EY’s “Reporting”: A Strong Example of a Customer Magazine
One of the best ways for companies to communicate their stories to current and prospective customers is the customer magazine. Done right, a customer magazine gives a company a great opportunity to cover various aspects of its business in an informative, engaging and familiar way, and to appeal to the target audience with content that is meaningful and relevant to them.
EY’s Reporting magazine is a strong example of a customer magazine from a professional services organization. It enables the assurance, tax, transaction and advisory services firm to make what’s generally a pretty dry and fuzzy topic—corporate assurance—accessible and interesting. It also provides a platform for highlighting the issues on which EY’s assurance practice can provide in-depth expertise while keeping executives informed of leading practices that can help them improve their assurance function.
Reporting highlights the expertise of the firm’s professionals, which should be the core goal of a customer magazine for any company whose primary “product” is its professionals’ knowledge and advice. But the magazine also makes good use of non-EY experts in the form of interviews with and articles by executives from other organizations (some of which are likely EY clients), which makes the magazine more interesting, diverse and, importantly, more credible. And many of the articles in Reporting are drawn from or based on other EY documents, such as white papers and research reports. This approach helps extend the use of material already created (thus increasing the ROI on that content) and alerts customers to more in-depth content they may not have been aware of. It also provides a steady stream of editorial source content for the magazine and helps ensure consistency of message across the practice’s publications.
Finally, the design and editorial quality in Reporting is uniformly high. The articles feature strong narratives about the concerns of EY’s customers and are written in a journalistic style that is suitable for publication in external magazines or journals. That’s critical to helping the magazine stand out from the myriad other content vying for customers’ attention and time, and to ensuring the magazine remains relevant and provides value to its target audience.
In all, Reporting leaves readers with a positive impression of EY’s expertise in the corporate assurance arena, and is a worthy ambassador for the firm’s assurance practice.
