By Ian Gallagher, account director at R&Co Communications.
Building trust through marketing activities is always a challenge in a regulated industry such as finance, but that doesn’t mean businesses should shy away from it for fear of non-compliance. I would argue it’s a challenge which should be embraced.
Purchasing decisions are rarely made using information from a single source, which is why trust needs to be built across multiple channels – PR, SEO, social media and executives’ own profiles.
We know that building trust is a hard job in any era, never more so than in the new AI-driven landscape we now face.
However, our advice is to tackle it head on. Use storytelling and real people to build trust and brand equity and understand that the concept of a ‘finfluencer’ isn’t just limited to social media – it’s about any platform where your audience is.
This is where the integrated approach of PR, SEO and social media comes in.
A long-standing PR and SEO approach which works
In simple terms, if you share content which comments on people’s health or wealth, it needs to come from a trusted source.
When Google starts to see that trusted source across multiple platforms – your website, PR stories in respected media outlets – it recognises them as authentic and – just as importantly – real.
By utilising thought leadership, building trust signals through PR and SEO and offering quality advice from qualified people you start to build your narrative, context and your brand story.
This, in turn, can materially improve the quality of leads being driven by your SEO and social media activity.
In practice, the execution can be wonderfully simple.
When pitching experts for PR coverage, we will always include a link to our expert’s LinkedIn profile or website biography, a simple way of demonstrating credibility from the outset.
Evidence proves this is needed. A recent Press Gazette survey unearthed 28 people quoted across 250 articles on national newspaper websites who either didn’t exist or were impossible to verify. So, the simple act of proving your existence is an easy trust signal.
You can then start to join the dots using your website, keeping your experts’ bio pages up to date and ensuring they publish regular, bylined blog posts underlining their expertise on their key topics. PR outreach can be used to earn links to these pages, further improving their visibility in search.
Why an integrated approach is key for LLM visibility
Optimising content for AI visibility may be an immature discipline compared to SEO, but all evidence points towards an integrated digital marketing strategy improving visibility in large language models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT, Perplexity and Gemini.
Starting with PR, credible third-party coverage from trusted sources is critical for brands in the AI era.
In this new world, the humble press release is enjoying something of a rebirth. Derided as old hat in some quarters, earned media coverage is now feeding LLM results and should be a fundamental pillar of any integrated campaign.
Recent research published by Gartner showed that 27% of links referenced by LLMs came from earned media sources, with an overall 95% of referrals coming from earned, shared or organic owned content. In short – earned, not paid, is winning out in the battle for AI visibility.
This isn’t just about targeting top-tier media, either. If anything, it’s the opposite.
Research from SEO agency Distinctly provides a very useful snapshot of the value of media coverage across multiple industries and sectors, assessing whether key industry titles allow themselves to appear in LLM search results.
In the financial sector, 15 media titles with an online circulation under 100,000 allow themselves to be crawled by LLMs – with six of those permitting crawlers from the maximum 15 AI platforms.
By comparison, just seven larger titles with online circulations between 100,000 and 100,000,000 allow crawlers, with only two allowing the full 15 platforms to access their sites.
The message here is clear – by earning coverage in niche financial titles, you’re much more likely to be seen in AI search results than if you appear in top-tier consumer media. AI citations reward relevance and consistency more than virality.
Focusing on the integrated approach
To complete the circle of PR, SEO and social media, further evidence of the need for an integrated approach comes from analysis by Semrush. Through painstaking assessment of 89,000 LinkedIn URLs, it found that LinkedIn is the second most cited domain in LLMs – both with content from company and individual pages.
Educational, original content is cited most often, with the largest share of results coming from long-form articles (500–2,000 words) and mid-length posts (50–299 words).
This is a space where financial firms and experts can clearly excel – completing a truly multi-channel marketing approach with the added bonus of increased AI visibility.
With research from Kaizen suggesting LLM conversion rates can be up to 12 times higher than organic search, the value of this fast-growing medium is clear to see.
The overall picture is something of a dichotomy, where the inherent distrust of AI content sits at odds with the need to build trust through AI search results. As communications professionals, our role is to explain why the latter plays a vital part in countering the former – especially in a world so dependent on trust as the financial sector.
For more information, please contact Ian Gallagher at R&Co Communications, on 01926 888308 or email ian@rcomms.co.uk.