“Investors are customers. They buy and sell your shares”

Corporate comms is changing. Martin MacConnol asks how content marketing can help make it better

Three years back, I had one of those ‘same world, different planet’ moments. I was in a FTSE 100 HQ, and I asked the head of investor comms what research he had done on his annual report.

“What do you mean, research?”

“I mean, have you asked your investors and analysts what they rate in your annual report?”

To me, as a content marketer (or customer publisher, as it was then called), it seemed a no-brainer of a question. Investors are customers too. They buy and sell your shares. To have no insight into what they would value reading in a report seemed a good way of turning a six-figure spend into nothing more than a regulatory box-ticking exercise.

In fact, even for that conversation I had asked one of our finance writers at Wardour to do a small piece of research by asking some institutional investors and analysts what they thought would make FTSE reports more useful. (And therein lies a whole separate article.)

But for the comms client, the idea was shockingly new. Somewhat apologetically, he said they had never had the time to do it. As a result, he conceded, they had a report that no one valued producing and, he suspected, no one valued reading. But at least it kept the regulators happy.

I left the meeting feeling a little crestfallen. Content marketers have long understood the critical importance of delivering what the audience needs to hear, and not just what the corporate wants to say.

For a long time, this position led to a feeling that we were talking Greek when our prospective comms clients were talking Latin – and our success beyond the world of customer magazines was narrow as a result. But not any more: increasingly, our language is the one clients want to hear.

The reason is that the content marketing industry has proved itself in a way that other communications sectors can’t match.

Since 2007, the industry has been running one of the biggest pieces of independent research in the media world – the Advantage Study – and the results are consistently impressive. For instance, the latest cut of the data shows:

• The average customer magazine keeps a reader’s attention for 25 minutes
• 57% of consumers who receive customer magazines take some form of positive action as a result
• The average customer magazine is picked up 2.8 times and kept for two weeks.

Unsurprisingly, comms professionals and marketers have started to think: what learnings can we take from these content agencies and apply elsewhere? The key message is the one I outlined at the start. It boils down to: “Think not what your audience can do for you. Think what you can do for your audience.”

Our industry research shows that brands are more successful (and profitable) communicators when they become information services, talking about more than just their corporate push. Agencies like mine call it ‘added-value editorial content’, and we are seeing comms clients embracing it left, right and centre.

I’ll give just one small example of how it extends from the magazine world to the corporate comms world. In an annual report, why make it hard for an investor to see the value of the board’s credentials by simply giving a list of biographies? Why not add a little value by explaining how the mix of skills creates the best management team to deliver the vision? No one currently does it, yet from our audience research, investors and analysts want it.We know our peers, and you can rest assured that our experience is being replicated by them. Content marketers are on the move: expect to see them in a meeting near you soon.