Connect to your audience

Understanding where you are now, is often a crucial aspect in deciding on how to get to your ultimate destination.

This is especially true when it comes to corporate and financial communication, which needs to be based on a clear understanding of the investment communities current perception of your company, strategy and management.

Although you may already receive regular feedback from investors during meetings with them, there are other ways of connecting with and receiving feedback from, your investors and other stakeholders.

A well-constructed perception study has a number of advantages over day to day investor conversations, from the breadth and number of people spoken to, to the timing of the conversation. The confidential nature of the interview process means that you will regularly receive much more direct feedback than that provided over the table on a roadshow.

A study will allow you to gather more long term views from the investor audience, whereas conversations around results, announcements and conferences are by their nature more focused on short term topics and themes. Thereby allowing you to develop a long term communications strategy and assess if firstly your plans are resonating with the investor base and secondly if you are communicating it effectively.

There is a risk that day to day conversations are held with an existing group of investors or interested parties, that have an inherent view on your stock. A good perception study will move outside of this group to speak to investors that should be interested but are currently not invested. To find out why they are not currently holding and hopefully engage them going forward in a proactive manner.

The results of the study are designed to assist you in refining your IR strategy and your approach to communicating with the market, in addition to how these might impact the investor’s holding. In some cases the findings can be used as a KPI measure for IR teams (especially when conducted on an annual basis):

Are any new themes emerging?

Perhaps unsurprisingly, given it is a key topic for investor relations, a recent trend has also seen the rise in ESG specific perception studies, to help issuers understand the growing trend in ESG and how this might impact investment decisions for both existing and potential investors.

• Does ESG feature in your investment screening
• What is of particular importance in terms of ESG topics
• How do you rate our focus on ESG