CiderChapman launched 5 flagship research reports
Before, CiderChapman's articles weren’t quite breaking through. They are one of the largest accounting firms in the U.S. with a great deal to say. But their content marketing results were uneven. Different internal practices had different writing acumen and some wrote about the news while others, ultra specific tax topics. The marketing and communications team needed to focus those efforts into a lean, annual burst of notoriety.
Fenwick pitched an “opportunity report” concept. This'd allow us to repackage whatever primary material each practice had into uniform-looking reports, no matter the information they provided. It also framed the report in terms of what CiderChapman's buyers wanted—insights they could act on.
Fenwick used the process of crafting the first five reports to build an internal playbook with checklists, templates, and documentation. Each report was designed to be endlessly decomposable—each page could turn into an article or series of posts that could be repurposed throughout the year. The result was a memorable format suited to their practices, which the company could then repeat on their own.
"It's the workmanship and just how skillfully the Fenwick team got those stories out of so many subject experts. Bravo."
Anon E. Imus
RESULTS
5 PDF reports
3 glossy videos
A strategy playbook
Team training
The full story: They needed to navigate fierce internal politics
CiderChapman (not their real name) had a years-long relationship with Fenwick when the idea for writing reports came up. The company is one of the largest private accounting businesses in the country and specializes in a range of things from tax to cybersecurity. Their customers look to them as one of the rare bastions of unbiased information for private companies—because while its competitors (the Big Four accountancies) tend to only focus on the largest 1% of businesses, CiderChapman has insights for all. Though this expertise wasn’t translating into the breakout publishing success they needed.
The Chief Marketing Officer, the Managing Partner of Industries, and the Head of Communications, reached out to Fenwick to launch a new project to take pressure off all others. Their goals were threefold:
- Create a program, not just one-off reports
- Make them so rich with information, they last a full year
- Document the process in such detail, others can repeat it
Projects like this are always, at their essence, a game of matching inputs and outputs. Of figuring out what wisdom, research, and ideas, we’d have to draw from, and the channels where they’d fit. In this case, we were all concerned about the bewildering variety of information and perspectives across their practices and hundreds of firm partners. Could we make one type of report to contain it all?
Tax insights are gripping to those they matter to
One thing we knew about CiderChapman is they’re at the bleeding edge of accountancy. Lots of companies apologize for their wonk and say, “Sorry, we’re not a sexy business.” Not CiderChapman. They are unapologetic about their zeal for state and local tax, and this is why so many thousands of executives trust them. We knew we were entering this project with access to true experts.
Yet their love of knowledge and precision had a shadow side. The firm's experts have a tendency to simply relay the facts. They tend to under-dramatize to the point of removing the story because it’s in their nature to report the actuals. But something else was needed for creating memorable, cross-channel reports. Their executive readers wanted more summarization and more story.
In research, we reviewed volumes of the company’s existing articles, reports, and webinars to understand the nature of all the personalities and data we’d be working with. We had tax law references, U.S. economic data, and surveys of thousands of private companies. At the same time, we looked at how their customers consume that information—largely relying on CiderChapman to tell them where to focus their attention.
And so, what tends to have their buyer’s attention? Economic opportunities. They wanted to know how to alter their tax strategy or update their financial system to run a fitter company.
The unifying bolt of inspiration came from thinking about Richard Linklater’s film, Boyhood, shot over twelve years in many small spurts. When asked how you plan for a project like that, the director replied:
“I had the outline, the architecture was there … but I left some of the specifics undone. It was like the music was written but the lyrics were being filled in. I was collaborating with time and the world and the kids growing up and the adults changing."
The CiderChapman partners were our actors. The comms team, our studio. We pitched the idea and with broad agreement, created a bill of materials and a calendar, then set about creating the first of the series.
We learned through each report
There was a moment in this project where Fenwick’s “Go slow to go fast” approach got the CiderChapman team concerned. We did so much research and had so many interviews with the Real Estate Practice they got to feeling like maybe we wouldn’t ever publish—though we did. The bulk of it was ready, we were just perfecting the ideas before we released the first one. With plenty of hard work on their part, we got it out there, including an onsite video shoot run by our partner Failure Island in Brooklyn.
With each successive report, we learned in the way you only can firsthand, how to assemble the various materials for CiderChapman. The Real Estate Practice had us tabulating commercial vacancy rates across various markets. The Manufacturing and Distribution Practice focused on economic data as relayed by an economist, and the Financial Services Practice narrowed its focus to just private equity, based on a series of surveys they’d published on emerging managers.
We involved outside CiderChapman partners and analyst firms, gathered quotes from experts throughout the company, and proofed and checked and reformatted until satisfied.
We took the typical Fenwick long view throughout—our design team thought through a convention for the first report that’d allow all five to look related, but individually unique—like a book series on a shelf.
It was a great collaboration. The CiderChapman team went beyond to help us uncover not just material, but genuine, unique substance worthy of their readers’ attention. They got into the details with us. In the Brooklyn filming studio, the Managing Partner earned the title "Spielberg." All that effort resulted in a product we aren’t just pleased with, but that also worked.
Launching the reports
The final format works well; we produced launch packages of social graphics, ads, and articles to kick off a promotion cycle the CiderChapman marketing team would continue on after us. We revised the playbook and organized it into SharePoint with templates, and held a training for a marketer to walk through.
The results mostly speak for themselves and the Managing Partner, we presume, speaks for everyone.
And maybe most fun, is these reports spread far enough to reach us at home. Over the following holidays, Clarissa saw her brother-in-law, who works in staffing, reading something on his computer, with the tell-tale blue accents of one of our very own reports. And she was delighted to say, we helped make that.
