How to Manage a Successful Investor Briefing with Executives

Plan Around Your Audience

Understanding your audience sounds intuitive, right? But planning around your audience is another matter. Planning around your audience means researching what’s on their mind, anticipating their needs, and treating them like the valued attendees they are with professionally managed invitations, a registration page that makes it easy for them to sign up for a virtual briefing, and content that resonates with them.

To start, I recommend creating profiles of your audience, down to their titles, interests, and pain points. The more you humanize your audience, the better you’ll be able to create a briefing that connects with them.

The tools for managing the above (and more) are constantly evolving. For example, natural language processing and social listening platforms can help investor relations teams uncover investor trends bubbling to the surface before a briefing, as well as investor sentiment about those topics. No one can read the minds of investors, but AI-powered tools can help a briefings team learn enough to prepare for the major issues and “gotchas” that can arise in a briefing.

I noted that planning around your audience means treating them like attendees at an important virtual event, which is of course exactly what they are. This means, among other things, using the most effective channels to reach investors, such as email campaigns (for more private briefings such as road shows), social media, blog posts, and press releases for mandatory briefings such as earnings calls. Your plan should include both organic and paid promotion – the latter encompassing paid search, paid social, etc., that builds anticipation for your briefing.

And I cannot stress enough the importance of designing an informative and user-friendly event landing page that provides all the necessary details in a centralized location. This should include your registration, agenda, and speaker lineup. Bottom line: your landing page is your content hub and essential connection point with your investors before, during, and after your briefing.

Develop Content That Builds Credibility

One of the biggest mistakes that any investor relations team can make is assuming that the company’s financial results will tell its story. Yes, one reality is unescapable: for any publicly traded firm, financial numbers are at the heart of earnings calls, and they’re the centerpiece of investor road shows and capital markets days. But there is always a story behind the numbers. Why did numbers either exceed or fall below expectations? How do results relate to the company’s strategic growth plans?

Your content is the most important element of your briefing. Consider what you want your audience to get from the briefing (beyond “get briefed on our numbers”) and plan your content around your goals and key messages. For example, a firm’s content North Star for a briefing might be, “Investors will believe our long-term strategy to accelerate our expansion across Europe and Asia is succeeding” and with that North Star in mind, the event team will plan the C-level investor comments and discussion of financial performance accordingly. It’s essential to be transparent about financial returns, of course; but as best you can, plan to share the context of your content North Star.

Your content approach also needs to consider how you will share your content. I’ve seen way too many investor presentations that consist of nothing more than a numbers dump, which becomes painfully obvious when you visit a landing page for an investor briefing, download the executive presentations from the day, and lose yourself in boring tables as you process what a company presented. I am not arguing against sharing numbers – but:

• How well does your company share essential data through a well-designed presentation that tells a story?
• Does your presentation focus on compelling visuals with speaker notes to share the narrative? 
• Do you complement your executive presentations with great video snippets that add color and storytelling to your briefing, and do you make that video available on your landing page?

Sharing great content is not an either/or decision. You can use strong production values to tell a story and make available transcripts of your investor Q&As and raw numbers in your financial filings, too.

Get the Technology Platform Right

One of the biggest challenges in planning an investor briefing of any kind is finding the right platform that allows you to run the event smoothly and securely. A high-risk briefing is no place for leaning into a basic, off-the-shelf software. An event platform should have basic features like event registrations, an event

page, registration data, and agendas. The right platform needs to nail so many other details well such as:

Flexible Content Delivery

The virtual event platform should have the flexibility to deliver both on-demand and live content. Live broadcasting or livestreaming is essential for engagement with investors, but pre-recorded content delivery is also crucial. Pre-recorded sessions can be played for the audience if one of the speakers is not available due to an emergency. Investors can also request playback of a particular session because they missed it or want to run over that concept once again. Pre-recorded content can also be streamed as simulative, meaning it becomes part of the live event when necessary.

Modern and Seamless Tech Tools

The virtual event platform should be capable of organizing and hosting a briefing with all the necessary tools. Audio-visual and network problems can sabotage a seamless virtual event. So, it is important to choose a user-friendly platform with a flexible system and portal for investors. It is tempting for a business to assume that they can do without a streaming platform at a time when cheap video conferencing solutions are the norm. This assumption can ultimately lead to disaster.

Analytics

The right platform gives you access to who has registered for your event and who has watched it. It is also a powerful tool for learning where viewers clicked on the microsite, their average viewing time, geolocation, and much more. In fact, analytics gives virtual briefings an important advantage over in-person meetings. Digital allows for the kind of detailed tracking that an investor relations professional cannot get offline.

Security

Unfortunately, bad actors can wreak havoc with any online meeting, and investor briefings are no exception. Security breaches range from hacking investor calls to stealing attendees’ registration data. The right platform is the key to ensuring virtual security. A good event hosting platform typically comes with built-in security features that can be controlled by the event organizer or a designated team member. It is also important to securely store any data collected by the virtual event platform and encrypt sensitive information.

IDX manages these and many more essential elements through our Connect.ID platform. Learn more about that here.

Coach Your Executives

C-level teams succeed through a combination of vision, planning, and teamwork. Why should your investor briefing be any different? There is no such thing as winging it in an investor briefing. The management team needs to be involved in planning the content North Star noted above, and then they need to be coached – not once, but repeatedly – to know what to say, how to respond to questions that will arise during the briefing, how they will handle the discussion of any potential negatives (especially disappointing financial numbers), and so on.

One of the details too often overlooked consists of ensuring that a speaker is comfortable with the technology set-up for a virtual briefing. It’s essential that speakers are clear about the platform you (and they) are using, which functionalities it features, and how investor Q&A will be managed. Speakers need to be reminded to mute notifications on any devices they have with them and to dress accordingly if they are participating in a briefing where they can be seen as well as heard. On the day of a briefing, it can be extremely embarrassing for executives to speak over each other or otherwise come across as unprepared because of poor planning for the format of the event as well as the content.

Learn more

In our recently published The Ultimate Guide to Corporate Virtual Events, IDX discusses tips for preparing speakers, especially for online events, and all those tips apply to investor briefings. I have drawn upon many of the points made in our guide for this blog post. Download your copy, and visit our website to learn more about our investor relations expertise, including management of virtual briefings.