London, 13th 2017 – PennWell, the host of brand new electricity and power conference, Electrify Europe, selects Aspectus, the global communications agency serving the energy, financial services and technology sectors, as its communications partner for the eighth year running.
Electrify Europe is the world’s first event dedicated to the convergence between the power-generation and transmission & distribution sectors. Aspectus will boost awareness of the event through content development, messaging, and both social and traditional media relations. Previously known as POWER-GEN Europe and Renewable Energy World Europe, Electrify Europe will take place in Vienna, Austria on the 19th to 21st June 2018.
Crispin Coulson, PennWell’s Senior Marketing Manager, comments: “Electrify Europe is our response to shifting market conditions such as the transition to a digitised power market. The challenges and opportunities of this change will be addressed at the event. With Aspectus’ in-depth industry knowledge, ability to engage target audiences and standout content, it is the right partner to take us through this pivotal time.”
With the 2017 event attracting over 12,000 visitors, Electrify Europe 2018 will unite stakeholders from across the electricity supply chain to promote collaboration, innovation and business growth for the new digitised, decarbonised power sector.
“Long-term relationships are important to us as an agency, because this is how we create partnerships and help develop brands over time. This means we can work with clients in an ever-changing landscape to keep their voice relevant, reach their target audience and continually help achieve their business goals,” added Head of Energy at Aspectus, Laura Iley.
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About Aspectus
Aspectus, the engagement agency, is a global communications agency focusing on financial services, energy, oil and gas, technology and engineering.
Our award-winning work builds brands, increases sales, attracts investment and supports business growth. We develop creative, integrated campaigns that engage target audiences and we guarantee outcomes, focusing on business results. That means original ideas and high-impact visual and written content promoted through the most effective channels. We do this all in a way that builds clients’ online profiles, integrates search and drives prospects to their website.
LONDON, 21st November 2017 – Aspectus, the global communications agency serving the financial services, energy and technology sectors, has promoted Tim Focas to head up its capital markets sub-sector.
Tim, who has played a pivotal role servicing the agency’s trading technology clients since joining from Weber Shandwick four years ago, will report into Ellie Jackson who leads the European financial services practice at Aspectus. In his new role, Tim will be responsible for providing strategic communications advice to existing capital markets clients and driving new business opportunities.
“The support shown to me since my arrival has been truly humbling. The agency’s entrepreneurial passion, sector expertise and commitment to its talent are three central reasons behind our continued growth in capital markets,” said Focas. “Our creative, integrated campaigns are engaging target audiences across the space and helping to drive clients’ growth. All that, combined with our results guarantee, means that prospects of all sizes are interested in what we have to offer. With all this in mind, the new role comes with some hugely exciting client and new business opportunities.”
“Tim has been a big contributor to our financial services practice, driving a number of standout campaigns including Big Bang at 30 and the award-winning Lighter Side of Dark Trading that are typical of the agency,” explained Ellie Jackson, Group Director at Aspectus. “These achievements, coupled with his proven new business track record, made him the obvious fit to lead our growing capital markets business.”
Capital markets is just one sub-sector of Aspectus’ financial services practice – which has a range of clients spanning the business, impact investment and personal finance sectors. Aspectus is one of the fastest-growing specialist communications agencies, and has offices in Aberdeen, London, New York, Luzern and a presence in Singapore.
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About Aspectus Aspectus, the engagement agency, is an international communications agency specialising in financial services, energy, technology and engineering.
In our hands communications transforms the way businesses engage with their markets. Our award-winning approach, creativity and market knowledge builds brands, increases sales, attracts investment and supports business growth.
London, 7th November 2017 – Meritsoft, a provider of automation software for tax, regulation and claims has selected Aspectus, the global communications agency serving the financial services, energy and technology sectors, as its retained global communications agency.
A proven expertise in market infrastructure, bolstered by a strong track record in creating and executing successful Regtech campaigns, were the main reasons behind Meritsoft choosing Aspectus. Focusing on messaging, media and content creation, Aspectus will service the account from its London and New York offices.
Angela MacAlinney, CFO at Meritsoft, said: “Aspectus’ understanding of current regulatory issues, combined with longstanding relationships with the key industry influencers, can help increase our brand profile among tier one/two investment banks and brokerage houses.”
Tim Focas, Account director in the financial services practice at Aspectus, added: “The imminent introduction of MiFID II opens up tremendous opportunities for tech innovators like Meritsoft to solve long standing middle and back office problems. Our experience in turning complex issues into compelling narratives will enable Meritsoft get its messages under the noses of the right people.”
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About Aspectus Aspectus, the engagement agency, is an international communications agency specialising in financial services, energy, technology and engineering.
In our hands communications transforms the way businesses engage with their markets. Our award-winning approach, creativity and market knowledge builds brands, increases sales, attracts investment and supports business growth.
Influencer marketing is all the rage among brands and PR professionals. In a recent study, which elicited responses from marketers across a range of industries, 86% used influencer marketing in 2016, 94% of whom found it effective. It’s a new tactic and there’s still mystery surrounding it. So, what exactly is it – and should you be doing it?
Here’s how it could help your business.
What is influencer marketing?
Influencers are specialists, or celebrities, that have built and retained trust and two-way communication with their followers. Influencer marketing taps into this already established and engaged audience to promote a product or service. Usually, the best campaigns are those where the influencer creates their own unique content to support the brand and its goals. From health and fitness to stock marketing, social media is swamped with influencers that we try to emulate. And they’re so easy to find – there’s no need to search beyond the standard social media channels. If you need to, they’re probably not worth following.
Is it worth your time?
For this haircare company, one selfie post from Kylie Jenner enabled the brand to reach her 96.7M Instagram followers, generating more than 1.9M engagements:
This comms trick doesn’t just work on the A-list celebrity scales. If you’ve got interesting and relevant content, it’s worth taking the time to find the right influencers to get your story in front of your audience.
Whilst there is some debate over how to measure the success of influencer campaigns, they can have a higher ROI than traditional media campaigns. Take the Budweiser #GiveADamn campaign during the Super Bowl 50. 50 influencer posts across Instagram and Twitter reached 107M people and cost 13x less than Budweiser’s 30 second TV ad (it reached 114M people, at a cost of $5M).
What are the benefits?
There are obvious tangible benefits including follower engagement, driving traffic, and the creation of more authentic content. But let’s not forget that word of mouth recommendations are more important than ever, and social media makes great content essential and relevant.
With the rise of ad blocker usage (and the fast forward button on our TVs), it’s easy to avoid traditional advertising. This, plus the fact that consumers are shifting their attention to digital platforms, makes influencer marketing a very relevant and effective social media strategy.
What does influencer marketing mean for B2B?
It’s unlikely that the Jenners would share our content, but we can relate to other major influencers in our sectors. Martin Lewis has a huge impact in the energy market – all it takes is one mention on This Morning for a company’s sales to rocket. Similarly, a mention from Ashton Kutcher would certainly spark interest in technology. The tech investor has put money into Airbnb, Spotify and Uber, to name a few.
When we generate compelling and engaging content, we might reach out to journalists or thought leaders in our respective sectors to share or put a unique spin on our stories. We might also use Google Hangouts or conduct a poll, which are great ways to gain valuable audience insights. We can then use findings as the basis for creative content, or a broader marketing approach.
How can influencer marketing supercharge your comms?
Influencers are already talking to your target audience – they have done the ground work by creating an audience (follower base) for you
They have built credibility and trust – followers will be genuinely interested in what an influencer has to say
They are everywhere – every industry has influencers, you just need to use the right tools to find them
Traditional PR channels still have high value. But if you’re looking to really amplify your digital comms; engage the influencers that have already won the hearts and minds of the people that would genuinely listen to your message.
To understand how influencers can support your marketing goals, please get in touch.
London, 27 June 2017 – Aspectus, the specialist communications agency for the financial services, energy, technology and engineering sectors, has been appointed by breatheHR as its UK communications partner. Aspectus was appointed following a competitive pitch process thanks to its original thinking and obvious passion for the business.
breatheHR is a cloud-based platform that helps growing businesses escape the administrative aspects of managing people. Although trading as breatheHR for five years, the company has two decades of experience implementing HR systems. Familiar with the challenges of managing HR, breatheHR developed a platform that is secure, reliable and intuitive that is targeted specifically at the small business community. Aspectus will run a proactive media-focused programme, supported by creative campaigns.
Jonathan Richards, CEO, breatheHR commented: “I’m really proud of everything we’ve achieved as a company over the last five years. As we enter the next phase of growth, now is the time to invest in our brand and really think about how we engage our target audiences as well as existing customers. What really struck me about the Aspectus team was their drive and energy. It was clear to us all that the team really cared about executing a PR programme that would have a positive impact on our business.”
Alastair Turner, CEO, Aspectus added: “HR is something that impacts us all, and so, as a result, the breatheHR brief was something we were all able to relate to and really got our creative minds buzzing. HR is often confused with business admin, undermining the real value it can deliver to any organisation – our mission is to change that and ensure small businesses up and down the UK realise the return on investment they can garner from the right HR platform.”
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About Aspectus Aspectus, the engagement agency, is an international communications agency specialising in financial services, energy, technology and engineering.
In our hands communications transforms the way businesses engage with their markets. Our award-winning approach, creativity and market knowledge builds brands, increases sales, attracts investment and supports business growth.
About breatheHR: Life as a small business is exhilarating. By comparison the admin involved in people management can feel a bit mundane. Managing people shouldn’t be taxing; it should be straightforward and intuitive. Say hello to breatheHR, cloud-based software that equips businesses with the tools and confidence they need to create the best employee experience.
Born in 2012, breatheHR now helps 2,500 companies manage their people with over 90,000 employees in the system. breatheHR is also sold through a successful partner network now supporting over 150 HR partners. Clients include: Mazars, ramsac, Digital Fibre and OneFile.
breatheHR is the trading name for Centurion Management Systems Ltd who’ve been selling software for 21 years.
Aspectus has been reappointed by InnoEnergy, the innovation engine for sustainable energy in Europe, to act as its communications partner across the continent.
London, 22nd June, 2017 – InnoEnergy, the innovation engine for sustainable energy, has chosen Aspectus to help drive the company’s engagement with the European market for the third consecutive year.
Following a formal procurement process, InnoEnergy selected Aspectus for its track record of successfully building sustainable energy brands, and for access to its pan-European network, the Aspectus Cloud. Aspectus has proactively built the Cloud to deliver anywhere and it will provide on-the-ground support as the accelerator seeks to further enhance its reputation as a creator and driver of, and investor in, new ideas and technologies that will make a real difference to Europe’s energy future.
Raj Ghelani, Marketing Director at InnoEnergy, says: “The European energy sector continues to change at an astounding rate. So, it’s of paramount importance that we engage an agency with its finger on the pulse of developments and that fully understands the wider market.
“We’ve got big ambitions to grow our portfolio across Europe. This requires support from the right communications partners in the right places. And we need those partners to approach PR in an innovative fashion – not just generating coverage for the sake of it, but creating and delivering the right strategy to get us in front of the right audiences at the right time. That’s why we chose Aspectus.”
This partnership will see Aspectus deliver a range of projects for InnoEnergy, ranging from traditional thought leadership and messaging to news, blogs and visual content. Aspectus will also support a number of events, including The Business Booster, InnoEnergy’s two-day international networking event that connects leading industries and bright minds to enable tomorrow’s sustainable energy solutions today.
Laura Iley, Head of Energy, Oil and Gas at Aspectus, says: “We have really enjoyed supporting InnoEnergy over the past two years and look forward to continuing to work together over the next 12 months. Through the support it provides for its partners, InnoEnergy has proven itself a true champion of innovative technology and we’re excited to help the team communicate their exceptional achievements across Europe.”
InnoEnergy is headquartered in Eindhoven, The Netherlands, with a wider communications team based in nine countries across Europe. Aspectus will use its specialisms in both energy and technology to work directly with the team to deliver both in-country and pan-European communications support.
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About Aspectus Aspectus, the engagement agency, is an international communications agency specialising in financial services, energy, technology and engineering.
In our hands communications transforms the way businesses engage with their markets. Our award-winning approach, creativity and market knowledge builds brands, increases sales, attracts investment and supports business growth.
London, 10th April, 2017 – Aspectus, the specialist communications agency for the financial services, energy, technology and engineering sectors, has been appointed by Edinburgh-based cyber security start up ZoneFox to deliver its UK communications programme.
Aspectus was appointed as the company’s UK communications agency after a successful project to launch its machine learning platform, ZoneFox Augmented Intelligence (AI). Alongside a traditional PR programme, Aspectus will also work with ZoneFox to deliver a fully integrated search and PPC programme.
Founded by Dr Jamie Graves, ZoneFox specialises in providing world-class security systems that effectively combat the growing business issue of insider threats. Graves spun ZoneFox out of Napier University, where he was studying for his PhD, in 2010. Over the last seven years the company has grown to 22 people and in February of this year closed a £3.6M round of investment – the largest book to be closed by Archangels, one of the longest standing VC syndicates in Europe.
Lynsey Jenkins, Marketing Director, commented: “Aspectus is proactive, creative and has an innate understanding of the security market. Acting as our brand ambassador and delivering a constant source of press opportunities, Aspectus will massively help ZoneFox elevate our brand in a very noisy market and engage with our audiences around our User Behaviour Analytics (UBA) platform, technical expertise and USPs.”
Sophie Hodgson, Head of Technology, Aspectus added: “ZoneFox is such a fast paced, dynamic and exciting company. We’re thrilled to be working with them and have already seen some great results. Moving forward we want to utilise our expertise and relationships in order to establish the company as the authority on User Behaviour Analytics and the insider threat, by promoting their award winning technology and Jamie and the team’s expertise across multiple channels.”
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About ZoneFox
ZoneFox focuses on providing world-class security systems that effectively combat the growing business issue of insider threats. Through ground-breaking and sophisticated machine learning technology it provides rapid insights that are critical for helping businesses create a strong security posture, all from a single dashboard. This allows security teams to see where business-critical data is going, who is accessing it and importantly who is doing things with it they shouldn’t be – either accidentally or maliciously – quickly, easily and without impacting on endpoints or user privacy.
Based in Edinburgh, ZoneFox is headed up by Dr Jamie Graves, a former PhD student at Edinburgh Napier University. In November, it launched a new machine based learning solution, called ZoneFox Augmented Intelligence (AI). The product, which is the most advanced of its kind to be developed in the UK, has been created over the course of six years and is targeted at a wide range of business sectors.
About Aspectus
Aspectus, the engagement agency, is an international communications agency specialising in financial services, energy, technology and engineering.
In our hands communications transforms the way businesses engage with their markets. Our award-winning approach, creativity and market knowledge builds brands, increases sales, attracts investment and supports business growth.
Blockchain has become the poster child for the challenge of building a fintech brand.
The distributed ledger technology that supports the bitcoin digital currency has been heralded by some as the ultimate fintech solution for transaction efficiency. Others, including a number of the financial institutions that need to buy into it, see blockchain as an incessant push for yet more technology that hasn’t been proven trustworthy or necessary. After all, sales pitches for banking ingenuity have been going strong for about 4,000 years. That’s roughly when an entrepreneur sold the first customer on the idea of storing a season of hard-earned grain in the entrepreneur’s vault, with trust that the small trinket they walked away with would prove there was wealth being protected.
From trinkets to blockchain, disruption in financial services throughout history started with proving that change was needed, dispelling mistrust and providing reassurance that wealth is protected.
There’s no shortage of blockchain solutions and innovators ready to alleviate the concerns blockchain brings. That may be any brand’s biggest problem: The sheer number of solutions crowding the fintech landscape. Once convinced a technology change must be made, a financial institution must wade through sales pitches and news articles to find something that can be trusted as well as have a sense of what competitors agree is the solution.
It takes more than just being the best solution. Could Apple have disrupted without Steve Jobs? Would electric cars be taken seriously without Elon Musk? Whoever pushes blockchain to the front of the fintech line will project a unique personality that offers a brand that can be trusted. Blockchain may be new, but looking through the lens of experienced public relations and marketing among fintech disruption, building the blockchain brand is rooted in time-tested best practices:
1. Being different is important – but being someone is critical
Before you can tell the world who you are, you need to make sure you know yourself – and what makes you different. One of the easiest ways to do something that no one else is doing is to have an identifiable personality. Your brand is your product, therefore your brand needs to be distinct and accessible and visible. It’s a critical component to building positive relationships with the press and other influencers you need to tell your story. An identifiable brand builds credibility in the fintech industry and gets the attention of the people needed to help expand the business. This requires a spokesperson who can infuse personality into a company or solution.
2. Know your own story
Your message is what sets you apart. That messaging should be consistent and woven into every narrative you have. Everyone in the blockchain world has a story to tell, but the standouts know how to tell the same story over and over again with consistent passion. That means across social media, in press interviews, across your website and throughout your sales and marketing collateral.
3. Ask for help when it’s time to tell your story
You may be good at tech and financial services. That doesn’t mean you’re good at telling your story. Not many leaders can dedicate the time it takes, day in and day out to sell their story. That’s where you find the value of partnering with an evangelist, someone who can talk to all of your audiences with the same zeal you have for your business. Specialist communication pros make good hype teams, and may be even more excited about your plans. A good PR partner will be instrumental in building a strong identity, and getting you in front of the right people using the right channels.
4. It’s not all (always) about you
Would you go to a cocktail party and insist on only talking about how great you are? It tends to turn people off. The same social grace can be applied to your branding. Once you launch a product into market, it’s critical you’re seen as plugged into the market. Work with someone who can insert you into the conversations already happening. Meeting journalists face-to-face will deliver ROI over a long term if you establish that you can help them understand the market as much as they can help you get visibility in the market. Have an opinion on the industry that is shaped by your own key messages.
5. Know your customers and know their rules
Knowing the market and what keeps financial service pros up at night is as important as knowing how your product works. Markets change, so a partner who is keeping tabs on competitors, legislators and more is invaluable. A PR firm will have launched many businesses and built them through to an end game. They most likely have worked in your core sector so know how it functions – the influencers, the media, the market structure and the regulations and rules that underpin it.
Blockchain has a shot at being the next great banking innovation. To make it work as promised, blockchain may need not one, but several, technologies and providers stitched together. Getting into that network takes visibility. Getting third-party validation from media is a time-tested route to building brands. Even the best product in any market is going to fail if no one knows about it.
London, 17th January, 2017 – Aspectus, the global communications agency serving the financial services, technology and engineering sectors, has appointed Annabel Rivero to its London-based financial services team.
Annabel joins Aspectus from Lansons where she spent more than three years representing clients in a variety of sectors including consumer and private banking, retail investment, asset management and insurance.
Commenting on her appointment Annabel said: “I’m thrilled to be joining such a dynamic and forward thinking agency. Since I started my career I’ve gained a range of experience in areas such as strategic planning, content creation and executing consumer campaigns. I am really excited about building on my current skill set with the help of the financial services team at Aspectus.”
Katy Galasinski, Group Director, Aspectus, added: “New talent is key to supporting the growth of the agency so we are really pleased to have Annabel on board. We are continuing to expand as our combined approach to content, media and search and award-winning communications results attracts interest across our sectors. Annabel’s experience, especially in consumer finance, is a great fit to complement the work which we are doing on the financial services team.”
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About Aspectus
Aspectus, the engagement agency, is an international communications agency specialising in financial services, energy, technology and engineering.
In our hands communications transforms the way businesses engage with their markets. Our award-winning approach, creativity and market knowledge builds brands, increases sales, attracts investment and supports business growth.
