How to Stay in Control of Your IR Narrative During a Bear Market
Whether 2022’s bear market is over depends on who you ask. While some experts claim stocks are leaving bear market territory, others aren’t so optimistic, believing stocks have further to drop. That’s quite a prognosis, considering the Street had its worse start in 50 years.
With the first half of 2022 marked by disruption after disruption, your investor relation strategy can feel unmoored today. But you can take back control of your IR narrative, even if the worst of the bear market is yet to come. Here’s how:
Understand Your Shareholder Base
Major changes in the market can cause enormous shifts in investor sentiment and behavior. It’s important to keep track of these rapidly evolving attitudes so that you can predict shareholder actions with greater accuracy.
Accurately predicting the future may sound challenging, but it’s possible when you’re equipped with the right data and the appropriate IR tools to analyze it all.
When it comes to predictive analytics, the process is easier when you collect a broad spectrum of data from across your entire digital landscape. Having more data increases the accuracy of your model, but let’s be honest — tremendous data sets can be overwhelming for your team to crunch on their own.
That’s where a holistic or end-to-end IR platform can help. It aggregates IR intelligence from a variety of sources, including your IR CRM desktop app, IR website, and capital markets events, and analyzes it using sophisticated AI.
Something like the Q4 Capital Connect platform combines these state-of-the-art market intelligence tools to collect, visualize, process, and synthesize data on your behalf, delivering insights in one easy-to-use application.
With a holistic approach to your behavior analytics (or engagement analytics, as it’s also known), you can collect actionable insights about your investors and the market at large. You’ll be able to accelerate meetings with institutional investors and know when to prioritize the right investors at the right time.
Adjust Your Investment Proposition and IR Narrative
Engagement analytics helps you understand your shareholder base with greater clarity. And while these metrics can help you refine your targeting strategy, they can also help you improve your overarching IR narrative.
Take the time to review your investment proposition and key messaging you’ve been using to tell your story via your investor relations website, making sure it aligns with what you know about your investors. You’ll want to update your messaging to ensure it reflects current and projected performance.
It’s also a good idea to compare your positioning to similar IPOs or publicly traded companies in your peer group. You’ll see how other companies have tweaked their IR narratives to reflect these volatile times. Checking in with the competition like this can help spark inspiration for your own messaging and investor relations strategy.
Bottom Line:
It can feel as though you’re at the mercy of a bear market, thanks to inflation. But there are ways for your team to adapt to this new volatile landscape. An end-to-end IR platform powered by engagement analytics can help you craft an appropriate IR narrative for these unpredictable times.