A while back, I blogged about how to improve your IR web page by using SEO. And see my blog about why making your IR web page accessible is important. Here are five tips about how ways you might consider making your IR content more accessible (beyond our set of 25 criteria that companies can use to make their IR websites more transparent):
- Make it easy to find your IR web page
One of my biggest pet peeves is how some companies make it challenging to find the IR web page from the corporate home page. It’s hard enough to find sometimes because there is no standard convention of what the IR web page should be called. Often, it’s called “Investors” or something akin to that. But sometimes it’s something kind of far out there.
And then it might be buried deep in a menu or even deep at the bottom of the corporate home page. Investors can be as important as customers and they should be treated as such by not making it hard for them to find the content they seek.
2. Provide direct telephone numbers and email addresses of each member of your IR team
The investment community will appreciate you providing telephone numbers and email addresses to facilitate their ability to have their questions answered. You might even consider providing links to the LinkedIn profiles for each member of your IR team too so that the financial community can learn more about your team and facilitate networking, which is one of the reasons for your IR team to exist.
Understandably, some IR departments would be worried that they’re going to be bombarded with frivolous and irrelevant phone calls or emails – but one way to reduce that risk is to provide clear alternative channels to people outside the financial community to ask questions of the company so they’re less likely to reach out to the IR department.
If you tried all of this, I believe you will find that the benefits of providing individual contact information outweigh the potential pitfalls.
One investor emailed me saying they used the generic email address provided on an IR web page – and was frustrated because this is what was received as an auto-response: “Your message couldn’t be delivered. The group investor.relations only accepts messages from people in its organization or on its allowed senders list, and your email address isn’t on the list.”
3. Provide excel data downloads for your financial results archives
Many analysts appreciate data downloads because they can import them into their own models – and it’s a simple and easy way of improving your service to them. So alongside your PDFs and webcasts, consider providing your data in an excel spreadsheet that can be downloaded.
4. Fully integrate your investor relations web page into your main corporate website
Don’t make your audience work harder than they need to get a full blown picture of your company. In other words, don’t silo your IR content and have it be branded on a stand-alone basis. All of a company’s content should be weaved together intuitively and coherently.
This is not always easy since many IR web pages are outsourced to third-parties to maintain. But fund managers, other investors and analysts are as likely to visit your corporate web site online to find out qualitative information about your company as they are to obtain investor relations content. Particularly the kind of information they can’t pull from a Bloomberg terminal.
You want visitors to be able to access content adjacent to IR easily. Being able to navigate from the IR web page to news articles and the “About” section of the corporate website – and vice versa. Intuitive navigation is a key part of this.
This is even important for job seekers as those candidates will likely dig around your entire site and not just the “Careers” web page. You want them to be able to seamlessly toggle between the IR web page and other content on the site. The same goes for folks visiting your corporate website to learn about the company’s environmental and social actions and positions.
5. Provide transcripts of investor calls and presentations
You get good marks for accessibility if you follow the practice of providing transcripts of audio and video investor-related content. These transcripts should be posted alongside the archive of the related content.
For example, analysts who miss an earnings call typically say they don’t want to watch the archived video as they would rather scan a transcript – or just do a keyword search to quickly jump to the information they need. You want to foster your relationship with these people and this is one way to easily do it as transcripts are easy to make.
