Communicating with your investors and giving them regular updates ensures that shareholders are well aware of your company’s strategic goals and plans. Without a strong strategy, it can leave your business vulnerable to inconsistent messaging and communication gaps. Both of these can result in a decrease in investor trust and impair your equity story.
Planning is one of the most important pieces of any investor relations strategy. As an example, the investor relations team at Netflix spends 40% of their time planning out the financial news and updates they will share with investors.
Let’s take a look at the eight most important components of an investor relations strategy. We’ll touch upon both the importance of setting goals and creating a plan, as well as a deeper dive into some essential pieces of a successful strategy.
One of the first steps you’ll want to take when building an investor relations strategy is to outline your goals for investor activity in the coming year. You can then use your stated goals to help you create a plan that is tailored to your specific intentions.
There are a number of essential steps to designing an effective investor relations strategy– you have to establish a well-grounded valuation for your company, gain a deep understanding of market and investor biases, and make sure you are targeting the right investors.
Beyond that, you will need to compose a compelling story and messaging plan that appeals to the investors you are looking to reach. You’ll also want to build a system for receiving, analyzing, and taking action on the feedback you receive in order to continuously improve your strategy.
All of these steps require that you have a firm understanding of what you are trying to accomplish and the type of relationship you want to build with your investors. If you start working on crafting your story before you understand your goals, for example, you’re likely going to miss the mark when it comes to achieving the outcome you’re looking for.
Where do you go when you want to learn about a company you’re thinking about investing in? If you’re like most people, you head to their website.
You need more than a piece of real estate on the web if you want to create a solid investor relations strategy– you need to make sure your website is professional, informative, and polished. Beyond that, it should be built from the usability perspective, so potential and existing investors can easily navigate and find the information and pages they’re looking for.
You should have dedicated investor relations pages on your site that offer concise and crystal-clear data about your objectives, products, history, and much more. For example, these pages can also include executive and board profiles, stock details, financial data, and contact information.
Other essential details to include on your IR pages include shareholder meeting materials and information, your events calendar, the latest corporate news, and links to conference presentations and webcasts.
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There are infinite ways you could tell your story to your existing and potential future investors. You don’t just want to write out the details of your timeline or throw together a story in a few minutes before lunch. You will want to be very deliberate in crafting your company’s story to help investors better understand the opportunity being presented to them.
Creating a clear yet persuasive story is a bit of an art. You don’t want to treat it like an overt sales pitch or stretch the truth with the goal of reaching heavy-hitter investors. At the same time, you’ll want to highlight your company’s strengths and where it sits within the industry’s landscape.
You’ve been so involved in your company’s story that it can be tempting to include every little detail about how you’ve gotten to where you are today. Too much information can mean that the major bullet points are lost in the shuffle. For this reason, it’s a good idea to hone in on a handful of main themes that will be most compelling to investors.
Your story isn’t just about the pitch you share with potential investors. This is a holistic messaging strategy that can be used as a part of all investor relations. The story that you craft is something that informs the tone, copy, and voice of every message you send your investors.
When you’re creating a strategy for communicating with investors, it’s easy to assume that all investors simply want a bullet point of facts to decide about a company. The truth is that even the most numbers-focused investors will be moved by compelling stories that speak to their emotions and values.
A successful investor relations plan is a balancing act– you don’t want to neglect current investors by focusing too much on seeking out new investors, while you also can’t solely direct your attention toward your existing relationships at the expense of new horizons.
To make sure that you are taking care of both sides of this equation, you’ll want to create a plan that allows you to meet and interact with key players. This might mean conducting investor days, attending conferences, hosting on-site visits, or embarking on road shows.
When you’re creating your plan, you’ll want to prepare ahead of time by selecting who will speak on behalf of the company and providing ample opportunity to rehearse elevator pitches and formal presentations.
As you build your schedule for connecting with investors, it can be a good idea to make sure that you’re attending a diverse array of events. There are important differences and nuances between the many types of investor activities, and it’s a good idea to avoid tunnel-visioning on one specific event type.
For example, non-deal roadshows are important but time-consuming. For this reason, you might be tempted to avoid them in favor of more efficient networking opportunities. The truth is, though, that investors are often more focused and prepared during these specialized events, and making the investment in attending this type of conference can be well worth the time.
Companies often find that there are seasons for both being more outward-facing and focusing attention internally. A good investor relations strategy will be able to constantly work to strike a balance between maintaining scarcity value and being visible.
Your company should have the image of running like a well-oiled machine. In order to maintain the confidence of the market, it’s essential to make it clear that your business is highly organized. Investors and analysts alike can start to get cold feet and doubts about your company when even the smallest change or gaffe crops up.
To ensure that you maintain your reputation as an organized and professional company, you’ll want to post a schedule and stick to it no matter what. If you find yourself in a situation where something on the schedule needs to be postponed, you’ll want to communicate transparently and thoughtfully with your investors right away.
Feedback is an invaluable resource when it comes to investor relations. One of your primary tasks is determining how to position your company best within the market. Learning what investors and analysts think about your company can be tremendously useful to this end.
In order to receive truly candid responses, you’ll want to have a third party conduct an independent perception audit. They collect impressions from investors (former, current, and potential investors alike) as well as analysts.
There are many different ways a perception audit can be run, and they often include an emailed survey and a phone interview. You might find the results of your perception audit to be illuminating, as you’ll likely be able to develop, overhaul, or change your investor relations strategy using the information gathered from this process. By learning what investors think needs improvement and what is resonating with them, you can make alterations that keep current investors engaged and help attract like-minded future investors.
When you’re auditing your investor relations strategy, it’s easy to want to build a completely new machine from scratch. However, don’t throw the past out the window before grabbing some of the most useful information that you can use to inform your new strategy.
For example, a good exercise is to make a list of all of the conference invitations you received the previous year, along with the bus tours, non-deal roadshows, and other events you attended or could have attended.
Looking at this list, along with notes about which events you attended and which you declined to attend, can help you gain a picture of where you might want to shift weight as you build a strategy for the coming year.
A strong investor relations strategy involves a plan for communicating with your investors both when you’re celebrating success and when you have less-than-ideal news to share.
Planning ahead for bumps in the road is essential when building an investor relations strategy. Even some of the most successful companies in the world have dealt with crises or disappointing financial results– having bad news in itself doesn’t have to mean a disaster for your investor relations.
In short, the way that you communicate negative news with your investors is more important, at some level, than what the news is in itself in many instances.
Chances are you will weather stormy seas in the future with much more agility and confidence if you build a plan now. If you don’t have a strategy for rainy days, it’s easy to make rushed decisions that don’t keep your bigger-picture goals in mind.
How you disclose information to investors, employees, regulators, and other stakeholders can have a major impact on your company’s future if you are dealing with a truly catastrophic situation. This means that you’ll want to nail down your company-wide procedures, choose a spokesperson, build a crisis communications team, and build a plan long before you are actively dealing with a crisis.
If your website is incomplete, outdated, or difficult to use, it means that your investor relations strategy isn’t nearly as polished as it could be. Most people head to the internet when they’re looking for information about a company they’re interested in, and a less-than-impressive site will lead them to bounce off more often than not. After all, they’re investing their hard-earned money in a business, and they want to be able to trust that they’re putting their money toward a project that has every reason to succeed.
Having a sleek, easy-to-use, and professional website is essential both to maintaining good relations with existing investors and reaching out to potential investors. Your current investors will appreciate being able to enter a dedicated investor relations portal to gather all the most vital information in one central location. New investors will be able to have a large portion of their questions answered by visiting your intuitively-organized site, helping to carry them down the funnel and increase the likelihood of conversion.
Are you ready to bring your digital presence to the level it deserves? Is it time to create an online space for investors to gain all of the information they need on a user-focused and stylish site? If so, contact us to get started boosting your online visibility, revamping your site, and giving your company the professional website it deserves.
Have any questions? If so, be sure to let us know! We’d love to talk to you and will gladly answer any of your potential questions.
