In today’s fast-paced digital landscape, the boundaries between public relations, paid media, and owned content are increasingly blurred. As a public relations agency that also specializes in advertising, social media management, and creative services, we at GAVIN understand the immense value of integrating these disciplines to ensure a cohesive and impactful digital marketing strategy for our clients.
While our individual PR, advertising, and media teams excel in their own specialties, they also partner to bounce ideas off one another, support content creation in a streamlined manner, and ensure a smooth client services experience.
So whether you’re expanding your publicity in the suburbs and urban cities, or generating a buzz in small town America, our in-house teams know how to driver deep results – spanning greater visibility, higher social media engagement, and more frequent interviews with the press.
Let’s take a tour of our GAVIN teams, their expertise, and how we continually collaborate toward our financial services industry’s next greatest idea.
Earned Media – The bread and butter of GAVIN Fi public relations
“If I was down to my last dollar, I would spend it on PR,” – a quote often attributed to Bill Gates, its sentiment rings true still today as the GAVIN Fi public relations team achieves top-tier results, placing clients in notable national media outlets, local news features, and leading trade publications of their industry.
What is a “top-tier” news outlet?
At GAVIN, our working relationships span reporters, editors, TV anchors, podcast hosts, and social media influencers. We land our clients in top-tier news publications that are widely respected, have a national reach with millions of monthly viewers, and are often the most premier source of news across finance, business, and technology industries. Recently, GAVIN has secured coverage for our clients in U.S. News & World Report (28 million Unique Monthly Visitors), CNN Underscored (118M UVM), Barron’s (5M UVM), and other leading publications. As top-tier outlets are widely read by target audiences and other reporters, initial quotes or mentions in those publications are frequently reshared on social media by users or journalists or syndicated to additional news outlets.With strong credibility and reach, top-tier news features are quite the milestone.
It’s no secret that modern media relations is the bread and butter of how our PR team operates. Our media strategists – many former business and broadcast journalists – understand the news landscape, know how writers and editors operate, and deploy years’ worth of reporter relationships to ensure our clients are quoted and written about as the seasoned experts they truly are.
At GAVIN, we know how to help clients reach their targeted audiences and secure a third-party endorsement in the press, from national brands and media to regional clientele surrounding our central Pennsylvania headquarters. Finanta (formerly Community First Fund), our Pennsylvania-based nonprofit client, is a community development financial institution that works closely with underserved, diverse communities, including immigrants, women, people of color, low-income communities, and the unbanked. Finanta supports groups in need across the greater Philadelphia area, eastern and southern Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Delaware.
Our PR strategy for Finanta focuses on securing consistent media coverage in the organization’s regional markets and trade publications to highlight greater executive visibility and brand awareness. We focus on telling the brand’s story, highlighting its grassroots efforts to connect with and invest in small businesses and redevelopment projects in its local communities.
By developing a strong PR strategy, we set the stage for a unified message across all media and social platforms. When our clients announce new services, name their incoming executive hires, or release fresh thought leadership, GAVIN PR garners print, social, and broadcast earned media attention that not only boosts visibility but creates a narrative that can be amplified through owned and paid channels.
By the numbers
Since early 2024, GAVIN has supported an earned media roadmap for one of our first-time PR clients (a wealth management firm in the Pacific Northwest). Over the course of the year, our earned publicity efforts have generated 470 media placements with a reach of 509 million (and an advertising value equivalency of $13 million). With GAVIN’s connections to reporters, the client has had numerous spokespeople quoted in top-tier and trade publications, including Yahoo! Finance, Barron’s, MarketWatch, InvestmentNews, and GOBankingRates.
Owned Media – Where you’re in the driver’s seat
Owned media is exactly as it sounds – it’s a digital space that you own, and therefore where you have the greatest control over the content. From your website and social media channels to your newsletter and organic email blasts, you’re running the show in these atmospheres. And of course, GAVIN’s expertise in producing and enhancing owned content can help carve out your new digital home – or refurbish the spaces where your content already lives.
Some financial brands have a long history of engaging with audiences through owned media, while others are taking the first step in promoting their company and story. No matter, GAVIN knows how to help ensure brands maintain a strong online presence, using owned media as both a brand reputation tool and a launching pad of other multimedia tactics.
Take our Bay Area client Adero Partners as an example. The GAVIN-Adero partnership helped scale up their Insights and News page with added media content, reinforced copy and imagery on their LinkedIn channel, and led to promotion of other owned assets such as Adero’s financial planning materials.
As we continue to leverage and grow their social media presence, GAVIN demonstrates how Adero’s owned content is a gateway to deploying multiple forms of media simultaneously, showcasing Adero’s earned and owned capabilities, and as a result, deepening connections with existing stakeholders as well as potential clients, recruits and partners.
Paid Media – A boost of digital energy
As owned and earned media lay the brand visibility groundwork, paid media (often referred to as advertising or digital marketing) articulates messages in a data-driven manner, sending content directly to specific geolocations, online platforms, or users of particular industries. Whether ads include videos, graphics, or audio elements, these advertising tactics give GAVIN a greater handle over the specific demographics targeted with our clients’ messaging, ensuring their budgets are used to a maximum level of efficiency to drive desired results. In many cases, that is driving more qualified leads through client websites and email marketing platforms.
In addition to targeting the right folks and having a greater financial impact, advertising allows more control over the specific copy, imagery, hyperlinks, and words that are included in the messaging, meaning the ads that users see or hear are directly managed by and written from our team of paid media specialists.
We have the privilege of working with our Bartlett Wealth Management client to conduct strategic and timely ads – in addition to routine earned media outreach and year-round organic social support. We recently utilized content from Bartlett’s self-produced webinar about business ownership, turning the language into advertising material to generate a greater buzz leading up to the event for the Cincinnati-based firm.
As organic social builds brand awareness, and PR earns customer trust over time, digital marketing enables direct engagement with audiences with highly personalized messaging tailored to user behaviors and preferences.
Whether it’s search engine advertising (i.e., Google Ads), sponsored posts on Facebook and LinkedIn, or event-specific digital ads, our GAVIN team knows how to deliver our clients’ messages to reach the right people at the right time.
Unified multimedia strategy ensures every message counts
The average consumer of news and social media is bombarded with messages, marketing emails, and advertisements on a daily basis. In our digital-first world, it’s important now more than ever to break through the noise with a holistic strategy, blending earned, owned, and paid media to obtain real results for our clients.
If you’re not applying an integrated marketing communications strategy to your brand and outreach, GAVIN is happy to partner with you to ensure your every message counts. Contact our GAVIN Fi team today at [email protected] and let’s embark on your next multimedia publicity experience.
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