Raising Your Profile

In this economy of depressed markets and money-conscious investors, the cost of raising capital or your stock’s profile is not only getting higher but the ROI is practically non-existent. It seems like every company is working harder and spending more on investor relations and marketing campaigns but yielding far less results.

In raising your stock’s profile, nothing is more important than building solid relationships, creating opportunities to pitch investors and differentiating your company to attract new investors. Reaching new investors is the most expensive and time consuming part of an investor relations strategy, yet it is an often fruitless process – especially for small cap companies like those listed on the Canadian TSX Venture or the US’ OTCBB exchanges.

If your company is going to spend any money on an IR or marketing campaign to raise the profile of your company’s stock, you better make sure that you have put in place the right corporate branding that targets investors and not just your clients. If you don’t, you may lose thousands of dollars in investments from investors that would have otherwise been interested in your company’s stock but invested elsewhere because your lack of a corporate image.

Respect Your Investors

Investors need to know that you respect them. No one will invest in a company with a website they don’t understand or written in another language. These days, no one will invest in a company that spends little or no money on their corporate image. Luckily, changing the way you present to investors is simple. An easy first step is to incorporate professionally produced investor-geared videos into your program.

Tell a Story

Videos are a great first step but there are major pitfalls if you attempt to do it without first understanding what works. Let’s face it: Most corporate videos are boring.

Videos need to tell a story. It needs to be well-scripted and well-produced because this piece of material will be the first thing investors look at and may be the last thing they see before they make any investment decisions. But once you have one, it will become your most powerful selling tool – aside from yourself, of course.

Don’t believe me? Take a look and do some research. Find two comparable public companies, one with well-produced corporate videos and the other without. Then take a look at their average trading volume and share price performance. You’ll find the answer won’t be surprising (given similar comparables, of course.)

Impactful Selling

By now your company has engaged in marketing initiatives or have inquired about different marketing approaches. Have you noticed that video advertising reaches less people than their print counterparts but costs significantly more relative to the audience reach? That’s because videos are significantly more effective at selling.

Let’s take TV infomercials for example which often sell useless items. If they were to send a brochure or email advertising the same products they did on TV, how many people would actually react and buy something from a brochure they received? Probably not many. Yet people react and purchase useless things from infomercials every day.

Hopefully, your company’s shares are not useless. But the principles of marketing remain the same for your company’s stock as it does for those useless items on the infomercials. It’s a well-known statistic that people remember 20% of what they hear, 30% of what they see, but 70% of what they both hear and see. So give investors something they can remember.

Still don’t think video is right for your company?

Proof is in the Pudding

In recent studies of online video ad exposure, 52% took action after seeing a video ad, 45% elicited a response, 28% looked for more information, and an astounding 16% bought something. I highly doubt any print advertising can achieve those numbers.

The biggest myth regarding using video in your investor relations program is that it has to cost a lot. It doesn’t. There are a select group of IR firms that can handle every process involved anywhere in North America, do it with a very minimal budget, and present your video to a whole new network of investors. Just make sure to find a firm that not only understands the investment community but can help you script and produce a video geared towards investors.

Every client or every company we interviewed regarding the use of video in their IR campaigns all agree it’s the easiest and most effective promotional piece they have ever created. Perhaps now is the time for your company to take the leap.