of the research goes beyond product, price, and performance, and gets at the more emotionally charged topics that are important to individuals and institutions, that relate to things that are going on in the world.

What’s getting traction in today’s marketplace of ideas?

An evergreen topic is what's going on with the economy and the markets. That usually gets traction, if it's credible. Another is spotlighting the investment-related mistakes of institutions and individuals.

The media is always very interested in workplace issues—how people deal with their jobs and, by extension, their money. The most popular business stories, even in The Wall Street Journal, are personal business stories, workplace stories, about people's aspirations and how they achieve or fail to achieve them. 

Other topics getting traction these days are diversity at investment firms. Institutions are very keenly aware of that. More thought leadership on that would have a great audience, if your story is real. 

There’s ESG and the whole question of whether ESG investments perform better than non-ESG investments. That's a huge topic. Still another is private investments versus public markets. 

All of these topics deserve good research. The thought leadership created from that research will be eaten up by your audience and appreciated by the media, by influencers, and others. 

So an example of workplace issues might be the concerns of endowment or foundation trustees, who have a tough job, have several fiduciary obligations, are often unpaid, and face a lot of work when, for instance, they need to make a manager change—something along those lines?

Exactly. Those are real workplace issues. What is it about their work that's keeping them up at night? Is it hiring the right managers? Dealing with trustees? Whether to go active or passive? 

These topics are like the meat of the peach around the pit of what you want to say. To use another metaphor, they're a Trojan horse that gets you into the fortress of your audience’s minds. Weave those human elements into your thought leadership and you’ll radically improve your chances of accessing people's minds.