If your firm is generating less coverage than it should, or less than your competitors, the reasons are almost always structural rather than circumstantial. Here is where to start.
1. Invest in media relations on an ongoing basis
The single biggest driver of sustained press coverage is relationships. Not press releases. Not content. Not a well-maintained media list on a spreadsheet. Actual, long-term relationships with the journalists who cover your sector.
This sounds obvious but it is also the thing most firms underinvest in, because it does not produce immediate results and is difficult to attribute to a single campaign or quarter.
Journalists covering financial services, legal, accountancy, and professional services receive dozens of pitches a week. The ones they respond to are from people they know, trust, and have found reliable in the past. A pitch from a trusted source gets read. The same pitch from an unknown firm gets deleted.
Building those relationships takes time and consistency. It means being a reliable source of genuinely useful information, not just when you have something to announce, but when a journalist is working on a story and needs an expert perspective quickly. It means responding fast, being accurate, and not wasting their time with pitches that are not relevant to their beat.
It also means knowing who covers what. The FT's asset management correspondent writes about different things to the private capital team. Knowing the difference and pitching accordingly is what separates firms that get coverage from firms that wonder why they do not.
The firms with the best media coverage in financial and professional services are the ones whose Partners and spokespeople journalists want to speak to.
2. Understand the news cycle and work with it, not against it
Most firms pitch the media as though journalists are waiting to hear from them. They are not. Journalists are working to their own agenda, driven by the news cycle, editorial priorities, and deadlines that have nothing to do with your content calendar.
Understanding the news cycle means knowing when your story is relevant to what is already happening and timing your outreach accordingly.
In financial and professional services, this means paying attention to the regulatory calendar, the Budget and fiscal events, enforcement announcements, market movements, and the themes that are already generating coverage in your target publications. When a regulatory development lands that affects your clients, you have a narrow window to be part of the story. When a major market event dominates the business pages, a story unrelated to it will struggle for space.
It also means knowing what will never make news, however well-packaged it is. A new partner hire is not news to the national press. A funding round without a distinctive angle rarely gets beyond a trade mention. A comment on a topic that has been covered extensively for weeks is not a fresh story.
The firms that consistently generate coverage are those that have a clear view of what is happening in their sector ahead of time and use that view to position their people and their perspectives at the right moment, rather than pitching reactively when it is already too late.
3. Create better content
Volume is not the answer. Firms that publish a steady stream of generic commentary, templated thought leadership, and self-congratulatory announcements do not build media authority. They create noise and journalists learn quickly to tune it out.
Better content in financial and professional services means three things.
Specificity. A viewpoint on "the future of financial regulation" is too broad to be interesting. A specific, well-argued position on how a particular FCA consultation will affect a defined client group with a named expert willing to defend that position is something a journalist can use.
Timeliness. Content published as a development lands is worth ten times the same content published three weeks later when the news cycle has moved on. Getting ahead of the cycle or responding to it within hours, not days is what generates coverage.
A point of view. The coverage that builds reputations in financial and professional services is not the coverage that summarises what has happened. It is the coverage that says something distinctive, makes a clear argument, or offers an expert perspective that is not already everywhere. Journalists are not looking for commentary that agrees with the consensus. They are looking for informed voices that can add something to the conversation.
Better content is also content that is built around your people. The firms with the strongest media profiles are those where individual partners and spokespeople are known to journalists as reliable, expert, interesting sources not just firms that publish good articles. Building personal media profiles for key individuals is commercial infrastructure.
4. Use media events to build the relationships that produce coverage
Press coverage is a byproduct of trust. And trust, in a media context, is built in the same way it is built anywhere else through repeated positive interactions over time.
Media events - whether intimate dinners, wine tastings, roundtables, or site visits - remain one of the most effective ways to build the kind of genuine relationships with journalists that translate into sustained coverage. Face-to-face interaction creates a different quality of connection than email pitches and press releases can.
A well-run media event for financial and professional services firms brings together a small number of the right journalists genuinely relevant to the firm's practice areas and target audiences with senior spokespeople who have something interesting to say and the confidence to say it off the record as well as on. The conversation that happens over dinner is frequently more valuable than the press release that follows it. This kind of investment in journalist relationships compounds over time in a way that no single campaign can replicate.
5. Use horizon scanning to be first to the story
Effective horizon scanning of regulatory, enforcement, legislative, and market developments across your priority sectors gives firms the ability to prepare rather than react. When you know a significant consultation is dropping in the next fortnight, you can have a prepared viewpoint, a named spokesperson, and a media strategy ready before the news breaks. When you are watching the enforcement calendar, you can reach journalists with your perspective before they have found someone else to comment.
A firm that reaches a journalist with a well-prepared, accurate, expert comment within two hours of a development landing is far more likely to be in the story than the firm that calls three days later with a polished but late response.
The signals that matter most are often not the dramatic ones. A quiet consultation paper, an FCA speech that signals a shift in supervisory priority, a litigation development in a related jurisdiction; these are the developments that create the opening for a genuinely timely and distinctive media angle. Spotting them requires a structured monitoring capability, not an occasional scan of the morning's headlines.
Rostrum's Signals programme is built specifically for this purpose, delivering fortnightly briefings of curated regulatory, enforcement, and market developments across priority sectors, each with a clear "so what?" and recommended action for BD, marketing, and PR teams. Firms on the programme are consistently better positioned to respond to media opportunities at the moment they arise.
6. Work with a specialist agency that knows your sector and your journalists
Everything above is achievable. It is also time-consuming, relationship-dependent, and most effective when driven by people who understand the specific dynamics of financial and professional services media. This is where the case for specialist agency support rests.
A generalist PR agency can write a press release. A specialist agency in financial and professional services knows which journalists at the FT, Financial News, The Banker, City A.M., and Accountancy Age are likely to find your story relevant today and has the relationship to get it in front of them in a way that will be read, not filed. In a competitive media environment where journalists receive more pitches than they can possibly respond to, a warm introduction from a trusted source is the difference between coverage and silence.
It also rests on the value of independent senior counsel. Knowing what to say is only part of the job. Knowing when not to say something, when an announcement will land badly, when the moment is wrong, and when an instinct that feels right internally will look very different externally. That requires someone outside the building, senior enough to be honest, and experienced enough to be right.
AI can produce content. It cannot tell you whether your planned comment on a live enforcement matter will make your firm look like it does not understand the room. It cannot pick up the phone to a journalist it has known for a decade and ask, off the record, whether this is the right moment. It cannot sit in a partner meeting and push back on a communications decision that the room has already agreed on.
The firms in financial and professional services that consistently outperform their size in media coverage share a common characteristic: they treat communications as a strategic function, not an administrative one, and they invest in specialist support that compounds over time.
The questions to ask if your coverage is not where it should be
Are our key spokespeople known to the journalists who cover our sector - personally, not just by name?
When a significant regulatory or market development lands in our priority areas, how quickly can we get a prepared, credible comment to market?
Is our thought leadership published at the moment it is most relevant, or after the news cycle has moved on?
Are we generating coverage in the publications our target clients actually read - or are we measuring column inches in outlets that do not reach them?
Do we have external counsel senior enough and independent enough to tell us when we are about to get something wrong?
What are our three closest competitors publishing, and where are they appearing that we are not?
If the honest answer to most of these is unsatisfactory, the issue is not that your firm lacks interesting things to say. It is that the infrastructure to say them well, at the right moment, to the right people, is not yet in place.
That is a solvable problem and it is exactly the kind of problem Rostrum is built to solve.
Rostrum is a PR and communications agency specialising in financial and professional services. We work with firms across legal, financial services, accountancy, consulting, and fintech to build the media presence, journalist relationships, and communications infrastructure that drives sustained coverage. To have an honest conversation about where your firm's external profile could be stronger, get in touch.
