The Investor Relations portion of your website is a critical part of an investor’s learning experience surrounding your company. Both potential and current investors use your IR website as a quick reference page for financial information or calendar notifications as well as a way to familiarize themselves with your company’s earnings history, board and management profile or the overall company positioning. Your IR website should demonstrate your corporate transparency and professionalism. In a study conducted by Cision in 2017 (Shareholder Confidence 365 Study), approximately 50% of institutional investors said they would not invest in a company that did not have an IR website, and close to 60% of individual investors felt the same.
Regardless of why investors are using your IR website, there are some important items to make sure you include on it. Below we’ll take a look at some of those key factors.
- The tangible data: The core purpose of an IR website is to provide your shareholders or potential investors with the fundamentals of the stock, stock price, earnings releases, press releases, company presentations, earnings transcripts, filings (such as 10-Ks, 10-Qs etc.) and information on dividends, to name a few.
- The intangible data: Intangible data that should be offered on the IR website includes research on your competition, market share, catalyst for growth, profiles of your Board of Directors and Management Team, corporate governance and compensation.
- Share your history: Including a deep financial history on your IR website will allow the investors to become comfortable with your stock, earnings history and execution, and to ultimately make an informed decision as to whether or not to invest in your stock.
- Show your personality: While an investor can spend time poring over the tangible information included on your website, getting to know your personality and demeanor goes a long way in instilling confidence. Share recent webcasts and fireside chats with your investor audience. If you have video footage of a conference, panel or seminar presentation, post that to your website. Allowing the investment community to see and hear the way you speak about your company, handle tough questions and speak about the future prospects for growth gives them the confidence to invest in your stock.
- View your IR site as a sales and marketing tool: If your IR site only contains data, you are missing out on an opportunity to attract new shareholders or reaffirm the confidence in current shareholders. Utilize visual tools such as graphs, charts and videos to tell the story of your vision and drive traffic to your IR site by including SEC filings. Investors will likely visit many areas of your IR site and you can use the visit data to learn more about your investors and which areas of your site are most important to them.
Conclusion
Creating a strong IR website is a critical step in building investor trust and confidence. Including both tangible and intangible data allows the investment community to become comfortable with your stock, your history, the company management and the potential for growth. Contact us for our years of experience creating impactful and effective IR websites.
Jessica Bornn, Principal
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