Investor relations (IR) professionals have many opportunities to enhance their communications strategies and better reach their target audiences.
According to IR Magazine’s 2023 Global Investor Relations Practice Report, just under 80% of IR leaders surveyed said that IR websites were an effective tool for engaging institutional investors. At the same time, only 65% of institutional investors find IR websites very useful when researching new investment opportunities, and 63% say the same about IR websites for companies they already invest in.
How do IR practitioners change this? How should we rethink our communications strategies? I recently moderated a virtual panel on behalf of the NIRI Orange County Chapter that sought to answer just that.
Our expert panel — which featured insights from Eli Marcus of The Buddy Group, Darrell Heaps of Q4 and Tiffany Bullock of Uncapped Communications — discussed how a modern approach to investor communications requires heads of IR to leverage a marketing mindset, invest in visual mediums and better utilize owned digital assets such as IR websites and social media.
Watch the full panel recording below, or keep reading for our key takeaways.
Aligning IR with Marketing To Amplify Reach and Maximize ROI
At Arbor, we believe that investor relations teams can take a similar approach to investor engagement as their marketing counterparts. Although the two disciplines may have different goals and benchmarks for success, both must identify core audiences, proactively engage with them and deliver clear communications that call for action.
Eli Marcus, Vice President of The Buddy Group, shared his thoughts on how IROs can evolve their communications by thinking like and integrating with marketing teams.
The Intersection of IR and Marketing
Eli Marcus, Vice President of The Buddy Group
Traditionally, IR has been perceived as a function that is responsible for — and perhaps limited to — sharing financial data and regulatory information with investors. However, marketing’s transformation from powering sales to fostering trust is in many ways analogous to the IR function’s recentering from regulatory-focused communications to investor-focused communications. Both present opportunities to better adopt more engaging, multi-channel and visual touch points.
Investor Days, for example, are full of possibilities for publicly traded companies that are willing to invest in audience-centered messaging and high-quality production value. While there is nothing more impactful than an in-person Investor Day event, the reality is that a large percentage of audiences will attend virtually. Gold-standard events moving forward should think through how to communicate to and engage both in-person and virtual attendees.
So, what does an Investor Day look like from the perspective of a marketer?
- Invest in the virtual experience. As remote audiences outgrow in-person attendance, webcasts can no longer be secondary to the in-person experience.
- Strategically position your Investor Day within your broader communication roadmap. When Investor Day events look and feel like your corporate marketing and branding, you can repurpose the materials across your entire communications strategy.
- Communicate like a storyteller. Communicating from an accounting or finance perspective is standard practice in investor relations, as storytelling is not the primary focus. While it is the responsibility of the IRO to present information that is unbiased, factual and informed by data, messaging that lacks a storytelling element may not capture an investor’s attention.
- Integrate with marketing and sales departments. Properly leveraged Investor Days yield the highest return on management’s time spent with investors out of any investor relations activity. However, budget can be and often is a constraint. Consider aligning with your marketing counterparts to pool or share the budget, as the content created for an investor day can also support external marketing initiatives and other business functions.
The Criticality of IR Websites
Darrell Heaps, CEO and Founder, Q4
It’s not uncommon for the efficacy of IR websites to be questioned; many IROs cite Bloomberg and other financial terminals as investors’ preferred methods of conducting research. But data from Q4 tells a different story. The 2,600 IR websites on the Q4 platform attract a staggering 18 million investors every month, and nearly a third (30%) of these visitors are investors coming from institutions.
Q4’s aggregated analytics not only point to whether or not institutional investors are frequenting your site, but they can also identify the content they are most often viewing. At a high level, Q4’s data revealed that investors are visiting your website to validate financials, news, filings and reports directly from the source; revisit past presentations; and review your corporate governance.
Best Practices for Structuring IR Website Content
If we know with certainty that investor audiences are engaging with IR websites, then it is well worth the time to structure content to articulate your business strategy and long-term value proposition.
1.Treat the IR website as a disclosure platform. Today’s IR leaders must understand how all of their activities translate to digital channels. It’s no longer just about the destination of your information, but how that information rapidly proliferates out into the market.
Major publications like Bloomberg and S&P function as information centers for investors, but they also act as distributors. That means that the moment you upload a new investor presentation to your site, you can expect these publishers to scrape and republish your content on their platforms. Therefore, it’s crucial to view your investor website as a disclosure platform, ensuring all information is current and easily accessible.
Make sure your site stays up-to-date with the latest developments, financial reports and news. If the content of the IR site is not updated or compelling, you are potentially missing the opportunity to broadcast your story across the internet, specifically on these popular financial terminals.
2. Structure content for easy access. Relatedly, the content on the IR website should be structured in a way that is easy for both investors and data aggregators, such as Bloomberg and S&P, to access. Avoid overly unique layouts that could hinder a bot’s ability to scrape your content.
3. Leverage media assets. Presentations, videos and visuals can significantly enhance the storytelling aspect of your IR website and present information in a format that is easy and quick to digest. Chances are high that your marketing or sales teams have already developed collateral that could be adopted wholesale or adjusted to fit your investor site.
4. Give investors what they want, but market your story to them, too. Think of your website as a service desk where investors — many of whom will be repeat visitors — can quickly and easily find the information they are seeking. While they are on your site, however, you have the opportunity to showcase your brand. As investors download the latest news or review financials, your content should be positioned and messaged to highlight your company’s brand story.
Crafting a Social Media Strategy for Investor Relations
We know that investors are on social media and using these platforms in their decision-making. In fact, nearly 80% of institutional investors use social media as part of their regular workflow.
Tiffany Bullock, Vice President of Digital at Uncapped Communications, shared how investor relations teams can better utilize social media platforms — X (formerly Twitter) and LinkedIn in particular — to own the narrative around their company’s investment story.
Engaging, Informing and Instilling Confidence Through Social Media
Tiffany Bullock, Vice President of Digital, Uncapped Communications
A robust IR social strategy must accomplish three primary goals:
- Engage: In order to stand out in social feeds and reach investor audiences, your social messaging must be compelling. Information from an investor website or press release can and should be republished to social channels, but it must be reformatted and distilled to its major themes.
- Inform: Attention is a scarce resource. Social posts need to provide investors with the top-line information they need for their decision-making — and do so using formats that are easy to digest.
- Instill confidence: Using your company and executive social channels can demonstrate not only a strong presence in the market but also a strong leadership body that is committed to keeping the company on the right track.
Similar to marketers, IR professionals can leverage graphics and videos to engage, inform and instill confidence and in a more attention-grabbing format than words alone. As you prepare content for social, consider how you can translate your story into more visual formats, such as charts, quotes from your executives or eye-catching stats.
Effective social strategy extends beyond a regular posting cadence; it should be fully intertwined with your other communication channels. A social post recapping a recent press release, for example, should link to the original press release on your website, further funneling viewers toward your owned online assets. Frequently posting relevant, engaging content can also help investor relations teams own their narrative on search engines (namely, Google), as their posts may begin to appear in search results for relevant queries.
Social Media Best Practices
Consider the following best practices for social content development for the investor community:
- Include your stock ticker symbol. Similar to using hashtags, adding your stock ticker symbol at the end of your post will help your post appear in search results, as investors often use them as a search term.
- Take an audience-centric approach. Your content calendar should be fine-tuned to include only what will be of interest to target investors. Business updates, earnings, acquisitions, mergers and other significant transactions are great places to begin.
- Repurpose existing content. As you review your investor presentations and the investor section of your website, identify content that you can add to your social media calendar. Highlight aspects of your business that differentiate you from competitors, and ask yourself if your message would be more engaging if accompanied by a graphic or video.
- Establish your leadership team as thought leaders. While telling the company’s story through corporate channels is effective on its own, heads of IR can further reinforce investor conviction when their leadership team is visibly engaged on their own social platforms.
Final Thoughts
Today’s investor relations professionals can evolve their communication strategies to align with the changing ways in which they connect with their target audiences. By engaging with marketing teams, optimizing IR websites and leveraging social media, IROs will find they have a much more robust communications toolbox for amplifying their message and making better use of their existing content.
Interested in hearing more about our approach to strategic communications? Read how our Investor Day strategy increased our client’s valuation and attracted three times as many online participants as in-person.
