The Long-Term Value of Investor Days
It’s easy to think about investor days as self-contained events, but their value extends far beyond keynote speakers and swag bags. When done correctly, investor events can support your IR communication for the coming year. This is excellent news, given the resources that go into successfully executed IR days. Too often, however, companies fail to realize the long-term value in the moment.
Adopt an Audience-First IR Day Strategy
If you’ve followed us for any amount of time, you’ve heard about Haystack’s Audience-First approach, which describes our belief that all business and marketing efforts should prioritize identifying, reaching, and engaging with the ideal audience.
In the context of investor days, Audience-First applies to content and style. Investor days are excellent opportunities to reinforce your brand and share future goals and ambitions with your shareholders. However, presenting that information in a way that honors participants' attention spans is just as important.
Though we’ve published our thoughts on event best practices, here’s a recap of our top five recommendations for successful IR day presentations:
Brevity — Limit each presenter to a half-hour runtime.
Dynamic Production — Keep the format varied and impactful.
Rich Content — Streamline talking points and support them with engaging media.
Pre-Record — Control and polish digital events with strategic pre-recording.
Live vs. Remote — Choose a suitable presentation method based on desired perception.
The main point here is to remember why you are hosting your investor event in the first place. Fostering stronger relationships with shareholders is the key to healthy growth and the most important step in championing a business strategy, managing expectations regarding progress, and proactively defending your company and executives against activist investing.
Start Your Content Engine
Haystack’s event team is well-versed in supporting clients with all the above. Producing investor days has become their bread, butter, bagel, and brioche. Beyond the events of the day, however, our experience has taught us that all of your optimized presentation content can act as a content engine for months to come, and intentionality toward this goal can make all the difference.
Where digital events shine through pre-precording and remote capture, in-person videography and event photography complement live and hybrid events. Regardless of the method, plan to document as much of your investor day as possible. The additional expense will pay dividends in the form of authentic, shareable content for months to come on websites, social media, and across marketing materials.
Soundbites of presentations and photos of speakers perform well on social media platforms, as do quotes and highlights of the day. Video is the most engaging form of media, and investor days are a perfect opportunity to create a library of video content for slow release. Since IR days bring executives together, it’s also an opportunity to capture one-on-one interviews throughout the day, creating talking head videos that can be edited into sizzle reels or used on their own as board member profiles to create familiarity and foster trust between shareholders and key decision makers.
Taking social media proactivity a step further, consider setting up IR-specific social handles on the platforms your company uses most. Providing these to attendees at check-in and reinforcing them through event materials offers a direct line of communication and engagement beyond the event and helps build stronger relationships with shareholders. If your company publishes an email newsletter, the registration desk is also an opportunity to offer attendees the option of joining your mailing list.
Strategically recruiting attendees to sign up for updates and follow you on social media will proactively build your investor database and save valuable resources in the long run. This is a crucial point overlooked by many mega-cap companies who later enlist our services to clean up and optimize their investor records. It’s more effective and efficient to manage this organically instead of fishing for your audience’s attention through paid media.
Do It for the Market
Remember that you’re hosting an investor day as an integral part of your company’s IR communications program. And while we’ve covered the importance of engaging your event audience, remember that this is not just a singular event, company mile marker, or box to check.
According to CFO.com, “investor relations has significant economic benefits for companies,” and strategically executing the right IR activities is the secret to accurate market valuation.
Maximize the long-term ROI of your IR day efforts by optimizing production value within your budget and capturing all of that engaging content into a library of visuals and messaging that you can draw from again and again.
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