This first step can increase advisor engagement with your firm

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When considering ways to increase your firm’s visibility, there are two primary routes to take: public relations or marketing. The two have long worked beside each other but with distinctly separate methods. In today’s world of instant communication and constant data collection, though, public relations and marketing can no longer be considered two separate entities. Instead, they have become collaborators.

The most consistent component of any visibility campaign should be original content—traditionally garnered from the marketing department and distributed through your website, blogs, or social media. This content acts as the primary form of communication with clients and investors, but it doesn’t necessarily carry the same weight as say, a feature article in Barron’s or Investment News. That kind of placement has always been the domain of the public relations team. Rather than keeping original and featured content separate, though, your firm should use one to bolster the other.

Beyond just promoting a news article on Twitter or LinkedIn, marketers can use third-party endorsements as spring boards for new content, highlighting key thoughts or company news and providing more complete information than there might have been space for in a magazine column.

In turn, the public relations team can look to their marketing colleagues for pitch ideas. Better yet, the two teams should coordinate original content and earned coverage by collaborating to decide which story ideas will be pitched or written and how the results will be leveraged beyond the original placement.

Picture your public relations and marketing teams as a comprehensive newsroom dedicated only to your firm, people, strategies and products. Just like a news outlet would, they need to keep an eye on the daily reality of their audience and hold regular editorial meetings to decide what to publish. What topics are hot? What information do readers need in order to contextualize and understand what your firm wants them to know? And what appearances or articles by your executives are going to be important in the coming week? By setting all of this information out at once, and strategically connecting it through media placements and original content, your public relations and marketing teams will be able to effectively support each other and drive more audience engagement than either would be able to on their own.

Getting your public relations and marketing teams in the same room and working together is a great first step to increased audience engagement and more impactful content creation, but don’t get lazy. Be sure that you have a clear brand voice ahead of time. Position your company so that public relations and marketing are working from the same base, and their content production promotes the same messages and outcomes. When the two teams are speaking the same language, it will create a unified, cohesive message that your investors will notice again and again, regardless of whether they read your story on your blog, on Twitter, or in an advisor publication.