Getting PR right in complex and sensitive professional services areas

In our work with professional services firms over 20 years, we have often been presented with the challenge of promoting teams and services that deal with complex or sensitive subject matter.

For example, complex litigation, forensic accounting, tax planning, family law, business restructuring, or audit services are areas where clients are likely to want to remain anonymous, or where it can be hard to make the subject matter appeal to wider audiences.

It’s a reminder that not all PR campaigns are suited to bold headlines or the being in the media spotlight. How then can these teams and firms grow their profile? Here’s six tips to consider.

Start by clarifying your objectives

It’s important for any PR and comms activity to be aligned with the objectives of the firm and its team. Is it overall awareness, lead generation or building an individual’s own profile? Once this is established, clarify the audiences and key messages. In highly specialised professional services, the audiences are often highly focused too and may include people working in other professional services disciplines, not just business clients.

Decide on key messages and tone of voice

As part of your planning you can define your key messages and set some boundaries for what can be discussed publicly and what must remain confidential. Deciding on an appropriate tone of voice that’s aligned with the subject matter and sensitive to client expectations is crucial and can help you to manage PR risks.

Make your comms issue led

Taking a thought leadership approach and examining the important issues, rather than overtly referencing project and client outcomes, can work best when it comes to sensitive subject matter. You can create advice pieces, guides, whitepapers, or video content that helps to educate audiences.

You can still use anonymised case studies to illustrate your specialism and highlight the expertise of your team.

Position your people as trusted experts

Introducing your service leads as experienced and knowledgeable voices can help them to become a recognised authority on important client issues, rather than just promoting the firm and the service. Our previous post on making your professional people and authority goes into more detail on this.

Maximise owned channel content

While difficult subject matter can sometimes be a turn off for the media, your owned channels give you the opportunity to highlight sensitive issues in a controlled and nuanced way. For example, you could host your own roundtable, or webinar about an important issue, inviting colleagues, sector intermediaries and other experts to be part of the debate.

Target smaller, higher value audiences

It doesn’t matter if your area of expertise doesn’t have mass media appeal. The audiences for specialist professional services are always smaller and more focused and so a niche approach is what’s needed when it comes to media outreach. Are there industry specific media you could partner with? Can you build your profile within LinkedIn groups or communities? What industry events can you be part of? All of these are options worth exploring to get in front of the right audiences.

Freshfield has been providing strategic communications support to professional services organisations and their leaders for over 20 years. If you want to discuss a project, in confidence, contact our team at hello@freshfield.quicklaunch.co.