Critical Post Earnings Topics
Earnings are a critical period that requires a lot of work and preparation, and that doesn’t end when your earnings call does. The post earnings period is essential for communicating with the investment community, engaging investors, and furthering the success postof your IR strategies. To perfect your post earnings process, here are the key ways to set your investor relations team up for continued success.
Assess the Preparedness of the Senior Leadership Team
Following an earnings call, you must assess the performance of your senior leadership team. To do this, review the webcast or call recording, identifying any challenging questions or topics. Encourage each team member to share their thoughts on their performance and areas for improvement. Gathering their valuable insights. You can pinpoint where the team can grow and enhance its effectiveness.
To prepare your team for future earnings events, develop a plan focusing on their needs. This plan may include additional training sessions to address knowledge gaps, Q&A exercises to build confidence, or providing more detailed briefing materials. Additionally, consider seeking support from investor relations consultants or communications experts who can help fine-tune your team’s messaging and presentation skills.
You’ll cultivate a strong and confident group of leaders by consistently evaluating your senior leadership team’s preparedness and taking steps to improve their performance. With this foundation, your team will be well-equipped to tackle the demands and challenges of post earnings events, approaching them with poise and expertise that will impress shareholders and analysts alike.
Share Relevant Post Earnings Content and Key Take-Aways
To maximize impact, it’s imperative to share all relevant information promptly during the immedikate post earnings event timeframe. This means distributing it to all those who attended and sharing it on your investor relations website. The essential content consists of the recorded version of your earnings call, a transcript of the call or video of the webcast, slides from the presentation, and an email with key takeaways sent to analysts and critical shareholders that attended.
Investor relations professionals benefit from tracking how investors interact with the posted information. Aggregating the engagement metrics from your IR platforms, such as time spent on the website, webcast recording views, and data downloads, allows professionals to measure content strategy effectiveness and make data-driven decisions. Gaining valuable insights into audience preferences and behavior helps tailor future communications.
Providing content in a timely manner allows those who attended the call to absorb your message in their own time and pick up on the information they may have missed during the live event. Additionally, using social media to spread the word about post earnings results should not be overlooked. Recent research shows that one in five investors exclusively use social media to research new investments.
Connect with Your Key Stakeholders
To be proactive, check in with analysts immediately after the call to ensure they understand what your company is trying to deliver. Gathering feedback after the event, both internally and externally, will help you remove the guesswork by uncovering vulnerabilities and better preparing you for your next earnings call.
In collecting feedback, you’re likely to have a more direct relationship with the sell-side, resulting in a straightforward exchange and a better understanding of their opinion of your earnings event. Alternatively, it’s less likely that you have that same relationship with buy-side investors, which means you should consider putting in a bit more effort and seeking additional means to capture their feedback. To help stream your outreach efforts, IR professionals should build a roadmap for your critical stakeholders, share it with them, and don’t forget to test for success.
Measure the Overall Success of Your Earnings Event
Conduct a sentiment survey to gauge your earnings event’s success and determine if the right messages made it into the market and analyst coverage. A sentiment survey serves as a quick pulse check with top shareholders to get feedback on how much the message resonated and whether or not it was effectively communicated. Additionally, If your investor community is active on social media, monitor investor relations social channels to assess response and tone after the call.
The data from your survey, combined with tracking metrics from your IR website, like time spent on the website, bounce rates, and pages viewed, can assess the interest and engagement of your audience. If users spend more time on your website and explore multiple pages after the earnings event, it could indicate that the event successfully captured their attention and interest. Similarly, a low bounce rate, which is when website visitors leave a webpage without taking action, can indicate that visitors found the information provided relevant and valuable. In contrast, a high bounce rate suggests that as soon as the visitor loaded the page, they found the information to be useless, thus leaving without further investigation.
Combining the insights gained from sentiment surveys, social media monitoring, and website analytics data, you can comprehensively understand your earnings event’s impact and effectiveness. You can then use this information to refine your communication strategies, improve future events, and strategically engage your investor community.
Leverage Your Collected Insights
Perfecting your post earnings process also involves applying the insights about the call itself. Begin by reviewing attendee numbers, questions asked, and areas of interest. Identifying trends and areas of interest helps you address these points in future calls. Evaluate the extent and tone of media coverage, identifying discrepancies between your message and its perception. Use these findings to fine-tune your communication strategy for subsequent earnings calls.
Optimizing your Post Earnings Process
By leveraging all of the insights above, you can refine your approach to your post earnings process, build stronger relationships with your key stakeholders, and drive investor confidence.
As you prepare for your next earnings, download our Ultimate Earnings Guide, which will provide you with ten detailed steps to ensure your next earnings event is your most effective one yet.
