Overview
One of the world’s largest investment banking and financial services companies was looking to create a best practices toolkit for its customers. Based on input from the organization’s sales and relationship management teams, the project leads had a preliminary list of potential topics. MiddleWay was engaged to flesh out the vision for the toolkit, develop and execute a plan to build it, and create materials that would resonate with customers and be truly useful in helping them gain maximum value from the organization’s solutions.

Opportunity
While some internal content existed, much of it was based on best practices material published annually in various industry surveys and reports — and readily used by competitors. MiddleWay saw an opportunity to go beyond standard industry best practices and: 1) curate a collection of unique internal insights; 2) deliver a toolkit of materials that would differentiate the organization and strengthen its position as a thought leader; and 3) celebrate the expertise of its people while satisfying multiple client engagement needs.

Solution
After conducting extensive discovery with stakeholders in client-facing roles, MiddleWay prioritized the organization’s list of topics, and added detail on where clients needed the most support and had questions related to its product set. Additionally, we conducted secondary research on similar materials published by competitors to identify areas where we could differentiate the organization’s offerings. Finally, we developed an approach that would showcase the organization’s thought leadership and make the toolkit content work harder by following three guiding principles:

• Tell success stories, create “heroes” and highlight achievements; we engaged teams of internal subject matter experts to help shape the content as contributors, and used quotes to illustrate their expertise, share their insights and highlight the work they do for their customers.
• Stage, repurpose and vary the depth and breadth of the content; we developed different formats to showcase the content so that it would work across multiple client engagement opportunities and support various marketing campaigns, channels and vehicles used along the customer journey.
• Apply journalistic principles and content curation tactics to hook, inform and inspire the intended audience; we created sound-bite worthy headlines, colorful graphics, and compelling themes, call-outs and storylines to keep readers engaged while serving up highly actionable, digestible content.

After developing an aggressive, rolling project plan for the top five topics identified, conducting research and auditing internal/industry sources for each one, MiddleWay held a series of working sessions with internal teams to capture field expertise and “case study call outs” to illustrate results achieved. Once the content was drafted, we created different cuts of the material to produce long form handbooks — including a generous amount of call-outs and sidebars that could be used for online/social media posts — as well as shorter, targeted documents like one page overviews, presentation slides and infographics.

Results
In addition to creating buzz for the new materials by engaging internal teams, the toolkit content celebrated the culture of the organization and fostered a feeling of teamwork and “pride of authorship” among those contributors who shared their knowledge and invested their time. Upon reviewing the final version of a handbook Foreword we drafted for her, one of the executives responded, “Oh my gosh: this is me, but with a blowout and a manicure. I approve all the changes. Thank you so much!”

Feedback from the project leads, contributors and the organization’s leadership team was incredibly positive. Further, the best practices content assets were one of the most frequently downloaded materials on the organization’s intranet site – second only to the sales presentation templates. And the content was repurposed multiple times and used on the website as posts and bylined pieces.

Finally, during the development process, MiddleWay captured important feedback from the field and shared suggestions for creating additional tools and materials that would help the organization better serve it customers and support its people going forward.