The PR Pulse: Share of Voice+ Report was created to help marketers and PR professionals in the fund administration industry to assess their client’s presence in the media against their direct competitors’. Through a data-led approach and introducing innovative indicators to monitor performance, the Share of Voice+ Report outlines the media landscape for fund administrators interested in making their media presence stand out. After several months of data collection and analysis reporting, I’m pleased to say that our work has helped identify the successful PR and marketing strategies of fund administrators globally.
For instance, the Report highlights how some fund administrators often promote themselves through thought leadership, using content to attract and engage different stakeholders interested in their line of work. Another approach, particularly common to large companies, is to rely on their size to secure the media’s attention. However, the most interesting finding present in the PR Pulse Report is that some companies were able to boost their media presence by consistently appearing in high quality, Tier 1 media outlets and do so consistently through the year, rather than through sporadic campaigns.
To account for all the subtleties involved in a carefully laid out PR and marketing plan, the PR Pulse Report introduced the Share of Voice+ Score, an innovative metric used to capture all the nuances behind a successful media insertion strategy. Underpinning the Report is the conviction that the traditional concept of Share of Voice is not suitable to reflect the complexities behind well-executed PR campaigns. Over-reliance on the sheer number of media citations, for example, largely obscures important aspects of every company’s media presence such as outreach to the right audience and the quality of outlets in which mentions occur. Furthermore, Share of Voice alone doesn’t give an indication of brand awareness or the international reach of media coverage. Hence, the PR Pulse Report draws on such metrics as a way of eliciting the qualities behind different, yet equally successful strategies used to establish the media presence of different fund administrators.
Working on Material Impact’s PR Pulse Report spanned through several months. In the initial stages of the project, a great part of the work consisted of finding and validating the right data sources to assess the media presence of different companies. At this phase, the most challenging aspect of the work was ensuring that the data collected was comparable across every company in our initial list. By the time that the data collection phase was over, we had assembled an entire database from scratch in which we recorded the performance of over 100 companies according to their presence in the media from July 2022 to June 2023, timeframe assessed by Material Impact’s first edition of the PR Pulse Report.
Now, the data analysis phase was by far the most exciting stage of the project. A considerable amount of time was spent analysing the information gathered to understand the patterns and maybe spot some trends hidden in the data. With the assistance of tools for data analysis and visualisation, we were able to evaluate the performance of every company in our database, and we soon realised that we had designed a reliable metric to assess the media presence of some of the largest financial institutions in the world.
Our analysis showed that different companies have different ways of standing out from their competitors in the media coverage landscape. However, we contend in the Report that five strategies were the most effectively common. The traditional Share of Voice metric, though slightly outdated, remains an important parameter to measure media’s attention, and thus must be weighted accordingly. We also found that consistency in the coverage and the quality of outlets in which companies are featured are deeply linked to a solid overall presence in the media. The level of online interest for companies’ brands was another important element in assessing the efficacy of PR and marketing strategies of different fund administrators. Lastly, given that these firms operate on a global level, they are often inclined to expand the international reach of their media coverage.
After identifying these five different components of media relations strategies, deployed by over 100 fund administrators globally, our attention turned to how we could quantify their performance based on these different approaches. At this stage, the challenge was to create a new and fair metric that could assess and compare companies’ performance in each one of them. Thus, we developed five new performance indicators and ranked all the companies accordingly.
Another interesting finding of the report is that although companies can deploy different strategies to establish their media presence, the best performing firms exhibited a multipronged approach. Therefore, we used these five metrics to create the brand-new Share of Voice+ Score, the ultimate indicator for the PR and marketing performance of global fund administrators. The PR Pulse: Share of Voice+ Report ranked companies according to their SoV+ Score, and the top-100 rank can be seen here.
The recently published PR Pulse Report is the first of a series of reports meant to track the media landscape for fund administrators. By introducing the SoV+ Score, we at Material Impact hoped to contribute to the betterment of the PR and marketing sector serving fund administrators. Ultimately, we wish to help companies understand how they can improve their media presence through a carefully planned PR and marketing strategy. After the publication of the first PR Pulse: Share of Voice+ Report, I could not be more certain that fund administrators everywhere can benefit a great deal from the work we have done.
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