We know that two of the most difficult challenges for today’s IROs are maintaining high-value institutional investor engagement and working successfully to increase their positions in the company’s stock. As a result, proactivity in terms of investor marketing and relationship engagement is a must. The effective use of data is essential to retaining and increasing the positions of strategic shareholders. In particular, this blog post seeks to answer the critical question: How can the combination of behavioral analytics and CRM data be used predictively to anticipate and influence the future decisions targeted investors make with your stock?
Exploding the Lack of Data Myth
Over the last several years, you’ve probably heard the oft-cited argument that “we don’t have the data.” We’ve certainly heard our fair share regarding anticipating the buy/sell intention of critical institutional investors. According to this logic, you’re left with limited visibility into leading indicators for how investors may behave or act between earnings periods and the filing of ownership disclosures.
The reality is, however, that all the data necessary to anticipate and even influence this future behavior typically exists and is available. Behavioral analytics includes:
- Investor engagement activity data: CRM data documenting your shareholder composition, IR and C-suite interactions, and key themes that matter to your investors relative to your investment narrative.
- Online behavior tracking (digital footprint): To determine what, how, when, and where shareholders engage digitally with your company and your content.
- Event participation: Tracking shareholder participation in your online events, such as quarterly earnings releases.
- Capital markets data: Information on your company’s stock transactions, ownership changes, estimates, and valuation.
What Makes Predicting Investor Engagement so Challenging?
The challenge is that the data sets required typically exist in 3 to 4 different systems with different providers and little to no integration among them. It’s a limitation that prohibits you from accessing a complete 360° view of your shareholders – one that captures, reports out on, and draws conclusive insight from all of the investor’s activity with your brand across platforms and human engagements with you and your C-suite.
For instance, when an IR team relies on several different providers for its website, online earnings events, CRM and capital market data needs, the challenge identifying investor engagement is insurmountable. Evaluating information from each resource is done independently, prohibiting a comprehensive view of the data as well as the resulting insight that can come from broad-scale analysis. As a result, the team can only perform generic actions like sending mass emails, potentially holding ineffectual meetings, and providing general financial information. As we all know, these are rarely productive.
What’s the Solution?
Simply put, the solution is to partner with a single provider who can integrate all of your behavioral analytics, market, and CRM data on a single platform. This allows you to analyze specific IR sales and marketing efforts, determine the effect of your digital assets and events, and interpret sentiment toward your stock … all in one system. As a result, it allows you to predict, influence, and impact next steps as they relate to each of your institutional investors. How? Via tailoring future interactions – both human and digital – to the specific interests, desires, needs, and goals of each. Practically speaking, this allows you to efficiently and effectively meet your IR goals, whether they be to increase an important institutional investor’s position or win one that you’d like to purchase your company’s stock.
Conclusion
Every IRO must deliver strategic, high-value shareholders to their companies. The most successful ones use the power of a single platform with behavioral analytics combined with their IR CRM to:
- Understand and tap the full potential of each shareholder relationship
- Seamlessly nurture their high-value investors
- Manage their communication strategy
- Build a pipeline of future investors
- Leverage investor behavior tracking to drive a proactive capital markets strategy
- Gain a competitive advantage
Ready to learn more about this powerful combination? Check out one of our blogs on this topic and stay tuned for our next chapter exploring a new concept and use case.
Ready to explore how Q4 can help? Take a look at Q4 Capital Connect™, our new platform offering Engagement Analytics.
To see the thoughts of our CEO on using these tools to measure your IR Strategy, you can view his interview with IR Magazine:
