Whether it’s an earnings presentation event or an NDR, there are some common themes that need addressing in every investor relations presentation. Knowing how to communicate your story and hold your investor community’s attention is essential; with that mind, here are 6 of the most critical components of an impactful investor relations earnings presentation.
Frame the Unique Problem You Solve
When developing your slides’ content, keep in mind that not all investors are fully aware of your product or service’s exact benefits. In light of this, it’s essential to include a detailed explanation of how your solution works and why it is a superior option to the competition. This approach highlights your strengths to investors and demonstrates what makes your company well-positioned for the future.
Logitech has included the fact that they are the first consumer electronics company to provide detailed carbon impact labeling to help consumers make better-informed decisions. This sets them apart from competitors and taps into an increasingly important aspect for investors; ESG.
Position Your Market Opportunity
For investors to understand the opportunity your business represents, they need to be aware of how much the company can grow. To best convey that, your earnings presentation should include your industry’s market size and how far you can penetrate that market so that investors can estimate your future revenue and compare you to others within the same sector.
Coca-Cola European Partners breaks down its value share of the market within the sparkling beverage industry, as well as what differentiates its products and how they can further penetrate the market.
Communicate Your Strategy
When communicating how you plan on achieving your goals, you don’t need to get granular; you can keep the general. You can do this by providing short-term and long-term goals to help investors understand your priorities and what they can expect to see in the future. This demonstrates to investors that you have set clear and attainable goals and a strategy to achieve them.
Early on in their earnings presentations, Merck presents a clear and concise slide that succinctly establishes their goals for Merck and, by extension, cancer patients globally. Later in the presentation, Merck dives deeper into their 5, 10, and 10+ years strategy and how they plan to achieve them. By breaking down the information this way, investors are better able to conceptualize and align with your company’s goals.
Be Deliberate About Your Financials
It’s no surprise that all investor relations presentations need a slide dedicated to your company’s financial position. Though it varies, most companies choose to either include their most recent income statement or include only a few metrics. However, when deciding what to include, the metric that should always be addressed is revenue since it’s the most important indicator for investors, allowing them to gauge your profitability. Additionally, you should structure the layout of your financials slide in a way that can be easily understood and digested by investors. To further ensure that your most important information is front and center, make sure that your most impressive stats are called out on your slides.
Discover neatly displays all of their year-over-year net-income and losses in a simple chart, while also plainly explaining in bulleted highlights what the audience needs to know.
Keep Your Presentation Slides Brief
To keep investors engaged and not overwhelmed, you want to keep the text on your slides clear and concise. A good rule of thumb is to use the 5/5/5 rule: no more than five words per line of text, five lines of text per slide, or five text-heavy slides in a row. This formula can ensure that all of the vital information you want to convey is clearly presented and easily digestible.
Square does an excellent job of keeping their slides brief but impactful. Each point is strengthened by a short sentence ensuring that your audience isn’t overwhelmed and pays attention to exactly the points that matter.
Engaging Imagery
Leveraging your brand colors and engaging imagery also help capture and retain your audience’s attention. There’s an overwhelming trend towards more visuals of charts or graphs – the more visual, the better and particularly because it’s something that you can continue to push out. It’s content that can be repurposed in so many ways and continues to tell your earnings story long after the presentation is over.
Salesforce incorporates their unique branding throughout their earnings presentation and even feature company employees as a way to humanize the brand.. The bold design stays true to the theme of their IR website and adds eye-catching graphics.
Given that a majority of events are still happening virtually, as in-person restrictions remain in place, creating an impactful presentation is even more important. Companies cannot rely on body gestures or physical presence to command the attention of attendees, so they must replicate the experience as best they can in a virtual environment. To learn more about not only perfecting your slide deck but your virtual event, you can download our Virtual Events Best Practice Guide Here.
