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The world of investor relations is evolving constantly, and you can’t afford to lag behind. Keeping pace with the ever-changing market, shareholder sentiment, and technological advancements can help you hone a better IR strategy and target key investors at the right time. These three investor relations trends can help you stay out in front of the capital markets.
1. New IR Tools Will Streamline Analysis
Digital acceleration in the IR space is happening at lightspeed. SaaS providers and IR firms are releasing new technologies that help you crunch IR intelligence and streamline communication.
The folks at IR Magazine point to AI-powered tech as the biggest trend to make waves in the IR space. This software includes customer engagement analytics and benchmarking tools that give you better insight into your IR performance.
Engagement analytics relies on state-of-the-art AI and machine learning to harvest, clean, and visualize relevant online activity and investor behavior on your screen. AI-driven software crawls through your expansive platform faster than any human can. As a result, it can include more data in its calculations. It can help you find meaning in the countless investor interactions that take place online, connecting your IR website, events program, and CRM IR desktop app.
You can compare these engagement metrics against your peer group to understand how you fare within your market cap and sector. You can also evaluate your digital engagements against your performance on the Street, tracking how press releases and webcasts influence stock price and ownership detail.
2. ESG Will Continue to Be Important
For years now, sustainable and ethical principles have guided investors. ESG funds more than doubled in the first year of the pandemic to seize $51.1 billion of net new money from investors. According to Bloomberg, this pushed ESG assets to capture more than $35 trillion, which is one-third of the total global assets under management.
Before this year’s proxy season, investors have demonstrated that their ESG principles continue influencing their decisions. The Proxy Review reports a record-breaking 540 shareholder proposals on ESG issues were filed as of mid-February in 2023.
With such a focus on your environmental, social, and governance initiatives, it’s important you align yourself with investors’ expectations and needs. Refining your ESG reporting and ESG website should be on the docket this year, especially as the SEC will enact their climate disclosure rule in 2024.
3. Hybrid Capital Markets Events
It may be tempting to pull back on capital markets virtual events today. None of the restrictions that pushed you into the digital event space exist today, and there’s been a push to make in-person, physical connections with investors.
That said, investor sentiment towards events is evenly split between in-person and virtual engagements. The most recent Digital Investor Survey by Brunswick Group found that only 42% of investors preferred in-person engagements. 41% preferred virtual options, while the remaining 17% had no preference at all.
Organizing hybrid capital markets events can help you attract both sides of the debate and ensure the greatest number of attendees for your conferences, roundtables, and earnings call.
Maintaining a virtual event will also help supply your engagement analytics software with more data points. You’ll still be able to track event attendance and activity online without denying investors who prefer a more high-touch event.
The Takeaway:
With another year of volatility on the books, any number of things can influence your IR strategy this year. While it might be hard to predict tomorrow’s trends before they happen, you can be prepared for these established ones now.