Double the Impact: How to Repurpose Your Annual Report Across your Marketing Program

Send your imagination back a few months ago. It’s the end of the year, your business has made great strides toward the ambitious social impact goals you’d set, and the glossy annual impact report showcasing these accomplishments has been released into the wild. Your investors love it. Maybe your customers even love it too, if you shared it with them. 

But for many companies, this is the end of the line for this showcase content. Now it collects digital dust until Q3 next year when it’s revisited to prep for the next year’s report. 

Those companies are leaving so much unmined content on the table! A ton of work has already gone into hitting your targets and compiling that narrative, and your brand should be able to reap the benefits of those positive stories all year long.

Here are 5 ways to leverage your impact story beyond the one-and-done annual report:

Chunk it out

Develop spotlight stories featuring what your company is doing to achieve just one of the goals, and what you’ve learned along the way. This could be content that you drip out once a month across all channels, focused on a different goal each time; could be fodder for infographic carousels across social media; could be a deeper dive interview on your blog. Or ideally all of the above! 

This is a great opportunity for some behind-the-scenes content that engages your customers and helps to bring them into your world, humanizing your brand. Note: you’ll want to focus on the process and on your learnings as a key way to position this storytelling in a more humble and gracious way, sharing your experience with customers and the industry at large, rather than a boastful opportunity for customers to congratulate you for hitting a goal (which…they won’t. Remember, it’s not really about you – it’s about why customers want to align with you: so they can see their aspirations reflected back at them through your great work.) 

Co-promote with a partner

Chances are, your company didn’t hit last year’s impact targets alone. Did you work with a measurement platform to track your progress? Did you engage an offset procurement provider to reduce your carbon footprint? Did you donate a portion of your proceeds to a particular cause, or sponsor a local philanthropic organization? These are all stories of successful partnership that you should be telling. 

Their audience are your potential customers (and the same could be said for them). This is a great way to align yourself with another brand doing meaningful work, to reach new audiences, and to, again, provide a peek behind-the-scenes to illuminate how your company is engaging with your impact goals. A story is much more memorable than a fixed number at the end of the day.

Bake reminders into your retention streams

No matter what your loyalty program looks like, the fact that your company is engaged in annual impact work means that you have a chance to thank customers not just for their purchase, but for being part of a movement. Whether you work these details into your new customer welcome communications or use them as fodder for more of a surprise-and-delight thank you to long tenured customers, the goal is to solidify their positive perception of your brand and to reaffirm their alignment with you.

Create a dedicated space to house impact content 

This should live somewhere on your website or blog. Beautiful bells and whistles are a plus, but even a simple landing page that links out to the PDF report you’ve already created will do the trick. Alternatively, you could add impact-focused copy to your “About Us” narrative. This will serve as the “learn more” destination for customers who are intrigued by the storytelling you’re doing in the steps above. Those customers who care about purchasing from conscious companies will take the time to do their research. Since you’re already doing the good work, make it easy for them to explore your impact. Just be sure you’re thinking about this page as part of your nurture or educational cycle, rather than a conversion-driving landing page. The goal is to build trust in your brand, which is best measured over time. 

Share regular updates

Provide quarterly – if not monthly – updates across your relevant marketing channels. Many brands shy away from more frequent communication out of fear that they won’t have made meaningful progress within these more regular time increments. However, if the update is that the number hasn’t changed but we’re still working toward it, that’s actually not a bad thing! It shows that you’re thinking about your next steps, the goals are top of mind across your company, and the desire to make an impact is more deeply embedded in your business strategy than checking a box at the end of the year. If you do have positive progress to report, all the better. The goal is to keep your company’s social impact goals top of mind for consumers, and the only way to do that is to talk about them. 

Want help fleshing out the impact communications strategy that makes the most sense for your specific marketing goals? Let’s chat.