Let’s say you’re an institutional fintech executive, maybe the CEO, CRO or CMO. Whatever your title, you’re responsible for growth. You’ve seen many of the big brand-name vendors in your space rapidly build out their teams and revenue, capture the leadership position in their niche and possibly sell for an astounding multiple. That’s what you want, and you know to achieve this you will need to do a better job getting “out there.”
Several years ago the playbook was pretty standard. You hired a PR firm to get you media coverage, made sure you were at the handful of industry events that mattered most and hired a design agency to build you a website. The real work, you knew, was handled by your sales team. You just needed to be sure that prospects had some idea of who you were before they received a call from one of your salespeople and if they checked out your company online they would conclude you were legit.
But what about today? You now know that websites matter a whole lot more, and that things like social, thought leadership content, SEO/SEM, marketing automation, video and even podcasts need to be considered. But how do you accomplish all that? Outsourcing to a hodgepodge of agency partners would take a tremendous amount of time to manage, particularly when you consider that most won’t have the requisite industry knowledge. Building an internal team is another option, but who do you hire? A recent grad would be an inexpensive way to ensure the digital agenda is covered, but they will lack the experience and understanding of the space. Hiring a seasoned industry marketer means your strategy will likely be sound, but execution will be expensive given the number of outside resources that will need to be brought in to do all the work. So what’s the right call?
Well, you’re not alone in that dilemma. It’s something that we’ve contemplated for the past few years, from both the perspective of an institutional fintech (where we each spent the bulk of our careers) and now as owners of an agency focused on the space. The answer, we ultimately determined, was that every institutional fintech — from those just starting out to established firms to everyone in between — must be prepared to use every arrow in the marketer’s quiver. And for early-stage firms, outsourcing their entire marketing and communications function to an experienced and specialized agency partner would be the fastest and most cost-effective way to go from “Launch to Leadership.”
So that’s the agency partner we set out to become, pivoting Forefront Communications from a traditional PR firm to one that offers all the necessary services — media relations, content, digital marketing, communications and brand strategy, creative services and distribution — to properly build a brand and strategically differentiate and stand out in today’s market.
This transformation required us to scale up our business, hiring a talented team of strategists, digital marketers and writers to augment the media relations pros we already had on staff, whom the fintech and market structure press has long respected. Today, we’re a rapidly growing firm that’s laser-focused on propelling fintech and capital markets brands to the forefront. Our methodology — rock-solid foundational messaging overlaid with expert strategy and program execution — has been proven to separate our clients from the pack and drive meaningful business results for some of the biggest names in the space. More recently, that’s meant complete brand-building efforts for industry leaders like MayStreet, Eventus, DASH Financial, Talos, LiquidityBook and more.
In fact, we’ve been so busy helping these firms with their brands that we back-burnered ours, maintaining an image more representative of our PR agency roots than what we’ve become. And that is an agency that doesn’t fit neatly into one box — we’re part PR, part content, part digital marketing and part creative — and is entirely built on industry knowledge, quality work and client service.
So this morning we’re excited to announce the launch of our new brand, which reflects our three-year evolution into the firm we are today. However you define us, we provide a compelling solution for the modern institutional fintech that is serious about scaling its business and capturing a market-leading position. If that’s you, we hope to speak with you soon.
