What To Do About Your Low-Utility IR Site, Part 2: Embrace Intra-Quarter IR
Part 1 of this post outlined how to dive much deeper into whether or not a company’s typical, traditional IR syncs up with the ways that investors and trading software actually interact with its shareholder web presence. In many cases, they don’t, for the reasons we explained here. In this post, we talk about how to activate analysis and digital analytics to make the typical IR function far more impactful.
Intra-Quarter Marketing - Go From Passive Quarterly IR to Active, Always-On IR
Once a company has used analytics to define a digital IR baseline, most often it will need to make three types of general changes to their IR sites:
They need to more-permanently and clearly highlight compelling information about their addressable markets, and about their actual business model
They need to create a space - basically, an investor blog - for real-time, self-published content
They need to re-organize their main IR page so that it features not just the latest quarterly results, but items 1 & 2 above, as well as a clearer, more urgent email capture mechanism
The core shift in investor-marketing mindset reflected here: companies do not, and should, not, rely on 4x per year disclosure of financials to support their stock price.
Even if you add in occasional conference attendance, the average small-to-mid-cap company - and many large caps - really only touch the capital markets on average once a month.
This creates a major discoverability problem for the average company and its investors. There are 250-plus trading days in the average year - and trading takes place 24 hours a day, even after hours and on weekends. You can visualize this discovery challenge a bit like Figure 1:
Figure 1
Most of this trading is algorithm or AI-driven, with no humans in the decision loop. That trading is driven not only by fundamentals, like a company’s performance data. It’s driven by technical factors, sector and competitor comparisons, macroeconomic factors and many other screens.
Most importantly, Sinter’s found that a lot of investment decision-making is driven by the relevance and recency of qualitative information. Software will find results from 45, and even 365, days ago and consider that. But it will often score day-of competitor and sector information more highly.
How do you keep your definitions of markets, business models and performance relevant and recent, without releasing new, material information?
You publish commentary that takes your performance over the past few quarters and contextualizes it in the present.
Did you predict something about the market or your supply chain two quarters ago? Publish a reminder.
Did an analyst or major publication issue an article that validates the way you run your business? Publish commentary on that.
Do investors keep asking a very basic question over and over, suggesting they don’t understand something fundamental about the company? Create an infographic, and publish it.
With proper analytics, properly understood, to hand, a company can create an editorial calendar and an algorithmic lexicon that can help companies create a weekly cadence of influential content for both human investors and algorithms.
Couple this with systematic, strategic social amplification, ongoing traffic and investor analysis, and direct emails to the most engaged analysts, investors and even partners? The average public company suddenly becomes a lot more visible and influential with respect to managing its market capitalization and engaging shareholders.
Some of these updates will need 8K’s, some will not. Some might merit a press release - but the point is not to clutter the market up with more releases, which increasingly have limited impact.
The point is to teach investors, analysts and algorithmis that your IR site is a weekly destination worth visiting regularly in order to understand not just the business, but your whole sector.
Put another way, without changing baseline IR activity, any company can make that activity far more impactful by upleveling its IR site, leveraging digital and social analytics and content, and starting intra-quarter shareholder marketing.
