Beginner’s Guide: You’re Already in Public Relations; You Just Don’t Know It.

PR and the Accounting Firm: Why Media Relations Is Already Part of Your Marketing Strategy

 As a marketer, your attention is probably focused on tasks such as building your firm’s digital presence, nurturing existing client relationships and working in your CRM to track prospects through the pipeline. Public relations (PR), if it crosses your mind at all, might feel like a separate world – something for big corporations, handled by a PR agency with a corner office and an established list of journalists.

The exciting news, though, is that PR isn’t separate from your marketing strategy at all; it’s not only a natural extension of it, but it may be one of the most cost-effective and potentially the most impactful tools in your mix. To quote Oscar Wilde, “There is only one thing in life worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about.”

Let’s discover how to change your mindset around PR to make the most of your hard-earned efforts.

What Brand Alignment Actually Means

Before we talk about PR specifically, let’s ground ourselves in what brand alignment means across channels. Brand alignment is the consistency between how you describe yourself as a firm and how the outside world actually experiences you as a firm. It’s the gap – or, ideally, the absence of a gap – between your messaging and your reputation.

Your marketing does a lot of work to establish that identity: for example, your website communicates experience and approachability, your social content reinforces your thought leadership and your proposals reflect your firm’s values. But marketing is, by nature, a one-directional conversation; you control the message, the timing and the channel. You’re speaking, and your audience is listening – or so we hope.

PR introduces an important third contributor into the conversation: a trusted, influential source of information supporting what you claim to be true. That third-party validation is what makes PR so powerful for brand alignment. When a local business journal quotes one of your partners on year-end tax planning, or when your Managing Partner is cited in a trade publication discussing a regulatory change, the credibility of that moment is qualitatively different from anything your firm can say about itself. It reinforces your brand story, but it does so through someone else’s platform and someone else’s editorial judgement. That’s alignment that marketing alone simply cannot manufacture.

Why It Feels Different from Marketing, But Isn’t

Here’s where marketers sometimes get tripped up. Most of what you do is explicitly B2B in that you’re targeting business owners and decision makers at companies that either are or could become clients. Every campaign has a target audience, a conversion goal and a measurable outcome.

PR doesn’t work that way, and that can feel uncomfortable when you’re used to tracking clicks, opens and actions.

When you pitch a story to a reporter, you’re not pitching to your client. You’re pitching to a journalist. When that journalist covers your firm or quotes your Partner, the resulting article is distributed to their readership, which might include your ideal prospects – but it might also include your competitors, your referral partners, your employees and your community. That’s not a B2B transaction; it’s something broader and less tidy.

But that’s precisely why it works. Your clients and prospects don’t live only inside a sales funnel. They read the news and follow industry publications. They see who their peers are quoting and reading. When your firm shows up in those spaces as a legitimate contributor to public knowledge instead of as an advertiser, you earn credibility, which is something no marketing budget can buy.

Think of it this way: your marketing strategy is building a case for why your firm should be trusted. PR is what happens when someone other than you makes that case on your behalf.

Media Relations as a Reciprocal Relationship

The word “reciprocal” matters here. Good media relations isn’t a cold transaction where you send a press release into the void and hope something sticks. It’s a relationship, and like all good relationships, it works best when both parties are getting something of value.

Journalists and editors, especially those covering local business, regional finance or trade topics, need sources. They need credible and reliable professionals who can explain complex topics clearly, turn around a quote on deadline and bring genuine insight rather than thinly veiled advertising. When your firm consistently delivers that, you become that reliable resource they’re looking for. Reporters start calling you, not just the other way around.

For your firm, the benefit is obvious in regards to visibility, credibility and brand reinforcement. But the reason this feels like a natural extension of marketing, rather than a departure from it, is that the content you’re offering the media is usually content you’re already creating. That white paper on the new revenue recognition standard? It’s a pitch. That partner who just presented at an industry luncheon on tax strategy and risk mitigation? They’re a source. The firm’s take on a high-profile IRS ruling (like OBBBA)? That’s a story.

Your marketing strategy, if it’s doing its job, is already generating ideas, experienced knowledge and thought leadership. PR is the distribution channel that gets those ideas in front of audiences you couldn’t reach on your own and does it in a way that carries the implicit endorsement of the publication doing the reporting.

Where to Start

If you’re new to this, you don’t need to hire a PR firm to get started. Depending on the size and goals of your firm, you likely never will. Begin by identifying the reporters and editors who cover business, finance and professional services in your markets. Subscribe to their publications, follow them on LinkedIn and comment on their work. Notice what they write about. If you’re feeling bold, reach out directly and offer to take them to lunch and get to know them and their need for resources. When your firm has something genuinely useful to contribute or a unique perspective on trends you’re seeing among clients or something in the news, draft a short, direct pitch, send it and ask for feedback.

Be patient. Media relationships build over time. The first pitch may not land. The second might get a response but not a story. The third might become a quote, and the fourth might become a feature. The roadmap to features isn’t linear though, so it bears worth repeating to be patient. What you’re building is not a campaign; it’s a reputation. And over the long arc of your firm’s marketing efforts, reputation is the asset that compounds most reliably.

PR won’t replace your digital strategy, your client communications or your pipeline work. But it will do something none of those efforts can do alone in making the outside world say, on its own authority, that your firm is worth listening to. That’s brand alignment – and that’s worth every pitch.