For Advisors, Creating An Editorial Calendar Will Make It Easy To Organize Your Public Relations And Marketing For the Year Ahead

Public Relations

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Most personal finance and financial professional magazines will post their editorial calendars on their websites for the coming year of 2012 in either December, but certainly by January 1.  These are usually under the tab on sites under advertising.

The thinking here by publications is that advertisers will want to know the editorial subject matter to accompany the ads and it gives them time to plan out the year’s placement and budget.

This affords you the opportunity to plan out some of your potential media exposure over the coming year, even if you don’t advertise.  These calendars indicate what topics will be covered over the coming months, including cover stories, and conferences that will be taking place as a complement to the magazines. 

This is a great way to plan out your public relations and marketing for the year ahead.    Take a look at what topics are in your sphere of expertise and think of byline articles that you can write.   Financial professional trade magazines such as Investment Advisor are great places to have an article published.  It showcases your expert status on a given issue and positions you as a thought leader in the industry.  This is a great first place to start.  Be sure to contact the editor a good four months in advance of when an issue of the publication is coming out.  Send an email suggesting some bullet points on problems and solutions you can provide on a given topic, along with your credentials.  Be sure to meet the requirements for the article and have it in to the editor by deadline.  Editors too need to plan out their monthly issues and need to rely on writers for content.

With regard to personal finance magazines, such as Smart Money, they too have and editorial calendar on their website which can serve as a guidepost to submitting yourself as an expert source that can be interviewed for a story by the magazine’s reporters or editors.

Rarely, if ever do personal finance publications publish outside expert byline articles.  In this case, you are really reaching out to the reporters and editors to say you can be interviewed as an expert on a topic they are covering, for example an issue on gold.  If you have a position in gold for your clients which is a bit unusual, perhaps you have a high allocation to the precious metal in physical gold.  This is something a reporter would have an interest in talking to you about.  Always think of the 5 W’s – who, what, when, where, and why.

From a marketing standpoint, once you have had some of your articles published and have been quoted in magazines that reach your audience; you can post those to your company websites and get reprints to send to existing clients as referral tools and to potential clients to further your credibility.