In Business World Hosting an Investor Day can be a powerful way to raise management visibility and credibility and clarify the company’s value proposition and growth strategy. An Investor Day event allows companies to control their story. It can be one of the most influential and cost-efficient activities in your investor relations arsenal – but only if you’re adequately prepared. If done right, it can be a platform for achieving some of investor relations’ most critical and valuable objectives. When well-executed, an Investor Day can:
- Increase investor support
- Drive valuation
- Attract the right audience to company stock
- Change investor perceptions.
An Investor Day is a way for companies to meet investors efficiently. It replaces many individual meetings with buy- and sell-side analysts that consume a lot of senior management’s time. Companies are still meeting with investors one-on-one, but an Investor Day is an opportunity for a company to bring its investors together in a single forum where it can showcase its senior management, discuss its strategy in greater detail, and review significant initiatives being undertaken to achieve its strategy. An Investor Day can also announce a new approach, a new product, or a new direction for the company. Unlike at a significant sell-side sponsored conference, the company controls the agenda and the theme. Undoubtedly, Investor Day is a prime corporate event and must be well-planned and well-executed.
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Preparing for an Investor Day
Public companies are increasingly turning to an Investor Day to tell a broad audience of analysts and investors what the company is doing and where senior management sees it going. It offer some particular challenges and elements to think about to ensure you produce an event that delivers on all objectives. With communication directly from management to shareholders and the media, the event can significantly impact the company’s perception and, therefore, fortunes. The gravitas of an Investor Day means that you should take every opportunity to review and refine your event execution, as this will go a long way toward producing a flawless event.
In other words, we cannot emphasize enough the importance of preparation for an Investor Day. That is why you may want to engage an investor relations consulting firm to assist the critical presenters in developing their speeches, as this can be time-consuming. In addition, if one or more of the presenters needs a brush-up on presentation skills, this too should be considered. Again, an IR consulting firm can provide a critical perspective in the presentation preparation and during the rehearsals.
As a follow-up to Investor Day, you should consider providing attendees with a survey or hiring a third party to call participants and ask their opinions of the day and whether they got what they needed. This feedback will be vital for the IRO and other senior management executives to determine if the intended message was delivered and what needs to be done to make the next Investor Day an even greater success.
How to Make Investor Day Work for your Company?
Hosting meaningful events requires careful attention to detail. Our expert team outlines below industry best practices that can help IROs create an architecture for the most successful investor day possible.
Develop a compelling story. When developing your company messaging, it’s essential to know that investors and analysts expect that you’ve got a good story to tell. Creating foundational messaging that resonates with your audience will help to imagine the headlines you’d like to read in analyst coverage of your event.
Invite the right audience. Establishing goals, crafting messages, and designing the presentations that effectively communicate that messaging are essential. However, even the most compelling messages and elegant presentations can’t significantly impact if not presented to the right audience. Getting the right audience to your it is critical to a successful outcome and maximizes all the hard work and diligence that goes into an event like this.
Decide on a budget. Organizing an Investor Day is often expensive for the company. Deciding how to spend your resources in advance allows you to cut back on extra costs. Without planning the budget, it will not be easy to plan the financial decisions of the project and deliver results.
Ask for feedback. A whole set of questions shall be asked to evaluate the event and measure message absorption. Analyzing data can help you focus your post-event follow-up and investor targeting. It also measures the event’s success for IROs that shall give feedback to senior management.
Final Thoughts
Investor Days are among the largest and most significant IR events a company can organize. An Investor Day can be one of the most influential and cost-effective activities in your investor’s relations arsenal if properly executed. Listed companies recognize the increased importance of such events and dedicate more time and resources toward this attempt. You shall be sure that it will continue to happen because they add value for investors and analysts. Understanding and estimating value from these events is critical.
The Sager IR expert team is here to help you execute a successful and impactful Investor Day or another IR event. We aim to create an industry-leading event that appealingly articulates your investment story and meets all current legislation and best practice criteria. We leverage our expertise to advise our clients on best practice standards and techniques to ensure that their IR event is organized efficiently and effectively. We believe that the post-Investor Day feedback objective is to gain insight & opinions from your investors, understand the drivers behind their investment decision process, and the barriers to maintaining investment in a competitive capital market.
