Reaching out to investors and communicating your story is one of the biggest challenges facing Managing Directors and CEOs. Cannings Purple’s Investor Insight team explain.
Reaching out to investors and communicating your story is one of the biggest challenges facing Managing Directors and CEOs.
Now these groups as well as investors on the other side of the fence need to think about how they will deliver the story.
No longer is it good enough simply to draft an announcement and post it to the ASX platform, hoping that brokers, analysts, fund managers and media are glued to an Iress screen waiting for it to emerge.
Smart and successful companies are now using a range of media platforms to reach different audiences at different times of the day.
Email still dominates as the medium used by most companies to disseminate news to their followers or interested stakeholders. It is simple to create a bulk email that goes out to thousands of recipients at the same time.
Email blasts tend to have a mixed hit rate, with 20-25% open rates typical for this type of delivery method. You are also faced with the issue of maintaining email databases over time as people move between jobs etc.
Twitter is becoming more widely used across ASX-listed companies, with many now seeing the benefits of delivering ‘owned news’ through to people that are genuinely interested in their story. This means sharing more than just vanilla announcements and can include video, infographics, photos etc.
One that we think will come into its own this year for many listed companies is LinkedIn. Many MDs and CEOs have spent years accepting connection requests from people that they have interacted with over the course of their careers and then don’t do anything with them.
Boards around Australia have thousands and thousands of personal LinkedIn connections that are a gold mine with respect to generating trading activity in their stocks. Providing regular updates via each director’s LinkedIn page will provide a lot of traction, given most connections have similar profiles and are potential investors.
For 2017, the call to action will be to become more social with your offering.
