What Do Investors Want in an IR Website?

Do you help manage investor relations communications at your company? If so, your role as an IR professional continues to evolve.

Your responsibilities now extend to being much more strategic about how company information is presented. You’re expected to have clear goals about how to engage and communicate with investors, potential new shareholders and how to build individual relationships with various audiences.

This is a challenging job, and at the heart of your communications workflow should be your investor relations website. How should it be built to effectively engage your audience and grow your company’s valuation?

Keep reading to learn what investors are looking for when it comes to your IR website.

Who's Visiting Your IR Website?

First, understanding who your audiences are and how they engage with your content will help you better tailor your website to visitors and ensure they return.

Visitors to your IR website can be grouped as follows:

1. Analysts who already know about your company.
    
2. Analysts researching your company.
    
3. Shareholders – both expert and non-expert, where non-expert shareholders are casual owners who have bought the stock out of curiosity or as part of a fund.

While each group may have different background knowledge about your company, they are visiting your site because they believe it to be the source of truth.

What Are Investors Looking For?

Our analytics tools help reveal the most frequently visited sections of our clients’ IR websites, and it should come as no surprise that the number one reason for visiting is to learn more about your company. This “About” section should be focused on helping your company sell itself and its investment proposition.

The second most popular content feature is financial information, both historical and current. This should include fundamentals to help visitors understand your company’s total financial value.

News, including recent press releases related to earnings announcements, rounds out the top three most visited content, but what may be surprising is how quickly non-financial data is becoming more relevant to your visitors.

These topics include:

• Philanthropic actions, including charitable contributions and efforts to enhance the welfare of communities such as donations, educational programs, healthcare initiatives and fundraising events.
   
• Ethical practices, including fair labor policies in your company and across your supply chain, as well as transparent governance behaviors.
   
• Environmental impact, such as pollution emissions, carbon footprint, water conservation and other natural resource preservation initiatives.

Why ESG Storytelling Matters

The popularity of these non-financial sections has increased in recent years.

As we touched on above, the most progressive companies are going one step further by adding dedicated sections for Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG)-related information, sharing what kind of impact they’re making in those areas.

Investors are increasingly factoring in ESG criteria when making investment decisions.

Successful companies now tell a compelling ESG story to not just their investors, but employees, customers and other key stakeholders. If the COVID-19 crisis has shown us one thing, it’s that the interests of these stakeholder groups are more connected than ever before.

Employee safety is an ESG and a business issue, for example. 

By creating a consistent ESG message across your IR website, news releases, regulatory filings, video events and social media posts, you can ensure that you’re telling a consistent ESG story to these groups. This takes collaboration between IR, corporate communications, public relations and sometimes even human resources teams.

In North America, companies are still catching up when it comes to ESG storytelling. Only 45% of North American companies include information on social responsibility practices on their IR website, compared with 70% in Europe and 71% in Asia.

If your IR website is missing ESG content today, now is the time to include it. Your investors are looking for it, and because your IR website is the source of truth, you control the message.

Why Choose Notified for Your IR Website?

At Notified, we’ll work with you to build and manage an IR website that’s intuitively designed, highly optimized and fully compliant.

You can present your financials, events and ESG initiatives and make your company information easy to find, improving transparency and accessibility for investors.

With a dedicated Website Service Manager and customer support that’s always available, you’ll have the resources and expertise you need. Our global team manages a portfolio of more than 3,300 sites and it’s easy to see why we’re the industry leader. Learn more today.