Every article ends with “Related Insights,” which are tiles of three articles or case studies that invite the user to continue exploring. For example, in June 2020, J.P. Morgan published a case study about its $3.5 billion financing for Delta to help the airline navigate the unprecedented challenges created by COVID-19. The end of that article includes tiles for case studies of three other financings that J.P. Morgan completed that have some historical significance.

2. Dives deep into Proxy Season.

Many investment banks publish reports on shareholder activism and proxy voting activity. Some prominent examples include Lazard’s Quarterly Review of Shareholder Activism and Credit Suisse’s Shareholder Activism: an evolving challenge. We think that J.P. Morgan’s annual report, Proxy Season, is one of the better examples of this type of content.

In particular, we like how it includes short (one or two paragraphs) summaries of specific actions taken by activist managers, such as Wellington Management and T. Rowe Price. There are also short summaries of the ESG priorities of several leading passive investors (Vanguard, State Street, and CalPERS), activist managers (ValueAct Spring Fund, JANA Impact Capital, Impactive Capital, and Irrational Capital), and a proxy advisor (Glass Lewis). These summaries do an excellent job of quickly turning abstract trends into tangible stories.

3. Focuses on user pain points.

Unfortunately, much of investment banking thought leadership is an exercise in showing how much insight the bank has into a particular market or sector. And often the reader’s needs or concerns become an afterthought. J.P. Morgan does an outstanding job of avoiding this trap by focusing on the target audience’s pain points for its corporate finance thought leadership.

J.P. Morgan orients its corporate finance advisory reports around the dilemmas that a company’s executive team and board are wrestling with. This orientation can be seen in headlines and blurbs for white papers such as:

One Piece of Unsolicited Advice:

Make Landing Pages Easier to Scan

The primary goal of a landing page for a white paper, e-book, or other long-form content is to allow the user to quickly understand why they should want to invest time to explore further, which often includes providing an email address as the price of entry. An effective way to do this is by making the page easy to scan, including using bullet points or graphics to highlight the key takeaways that the reader will get from the full report.

J.P. Morgan does this well in several places, including the landing page for the Disrupt, or Be Disrupted white paper. But the 2019 Proxy Season landing page is simply two paragraphs of text. The highlights of the full report are embedded in the landing page’s paragraphs, but the reader has to work to find them. A simple bulleted list would solve this.