Fintech PR Demystified: Costs, Relationships, and the AI Trap

PR is one of the most misunderstood and most expensive lines on a fintech marketing budget. In this episode of the Propagate Fintech Podcast, host Roland Howard pulls back the curtain on why PR costs what it costs, why AI alone can't carry a campaign across the finish line, and why so many founders write off PR after one underwhelming press release.

Roland walks through the real difference between marketing (what you control) and PR (what you earn), and explains why the engine that actually moves earned media is built on relationships and timing, not output volume. He shares how the best fintech teams stop running PR and marketing in parallel and start compounding them together, turning a single placement into a long tail of sales assets, social proof, and pipeline accelerants.

You'll also hear a candid breakdown of what you're really paying for when you hire a boutique B2B fintech PR agency at $5K to $15K a month: a network of editor and journalist relationships, the editorial judgment to know which stories will actually land, and the sustained effort it takes to keep a narrative alive. Then Roland tackles the AI question head on, including where it genuinely speeds up PR work and where it will quietly kill your credibility if you let it write your pitches.

Whether you're a fintech founder weighing your first PR retainer, a marketing leader trying to make the case internally, or a sales leader who wants to put earned media to work in your pipeline, this episode lays out a practical, honest framework for thinking about PR as a long term trust game rather than a quick paid play.

Chapters

• 00:00 Intro: Why PR Is Expensive and Where AI Falls Short
• 01:05 Marketing vs PR: The Control Line Most Teams Miss
• 02:30 The Press Release Trap: Why Your Big Announcement Flopped
• 04:00 Relationships and Timing: The Real Engine Behind PR
• 05:20 Stop Running PR and Marketing in Parallel
• 06:45 Turning One Placement Into a Long Tail of Marketing Assets
• 08:00 The PR Flywheel: When Coverage Generates More Coverage
• 09:15 What PR Actually Costs: $5K to $15K a Month, Explained
• 10:30 What You're Really Paying For: Relationships, Editorial Judgment, Sustained Effort
• 12:30 Why PR Is Not a Paid Media Buy
• 13:15 The Zeitgeist Test: Why AI Slop Will Sink Your Pitch
• 14:30 What AI Can't Do: Vibes, Favors, and Trust
• 15:45 The 18-Month Credibility Gap: A Thought Exercise
• 16:30 Outro: Crawl, Walk, Run Your Way Into PR

Want to talk PR strategy or kick around ideas for your fintech? Reach out at PropagateFintech.com.

Want to work with Propagate Fintech? Fill out a contact form at www.propagatefintech.com

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:04

What's up, y'all? Welcome back to another episode of the Propagate FinTech Podcast. I'm your host, Roland Howard, and today we are going to be talking about what PR does for your organization, why it costs what it costs. It's expensive. And if you've looked into leveraging PR services, you can attest to this and why AI is a helpful tool, but not going to get a PR initiative over the finish line. So before we get into it, let's delineate between marketing and PR a bit here and establish some groundwork. Okay. So marketing is something that you have a ton of control over. Your website, you control the messaging, the narrative, the look, the feel, your your email strategy, any content that you're producing, things that you're posting on LinkedIn, right? Like you, you own that and you're in control of that. And one thing that I see happening a lot is companies treat PR like it's a faster version of marketing. For example, company writes a press release, they blast it out there, they reach out to their contacts, their team helps getting this message out there in the market, and then nothing happens. And then they say, ah, PR is not for us, or you know, this is something that we're gonna focus on later. And it's really easy to get disenchanted with PR and the work that goes into it, and then ultimately end up deeming PR, you know, a waste of time, and they're just gonna focus on, you know, showing up at trade shows or whatever other strategy that they want to kind of plug that hole with. And I'll give you an example. Let's say that there's a new partnership that they strike up with a big player out there and they're excited about it. They draft a press release, they put it on their on their owned content, you know, their website on LinkedIn, they send it out to their customer base, and it doesn't really get a lot of traction beyond kind of initial flash in the pan notice or attention, if you will. And then people go, oh, look, this was you know a waste of time. We had everybody sh reshare this, you know, we really dug in on trying to get this out there in the market and nothing happened. PR sucks and isn't for us. Okay. That's not the right way to think about this. I want you to, in this case, reframe the way that we're thinking about solving for getting this information out there. And so the real mechanism within PR that makes it go and shape your image in the market is tied to relationships and timing. For example, knowing which editor is pursuing what types of stories right now, having the standing and the relationship and the equity with them to be able to get in front of them. And unfortunately, nothing in your marketing stack is going to be able to give you that soft power, if you will, with the gatekeepers to all things PR, for example, up you know, publications and you know, earned media environments that you want to be in. So let's shift gears and talk about where PR and marketing intersect. So most teams run PR and marketing in parallel without a lot of overlap. And when that happens, there's a compounding snowball effect that we miss out on. I'll give you an example. Let's say that we were able to secure some good press. You know, maybe we showed up in the local news or we were mentioned on a podcast or on stage somewhere, and you know, we got some good media placement from this. That's great. But here's a few ways that you could extract more value out of that awesome moment. You put it on your website, you put it in your deck, you find a way to bake it into your outbound sequence in some way. Your account executives drop it into their PowerPoints, they send it to somebody who has been stuck in your pipeline to provide them with some third-party, you know, credentializing aspect that gets them to engage again, knocks the dust off this relationship and gets them interested in what you have to say again. And so for the teams who are able to really optimize these moments, right, where they had secured coverage or a placement in some kind, they're able to turn these into long tail marketing assets. And so the teams that are really getting the most out of placements when they do occur are the ones who are able to think creatively about where they can drop this placement into different segments of their marketing engine, right? So bringing those two together and not just allowing this placement in this public mention to be a flash in the pan moment. Now, here's an example of where PR can compound and can run the other direction in terms of bringing attention to your brand. Let's say that you know one of your thought leadership pieces gets the attention of a journalist. They then reach out to you for a quote. Your leader or founder or executive is then quoted again in another piece that you didn't even have to go out and procure. And so the content that you helped to propel throughout all of your other channels was able to go out there and secure additional coverage for you. When you can get marketing and PR working together hand in glove like this, where your placements and mentions are baked into your marketing assets, your email sequences, you'll start to assemble a flywheel that spins and builds momentum over time. So let's talk about why PR is one of the most expensive services that you're going to pay for. And I think when you understand these factors, it makes it not hurt so bad to write to write these big checks. So let's talk about just like what the numbers actually are. So for a boutique B2B fintech PR agency, you're going to be looking at spending somewhere between five to fifteen thousand dollars per month. Now, larger financial institutions who you know are gonna pay for more dedicated resources, helping, let's say, train their executives on how to talk to media, how to tell the story more effectively. Maybe they have deeper, a deeper playbook Rolodex of contacts, that price is gonna go even higher. But the big question that I think every buyer of PR services should be asking is you know, what am I getting here? And there's really three things. And the first one would be relationships. So when you tap into a PR team and you have dedicated resources helping you from a PR perspective, you're tapping into uh a network of relationships who know editors, journalists, analysts, and they know which of them cover which beats and which type of stories and angles and narratives are going to hit with these individuals. And you're really not able to buy this type of insight. When you leverage PR services, you're really renting access to this network. Second piece is going to be editorial judgment. A lot of times what happens is a founder or an executive will be really excited about a new product release that's coming out or a change to the roadmap, and they'll try to run with that from a narrative perspective. But a lot of times journalists and analysts, they don't care about that. You know, they're looking for how whatever you're coming to talk to them about is changing the landscape, changing the industry, solving in a major way for a customer problem that you know hasn't been solved for before. And so there's an element of pattern recognition when interacting with publications that a PR pro is going to leverage for you. And the third piece here is going to be just the sustained effort that's required when doing PR pitches. Okay. This can oftentimes feel like you are sending emails into a black hole, you're not getting responses. And if you do, it's a very brief message from uh a journalist saying that they're not interested. So a good PR pro is going to stay in touch with that journalist, reshape the narrative, coach the executives at the fintech to think about the story differently, equip them with the skills to talk about it differently. And they are standing by and ready to jump on a story or an interview, you know, very quickly. Now, before I shift gears into AI, the last piece that I want to leave you with on this section of what we're talking about is that PR is not a paid media buy. It can be, but the really good stuff never is. Okay. No offense to the paid players that are out there. And the last thing I'll say before we shift gears into talking about AI and its relationship with PR is don't think about PR as a paid media buy, right? Like you're buying LinkedIn ads or Google ads. Okay. That's totally the wrong approach. And if you let that mentality seep into your thought process, you will probably give up on PR sooner than you should. And this is such a critical leg of the stool when it comes to filling your pipeline and growing your organization. Now, as we shift gears into how AI can show up within your PR initiative and strategy, I want to talk about a word I love, which is zeitgeist. Now, Zeitgeist is essentially, to put it in one sentence, the spirit of the era or the day that we're talking about. Okay. And where I want to take this is society today has a non-existent appetite for BS. And we have got a really great nose for it. And now with AI, everybody is on, you know, red alert, if you will, around anything that is disingenuous. And so if you are sending outreach to analysts or pitches to publications and you are using AI, and I'm talking about M-dashes being everywhere and all the cheesy AI vernacular that we over the last two years have really become accustomed to, you're going to be in a world of hurt. So AI is really useful in a PR workflow when it comes to ideating, trying to take a new angle on a narrative, a story, or you know, a change that's happening within your organization. But here is really where it's going to fall flat and can get you in trouble if you're not careful. It can't build or maintain relationships with journalists. It can't pick up on vibes when you're speaking with people on the phone. And it can't call in a favor with any publications or journalists, which will happen over time because you will you will encounter scenarios where a journalist or an editor has a deadline that they're trying to hit, and you're kind of their last stop at being able to solve for, you know, whatever that shortcoming is. And so, you know, you build up a reputation over time and in terms of being able to help people, and AI, of course, can't do that. And so ultimately, PR is a trust game. We talked about how when you leverage a PR professional, you're tapping into their relationships and their network and that expertise. You know, being able to secure placements is downstream of relationships that have been built over time. And so, of course, you can't prompt your way into that space. So, you know, AI should be, and I can almost guarantee you that it is being used by any PR pro who is worth their salt, but it doesn't replace the value that they deliver to your organization if you tap them for PR help. So if you're thinking about investing in PR, I would ask yourself to do just like a quick thought exercise. Where do you want to be in 18 months? And, you know, when you think about where that new position for yourself is in the market at that time, is there a credibility gap that you think is going to trip up your ability to get to that place? If so, PR is, and I hope this is obvious, one of the best ways to pull that off. Hey, thanks so much for listening to this episode. Hope that this is valuable for you. You know, we're always looking for ways to deliver value to anybody who tunes in to what we're talking about. If you'd like to collaborate with us on your PR initiative or you just want to get the ball rolling, we have some ideas around a crawl, walk, run approach to doing PR, and we'd be happy to share with you, you know, what those thoughts are. Feel free to reach out to us at propagatefintech.com and we can explore whatever that you are working on. We'll see you next time.