What To Do About Your Low-Utility IR Site, Part 1: Go Digital & Get Analytical
In our prior post, we described the low expectations most companies have for their IR sites, and the low web-presence utility that flows from that. We itemized what IR sites could do better for public companies. This post explains more about how easy it is to act on this advice and why it makes sense. Specifically, we describe how to activate most companies’ biggest unused valuation lever: intra–quarter digital and social investor marketing.
Changing Your IR Site Isn’t Like Changing Your Company Site
Though they aren’t usually web developers, management teams and even Boards know that big changes to websites usually mean expensive, time-consuming work. Web presences now link so many audiences in so many ways that adjusting them can feel like an endless butterfly effect exercise.
Upleveling the average IR site is actually much easier.
The reasons for this are a bit in the weeds for this post. Really, all the typical CFO/IRO needs to know is that 1) there’s significant ROI on a reasonable investment of time/$$ - and 2) that most IR pages can be adjusted without much if any impact on the rest of a typical company main site.
Define Your Investor Baseline
Before a company tweaks anything however, you have to establish a basis for making changes. Otherwise, you might make your IR program less, rather than more, useful.
Review your IR-site traffic and engagement analytics*
Evaluate and segment direct investor interactions - emals, calls, webcasts, conferences
Compare this data with 13F/13D-G data and NOBO list information
Matrix 1-3 against an event, sector, product and competitive calendar for 6 months
Perform an AI-enabled NLP trading analysis of your company/sector/competitor publicly available qualitative information**
*Note: some companies don’t have analytics turned on at all for their IR sites. If that’s the case, enable them and then proceed.
**Note also: this screen requires special tools/expertise - but is one of the best ways for small-to-mid-cap companies to regain an ability to advantage themselves with respect to algorithmic trading.
Questions you’ll want to answer include:
What IR content and pages have the highest/lowest engagement?
What traffic patterns emerge, during what windows?
How much, if any, traffic comes from social sources, vs. direct searches vs referrals?
How much time do visitors spend on the IR landing pages? What’s the bounce and exit rate for those pages?
What’s the breakdown and recurrence of investor questions, their sentiment, assertions?
How do those time-traffic dynamics map, or not, to earnings, stock price movements, competitor activity and other announcements and events?
What qualitative data and language is associated with your company in general, across all filings, press, and online information? Your sector? How does this compare to the competition?
Basically, you are looking for patterns and/or gaps between investor interest and company information and messaging. These patterns and gaps and related analytics should guide changes to the IR site.
Many clients - even if they think they understand their investors and analysts - suddenly find this exercise defines, in clear, quantitative terms, new opportunities to improve their alignment with shareholders. For example:
Chances are that IR web traffic spikes for earnings and other large announcements like a CEO change or product launch, but then falls immediately.
Traffic and engagement can also spike at times unrelated to announcements - but correlate with market or competitor activity or technical trading considerations.
Key parts of earnings announcements score poorly with respect to automated trading.
Now, some clients, especially those that are more web- and marketing-oriented, may believe that they update their sites with critical information each day. We hear as much at least a third of the time.
But in reality that critical information is seldom optimally relevant to influencing investors, analysts and algorithms - and proper assessment and analytics will show this, including revealing sometimes-long information gaps, where no influential information is issued at all.
These intra-quarter silences represent the lowest-hanging fruit for any company. Putting that time and an IR website to work doesn’t require new material disclosures. It just requires a clear, analytics-informed investor narrative; a capital markets editorial strategy; and a digital and social publishing capability.
At least half the time, the process above helps companies discover that their financial disclosures are not being interpreted by the markets the way they assume. We discuss how to address these kinds of challenges in part 2 of this post.
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