By Editorial TeamKey Takeaways
- You can hit a 3.5x ROAS on a $75k budget in 12 weeks for a trading platform if you target financial news and work with the right influencers.
- Getting your cost per lead (CPL) under $15 for sign-ups means you need a two-front attack: high-authority backlinks plus content that actually teaches something.
- Paid social can amplify your earned media reach by 40%, pushing a ton of traffic to your money-making landing pages.
- When market sentiment flips on you mid-campaign, you’ve got to be agile. We had to pivot from growth stocks to value investing talk just to stay relevant.
- After the campaign, you have to connect specific media placements to actual conversions. That means using UTMs and attribution models that aren’t just last-click to see what really worked.
Online trading platforms are in a dogfight for new users, so your marketing has to be sharp. Earned media is a seriously overlooked approach for driving organic interest and building credibility around your stock picks and platform features. Here’s a look at a recent campaign for a mid-tier trading platform, showing exactly how we got a solid return from a strategic earned media push.
The Goal: Credibility and Sign-ups
We had a clear objective: get more user sign-ups for a platform that uses AI for stock analysis and makes complex investment tools available to everyone. Our goal was to position the platform as a legit source for investment insights, generating real interest outside of the usual paid ad channels. The campaign ran for 12 weeks from Q3 to Q4 2025, with a $75,000 budget mostly for content creation, outreach software, and influencer deals.
Strategy: More Than Just Press Releases
Our whole strategy was built on creating data-backed content that was so good, financial journalists and influencers would actually want to share it. Instead of just blasting out press releases, we focused on offering unique perspectives, proprietary data, and expert takes on market trends. We built the strategy on three pillars:
- Proprietary Research Reports: We had the platform’s data scientists cook up quarterly reports on hot market sectors, how AI affects stock values, and the accuracy of their predictive models. These reports, packed with exclusive data points, were our main ammo for outreach.
- Expert Commentary & Thought Leadership: We worked to get the platform’s lead analysts and CEO known as the go-to people for financial news outlets. This meant we were constantly pitching them for interviews, guest articles, and quotes in trend pieces.
- Micro-Influencer Collaborations: We skipped the mega-influencers and went for finance-specific micro-influencers (10,000 to 100,000 followers) who had really engaged audiences and knew their stuff. The collabs were sponsored but felt natural, often just showing the platform’s tools being used for real research.
Creative Approach: Data Visualization and Narrative
On the creative side, we focused on making everything clear, visual, and story-driven. For the research reports, we spent money on good data viz tools so the graphs and charts were drop-dead simple for journalists to embed and share. Every report came with a tight executive summary and key takeaways that a busy journalist could scan in 30 seconds. We also created a “hot take” bank of researched opinions for our spokespeople, so when news broke, they could jump on it fast. The influencer content was all about showing value. One of our most successful series had an influencer use the platform’s AI to find undervalued renewable energy stocks, and they documented their entire research process over a few weeks. That worked because it was genuinely educational, not a hard sell.
Targeting: Precision Outreach
We were surgical with our targeting. We built a hand-curated list of financial journalists at places like Bloomberg, The Wall Street Journal, and Reuters who specifically covered fintech and investment strategies, and we also ID’d key editors and producers at financial news channels. For the influencers, we used tools like Grabyo and CreatorIQ to find people with high engagement whose audience and values matched ours. Every single outreach email was personalized. We’d mention a recent article they wrote to show we’d actually done our homework, which (shocker) makes a huge difference.
Campaign Performance: Metrics and Analysis
The campaign worked, plain and simple. The results really show what a focused earned media strategy can do.
Campaign Metrics Summary (12 Weeks)
- Budget: $75,000
- Duration: 12 Weeks (Q3-Q4 2025)
- Total Impressions (Estimated Earned): 15,000,000
- Total New User Conversions: 4,500
- Cost Per Lead (CPL): $16.67
- Return on Ad Spend (ROAS) from Earned Media: 3.5x
- Average Click-Through Rate (CTR) from Earned Placements: 1.2%
What Worked: High-Impact Placements and Data-Driven Content
Hands down, the proprietary research reports were our biggest winners. Our Q3 report on “The AI Dividend: How Machine Learning is Reshaping Mid-Cap Valuations” was picked up by MarketWatch and cited in an article on Yahoo Finance. Those two placements alone sent a huge wave of direct traffic to our report’s landing page, and from there, to the registration page. We saw a 25% increase in organic search traffic for branded keywords in the weeks after those big placements, and the expert commentary was also a goldmine, our CEO’s interview on a popular finance podcast about market volatility and AI’s role in risk mitigation led to a visible spike in sign-ups, with that specific placement hitting a CPL of just $12.50. The fact that these were real discussions, not sales pitches, built a lot of trust. It just goes to show, unleashing internal experts gives you credible voices that people actually listen to. Influencer collabs were smaller but gave us a steady stream of leads. One finance YouTuber did a detailed walkthrough of the platform’s backtesting features and got a CTR of 2.1% from the links in their video description, which brought in 350 new sign-ups we could directly attribute to them.
What Didn’t Work: Generic Pitches and Overly Technical Language
At first, we tried pitching generic “platform updates” to journalists. That went nowhere. They get buried in those kinds of announcements and are looking for an original insight or actual news, so we ditched that approach fast. We also learned the hard way that our research summaries were too technical for some of the broader finance pubs. While our core audience might understand “stochastic oscillators” or “Monte Carlo simulations,” a general business reporter would not. We rewrote our executive summaries to be more accessible by translating the heavy financial jargon into plain English, and our response rate from top-tier media outlets jumped by 15% within two weeks.
Optimization Steps: Agility and Attribution
We were constantly monitoring media mentions and referral traffic during the campaign. When we saw a theme like sustainable investing getting hot, for instance, we’d immediately create follow-up commentary and data points to ride the wave. That kind of agility was key. For instance, when a major economic report indicated a shift in consumer spending, we immediately crafted a piece discussing its potential impact on retail stocks, which a prominent financial blog picked up within 48 hours. We were obsessed with attribution. We used specific UTM parameters for every link shared by influencers and media outlets, which let us track not just clicks, but what users did *after* the click, time on site, pages viewed, and finally, conversions. We used a time-decay multi-touch attribution model to properly credit earned media touchpoints that helped with a conversion, because just looking at the last click tells you almost nothing. What we found was that earned media was a huge “assist” channel, often being the first touchpoint for users who would convert much later. And that’s not just us, the IAB Digital Brand Ecosystem Report 2025 found that brands that integrate earned media into their multi-touch attribution models see an average 15% uplift in perceived ROI compared to those using last-click only. One specific optimization we did was to chop up our big research reports into smaller, shareable formats for social media. We made infographics and short video summaries and then pushed them with targeted paid social on LinkedIn and Google Discovery Ads. This stretched the life of our earned content and brought in another 2,000 unique visitors in the last month. The cost per acquisition (CPA) for these re-engagement campaigns was $20, a bit higher than our earned media CPL, but totally worth it for the lead quality.
The Main Takeaway: Value and Persistence Pay Off
This campaign just hammered home a core truth: earned media for trading platforms is all about delivering real value, consistently. You have to earn coverage with great content and by building actual relationships with journalists. You can’t just buy it. Putting money into quality research and expert positioning upfront paid off in direct conversions, better brand authority, and higher organic search rankings. Getting cited by reputable financial news organizations has a long tail, building a foundation of trust that’s priceless in the fintech world. Addressing financial trust deficits is a huge deal for banking PR in 2026, and this kind of work is how you do it.
FAQ Section
So what exactly is ‘earned media’ for a trading platform?
It’s any publicity you get that you didn’t pay for directly. Think mentions in news articles, good reviews from finance bloggers, social media shares from real people, or quotes from your experts in industry stories. It’s ‘earned’ on merit, not because you bought an ad.
Why does proprietary research work so well for getting media attention?
Because it gives journalists and influencers something they desperately need: unique, data-backed insights. When you offer exclusive data or a new analysis on market trends, you become an authoritative source they want to feature which makes your content incredibly valuable to them.
What’s a realistic budget for a campaign like this?
It really depends on your goals. For a targeted 12-week campaign focusing on content creation, expert positioning, and micro-influencer outreach, a budget of $50,000 to $100,000 is a reasonable starting point. That would cover costs for data analysis, content production, PR tools, and potential influencer fees, excluding a large agency retainer.
How do you actually measure ROI on earned media?
You track everything. Use UTM parameters to see direct traffic from every placement, monitor brand mentions and sentiment online, and look for spikes in sign-ups that correlate with your media hits. It’s also smart to use advanced attribution models, like time decay or linear, which can help you assign real value to the earned media touchpoints that influenced a conversion down the line.
What are the big mistakes to avoid in fintech PR?
The most common mistakes are sending out generic press releases with no real news, using super-technical jargon that reporters can’t use, and not building real relationships with journalists before you ask for something. You also have to track your results. And remember to focus on providing educational content instead of just a sales pitch. That’s the key to getting anyone to listen.
