How to Create FinTech Digital PR Campaigns that Build Trust

Okay, it may be the world’s worst-kept secret, but it’s true, to thrive as a FinTech business, you need to build trust between you and potential customers. In the world of finance and fintech, trust is pivotal, especially in today’s age, where scams are a weekly occurrence. 

The real question is, how can you do this? 

Digital PR campaigns are a great way of securing high-quality coverage and developing trustworthiness for both your website and your brand. Plus, with online searches for ‘best FinTech companies’ and ‘global FinTech companies’ increasing by 21% and 100%, respectively, year-on-year, it’s more important than ever to stand out from the crowd and lead the market with innovative campaigns.

This means there’s a huge opportunity for businesses like yours to create actionable, authoritative content, develop relationships with relevant journalists and leap ahead of your competitors!

Whether you’re creating standalone campaigns or are incorporating digital PR into your overall SEO strategy, here are our top tips for creating FinTech digital PR campaigns that build trust:

#1 Add expert comments

Did you know…there’s a way you can build trust with customers, journalists AND search engines…that’s right, the holy trinity!

Expert comments are a necessary addition to any PR campaign, whether it’s a reactive PR opportunity, a press release or a larger campaign. The clue is in the name - an expert comment demonstrates your expertise in a specific area or topic, and is often used to give advice or tips to readers.

So let’s discuss how expert comments build trust with customers, journalists and search engines:

Customers 

When a potential customer is considering which FinTech company to choose, they need to know that the business they decide on actually knows what they’re talking about. By adding expert comments to your PR campaigns, you’re allowing potential customers to see you in action, whether your Practice Director is commenting on future technology trends or tips on how to choose the best cloud computing model for a business!

Journalists 

Journalists may receive very similar pitches and press releases daily, so you need to make sure your PR campaigns stand out. By including expert comments, you’ll be adding value to your pitches that competitors may not have. Also, technology publications need to make sure they’re publishing accurate, insightful content, so by consistently including expert comments, you’ll build credibility with journalists, and they may come to you more often for quotes.

Search Engines 

You may decide that you want to repurpose your expert comment into a blog for your website. This is a great idea because you can create content informed by expertise, something that search engines like Google take into consideration when evaluating the quality of a page. Google wants to make sure content is relevant, reliable and accurate, which is why it uses E-A-T to determine webpage quality. E-A-T stands for expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness.

#2 Incorporate data into your PR campaigns

Incorporating data into your digital PR campaign is one of the best ways to build trust with both journalists and potential customers. Whether you build your entire campaign around data and statistics, with a survey, or simply use data to give your pitch a hook to outreach with, including some kind of data is a must.

So, how does data build trust? Journalists can receive hundreds of press releases each day, so your PR campaign needs to stand out from the crowd. By using data, research and statistics, you’ll be going the extra mile to create content for journalists that’s both interesting and relevant. If you target journalists with data-driven campaigns, you’ll gain their trust, and they may come to you with reactive PR opportunities to give expert comments.

Data-driven campaigns also build trust with potential customers because you’re giving more than just an opinion - you’re providing evidence! Being specific and basing your campaigns shows customers your expertise. Providing data and statistics also has a psychological impact on potential customers, centred around two behavioural nudges: Herding and Social Proof.

• Herding - People will tend to do what other people are doing. This is the idea of a ‘sheep’ or ‘herd’ mentality.
• Social Proof - People are influenced by what they think other people are doing because they want to be like everyone else.

So, how do data-driven campaigns play into these psychological nudges? 

By presenting data to potential customers, you’re showing them what other people are doing. For example, your campaign might reveal that there’s been a 336% increase in online searches for how to prevent ransomware or may reveal that there’s been a 50% increase in people searching for how to improve cyber security. As a result, your data makes people more likely to start looking for ransomware prevention and cyber security solutions! 

As a FinTech company, you can use data to highlight trends within the financial services industry, provide forecasts of the future of technology, and ultimately position yourself as a reliable FinTech business.

So, where can you find data and statistics for your PR campaigns? We love Google Trends and Google Ads Keyword Planner for finding data relating to online searches! You can use these websites to see whether there’s been an increase or decrease in interest surrounding specific search terms over a period of time. They are great for including in press releases, and the data you find can often be used as a hook.

Google Trends data is particularly useful because you can filter interest by subregion and city, which is great when you outreach to local publications!

You can also find data in several other ways:

• Reports
• Surveys
• Census data
• Social Media statistics
• In-house data (e.g. have you had a record number of sales or a decline in interest in a specific service you offer?)

Find out more about turning data into a digital PR campaign in our recent blog.

#3 Create actionable content

When you create your FinTech digital PR campaign, one of your priorities should be to make your content actionable. The question you need to be asking is: what can your audience do with your campaign?

Building trust with customers is all about going the extra mile, and showing them that you are the most expert and authoritative company in the market. By creating a PR campaign that informs and gives your audience something actionable to take away with them, you’ll be positioning yourself as a front-runner in the FinTech world.

What does an actionable PR campaign look like? You may decide to do one of the following:

• Top tips
• Step-by-step guides
• Infographics
• How-to articles
• Interactive tools and calculators  

Whatever campaign you decide to run with, your audience must be able to take something away from it. If you can teach them something that they didn’t know before, you’re adding value to their business which means they’re more likely to trust you and consider you when they’re looking for a new FinTech business to partner with. 

Did you know…people tend to place a greater value on services, solutions and products when they can see how much effort has been put into producing them? This is known as payment for effort.  In other words, the more time and effort customers can see you putting in (whether that be through an interactive tool, a comprehensive how-to guide or a detailed infographic), the more valuable they perceive your campaign to be to them, which makes them more likely to remember your brand.

Fun fact: If you want to repurpose your PR campaign into blog content for your website, being actionable is a must. Google’s recent Helpful Content update has put more of a focus on relevant and people-first content than ever. To be considered ‘good content’ by Google, your blogs need to be valuable to readers, and the best way to do this is to provide actionable content that encourages readers to act on something. Creating actionable, engaging content can help you build trust and generate more conversions!

#4 Target appropriate publications

You could create the best digital PR campaign the world has ever seen, but if you’re not targeting the right publications then no one is going to see it. By pitching to relevant publications, you’ll be able to reach your target audience and build trust with journalists, as well as with search engines.

Let’s start with journalists. As we’ve mentioned, journalists are busy people and can receive more emails in one day than we might expect to see in a whole week! If you’re sending journalists pitches that are completely irrelevant, they won’t cover your piece and, even worse, may be less likely to open emails from you in the future. 

However, if you do frequently target relevant journalists, they’re more likely to cover your PR campaign because you’ll be providing them with engaging content that adds value to their publication. As a result, they’re also more likely to come to you in the future if they need a comment from an expert because you’ve gained their trust.

When you’re planning your content and creating your press list, consider the following:

• Has this journalist covered a similar topic in the past?
• Does this journalist have any specialist subjects (they might state this in their social media bios)
• Does the publication cover similar stories?
• Has this journalist put out ‘journo requests’ for this topic in the past? If a journalist is covering a story and needs an expert comment, they may put out a ‘journo request’ on Twitter which you can respond to.

For link-building digital PR campaigns, you can also build trust with search engines such as Google by targeting relevant and high-authority publications. When you secure coverage in a publication, you can also secure a backlink to a page on your website. According to Majestic SEO, any links you acquire will contribute to the overall ‘Trust Flow’ and ‘Citation Flow’ of your site.

Trust Flow: A measurement of how trustworthy a page is based on the quality of the backlinks it receives.

Citation Flow: A measurement of how popular or influential a page is based on the number of backlinks it receives.

To improve your Citation Flow score, you need to increase the number of relevant backlinks you receive from publications. You may do this with one large link-building campaign, or an ongoing series of smaller campaigns. When it comes to Trust Flow scores, you need to secure high-quality and authoritative backlinks from publications that have high TF scores themselves. Large national publications and reputable industry publications are likely to have the strongest TF scores. 

While Trust Flow isn’t an official Google ranking factor, it’s definitely in your best interest to keep your TF score as high as possible, as it gives you an overall understanding of how trustworthy the sites giving your coverage are. Generally speaking, as your TF score increases, so will your CF score. However, this does not work the other way around, as an improvement in your CF, does not guarantee an increase in TF. 

You can check your Trust Flow and Citation Flow on Majestic SEO, and compare them to competitors. For example, in the graphs below, you can see that our client (orange) has improved their Trust Flow and Citation Flow through high-quality link-building campaigns, and has overtaken both of their main competitors (green and blue) over the course of five years.

Key Takeaways

So there you go, our top tips on how to create FinTech digital PR campaigns that build trust with potential customers, journalists and search engines!

When you start planning your next PR campaign, you need to:

• Incorporate an expert comment into your copywriting
• Extract data from sources such as social media, Google Trends or reports
• Create actionable content such as top tips, how-to guides and infographics
• Research into your press list to make sure you’re targeting appropriate publications

In doing so, you’ll be able to create mind-blowing PR campaigns that secure coverage, while also building trust with potential customers, journalists and search engines. Effective PR campaigns will also elevate your overall SEO strategy, helping you secure high-authority backlinks that contribute to the quality of specific pages.

Are you a FinTech business wanting to elevate your Digital PR and SEO strategies? Get in touch with us today to learn more about how we leverage human behaviour to support you in reaching your full marketing potential.