Shoring Up Investor Relations with the ‘Rule of Seven’
Mid-year is the perfect moment to review the results of your investor relations (IR) activities and plan for the next two quarters to ensure a successful second half of the year. Reflection combined with recalibration enables you to improve marketing efforts, as well as tweak how you present and share your company’s story. Here’s the plan for July:
1. Evaluate Expenditures: Assess expenses, especially variable costs, and analyze results achieved. Get a grasp of your budget, with a full accounting of all expenses related to communications, meetings, roadshows, and supporting events and collateral. Measure the ROI both qualitatively and quantitatively.
2. Revisit Outreach: Register for Q3/Q4 conferences and industry events before the price goes up or space for presenting companies fills up. Plan and schedule management roadshows closely tied to corporate updates in Q4, and don’t forget targeting—it’s a powerful tool for reaching investors focused on your sector.
3. Analyze Coverage: Re-read analysts’ reports and understand their plans for the remainder of the year. Analyze target prices and recommendations to gain valuable insights into market perceptions and investor sentiment. Are you meeting their expectations? If not, re-fine messaging.
4. Optimize Information: Consistent news flow drives investor interest. Evaluate the quality, frequency, and relevance of what you share. Adjust to align with short-term corporate goals and achieved execution milestones.
5. Improve Visibility: Review your website so it reflects the latest messaging, corporate developments, financial reports, news releases, presentations, events and other information. If a brand refresh is overdue, summer is the ideal time to undertake the project.
6. Get Social: Hire your kid (or, a freelancer) to create and publish social content including thought leadership pieces, industry insights, and business updates that can enhance transparency and build trust with stakeholders. Our tip: involve your team as brand ambassadors, tagging employee names and reposting company content to 10x exposure.
7. Repurpose Material: Transform reports, cases studies, etc. that you have already published into a new format (such as testimonial clips) to drive interest. Some new AI apps, such as Opus Clip repurpose long-form video into attention-grabbing short videos for SEO, thought leadership, and drip campaigns.
Lastly, focus your remaining budget in a goal-oriented manner to maximize value. It’s always a good idea to repeat your successes, but like anything you need to remain open to exploring new opportunities and taking calculated risks. Sometimes it’s a matter of changing things up and exposing yourself to new ideas (like hosting a webinar tied to a key news event) that can lead to increased visibility.
At Harbor Access, we believe that success lies in continuous improvement. For a mid-year IR review and tune-up, reach out: Jonathan (US): Jonathan.Paterson@Harbor-Access.com or, Graham (Canada): Graham.Farrell@Harbor-Access.com
P.S. The 'rule of seven' is a classic marketing technique that states an audience needs to be exposed to a message at least seven times before they will act on it. The theory is that the repeated appearances can help boost awareness, recognition and recall.
