Creating an Annual Report (AR) is a labour of love. It’s likely the biggest piece of content your business will produce each year.
They are huge undertakings, with up-to-date financial and operational highlights, people news, sustainability impacts and business successes. All this content goes through multiple stakeholders across the business but is often forgotten about post publication.
We think your reporting content is a goldmine of opportunity, which should be repurposed to maximise engagement with relevant audiences across the year.
Making more of your reporting content
Developing an online summary of your AR on a dedicated page of the corporate site is a good way to start making more of the content. We did this for PPHE, creating a best-in-class online annual review (OAR), using bold content styling and animation to draw attention to KPIs and highlights. This achieved a 69% increase in engagement versus the 2022 edition.
Approaches we also recommend are an interactive page with infographics to address complex processes, videos to showcase your work or your people, and a map to highlight your global reach. For Informa, we set the benchmark for digital reporting, creating a visually rich page which not only repurposed content from the AR but also hosted content developed specifically for the OAR.
When executed effectively, OARs should act as a funnel back to the PDF version of the report, increasing awareness and engagement.
Update and incorporate
Repurposing AR content is a great way of keeping your corporate site up to date. AR content is written about the year just gone, so any financial highlights, case studies, people news or similar should be incorporated across the relevant website sections. For our clients, we recommend considering this as part of the reporting process.
Your website is your ‘shop window’ serving your multiple audiences; your investor section content will be different from your careers content, which in turn will be different to content for your suppliers. For C&C Group plc, we created an entire new website. As we were so familiar with the content, we conducted a content audit, comparing the website and the AR, repurposing the reporting content to keep all relevant audiences engaged.
Social media mavens
As social media continues to dominate modern communications, every business needs to consider how they come across on their social platforms.
A lot of the content in an AR can be segmented into mini campaigns of valuable content for social over several months. For example, a CEO review or Q&A, from the AR, could be filmed. This could feature the CEO or Chairperson discussing key highlights, segmented per highlight or report section to create an ongoing series of video content. Case studies are also very campaignable, lending themselves to more frequent releases with a wider appeal to broader audiences, such as customers and not just investors.
A couple of best-in-class examples include NGO ‘Raising The Village’ whose post on LinkedIn features a short video with key highlights of their past year as well as a sneak peek into what else is in the report. Confectionery company ‘Cake Box’ have created a campaign, posting about their AR weekly, teasing highlights and featuring a video of their MD discussing goals and key priorities.
If you want to know more about how we would help you make your reporting content shine online, please get in touch.