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by Kerry Kiley on Jan 22, 2024 5:56:48 PM
The landscape of communications between a company and its stakeholders is changing.
To navigate this change, organizations are discovering that collaboration between marketing and investor relations (IR) is not just beneficial - but essential.
Traditionally, these departments have been entirely separate. But each holds a pivotal role in shaping brand image and telling brand stories.
Marketing and IR pros are now discovering that by working together effectively, they can bring even greater value to their companies.
Why the Marketing/Investor Relations Partnership Is So Important
Marketing and IR have different immediate goals, though both aim to grow the company.
While marketing aims to communicate with potential customers and IR seeks to communicate with current and potential shareholders, both rely on communication channels such as email, social media and websites.
These two teams can offer each other a strategic advantage, ensuring that both convey a coherent and compelling message about the company's growth, vision and stability.
This cooperation can lead to both teams meeting their goals and contributing to the overall health and success of the company. To reach this level of collaboration and synergy, each must learn from the other.
What Marketing Can Learn From Investor Relations?
Marketers may not be aware of the number of requirements that IR teams are working under. Anything dealing with financial disclosures about the company needs to meet strict regulatory requirements, and IR teams are acutely aware of this.
IR communications are heavily scrutinized. Any slip-ups or missteps can cause serious damage to a company's relationship with its shareholders and will impact its market value.
What IR Teams Want Marketing to Know:
- Content posting has to be precisely timed. Manual process is not sufficient. The earnings release must be published on all channels at exactly the same time. Automation is key.
- IR website communications and content receive a great deal of scrutiny from various audiences — including regulatory bodies. Understanding IR-specific rules and practices is extremely important.
- Robust email alerts to stakeholders are very important. They want more than just to be alerted when a release is posted; they want multiple options to choose the content they want to receive and when they want to receive it.
- The grouping of content is important to IR website visitors. For example, when quarterly results are released, shareholders expect to find all relevant IR materials and earnings content available in one place.
- All the top IR content needs to be easily accessible from the IR homepage. This includes most recent press releases, most recent events, quarterly results, stock price and email alerts.
What Can Investor Relations Learn From Marketing?
IR teams can be so focused on shareholder communications, regulatory requirements and quarterly results that the nuances of marketing never even occur to them.
The IR site and other investor-focused initiatives have marketing implications, as customers and employees will look at the IR site. IR can be aware of the marketing opportunities and help take advantage of them.
What Marketing Wants IR Teams to Know:
- IR needs to realize that the audience of an IR website is more than just shareholders.
- Marketing strives to reinforce branding across all communication channels, and it does this by understanding the value of a good story. Website visitors want to see all news about the company, not just financial press releases.
- It's not just about investors and shareholders. There are multiple personas interacting with the website, such as potential employees, existing employees and potential customers. Catering to just one audience misses a vital opportunity to engage with all stakeholders.
- How content is displayed and presented really matters. Many website visitors find infographics helpful. Not everybody wants to read a financial report.
- Website analytics are how marketing knows what's working. Marketing uses them to understand what content website visitors find most interesting and where they spend their time.
- Leveraging the value of engagement is a huge win for marketing. For example, marketing wants to give website visitors and users the opportunity to submit feedback.
- Accessibility is important. The website will be accessed by people who use screen readers or need other accommodations. It is not a trend, but an emerging requirement.
The Benefits of a Unified Approach
The digital age demands finesse and strategy from a company, and that means departments need to work together. Both marketing and IR benefit from a unified approach, capitalizing on shared knowledge of their respective audiences for the best content delivery.
By leveraging marketing's skills in storytelling and audience engagement alongside IR's focus on financial transparency and strategic disclosure, companies can craft a narrative that speaks to customers and shareholders alike.
However, the path to this kind of unified approach frequently presents challenges. Merging two disciplines, each with its distinct language and priorities, requires a nuanced understanding of both fields. Many companies benefit from seeking specialized expertise in curating IR websites, ensuring that the dual objectives of compelling storytelling and accurate financial reporting are met.
Notified is an expert at understanding both IR and marketing, embracing this collaborative challenge. We want to help companies gain a competitive edge by presenting a unified front that maximizes the impact of their online presence across all stakeholders.
We provide expert insights and can help you tell your unique investment story with IR solutions that drive stakeholder engagement, increase shareholder confidence and showcase your brand.
Learn more today.
