What you’ll learn 🧠

Why engaging your long-tail shareholders is important
How to engage your shareholders through InvestorHub
How to design an awesome welcome experience for new investors
The importance of small actions for shareholder sentiment

What you’ll need 🧰

📍 An active Investor Hub

📍 Access to distribution via your socials, website and ASX announcements

📍 Additional content for context and background on your announcements

The Problem 🚩

Retail shareholders are an increasingly important aspect of a company’s shareholder base, with the recent booms in trading activity over the past few years. What’s emerged is a shareholder demographic that engages heavily in public discourse. Companies need to utilise their methods of engagement for their top 20 for their entire register.

Retail shareholders frequently discuss company announcements and other related topics within accessible public forums (HotCopper, Reddit). As a result, information can be taken out of context or misrepresented. Companies aren’t able to gather feedback or gauge sentiment from investors directly, and shareholders may feel disengaged as a result.

📍 IMPORTANT: Understanding the individuals who invest in your company is an essential aspect of investor relations. This understanding provides insight into why they’re investing, what they’re expecting in the future and how you can maintain and build their trust.

The Hypothesis 🧪

Shareholders already have faith in your company, that’s why they’ve decided to invest in the first place. They want to be engaged with, and having an interactive & enjoyable experience is one less reason for them to churn in the event of market adversity or external factors.

“The revolution in digital brokerage means that investing is all-but-frictionless, and investors can make decisions to buy and sell on a whim. Companies, therefore, should ensure they are reaching and engaging with all of their investors. If they can do this, then the company could be more resilient to the influence of external factors in the future”

Ben Williamson, CEO @ InvestorHub 🌿

We believe that a company can better identify their investor demand by enhancing their shareholder engagement. By uplifting your processes and shareholder strategy through the use of our tools and best practices; improve how you measure, grow and capture your investor demand.

Using the right tools as well as the appropriate methodology can result in:

Reducing shareholder churn by growing investor conviction
Maximising the amount of capital you raise by leveraging shareholder data
Lowering the cost of capital through data-driven insights and decisions
Increasing shareholder trust in your company strategy and long term objectives
Providing security in times of adversity like shareholder activism events

Case Study - Race Oncology SPP 2021 📖

Strategic SPP landing page to deliver the ‘why’ for investors
Extensive shareholder contact and distribution campaign (phone & email)
A targeted engagement strategy with extensive investor segmentation

🔥 $43.9m received in applications, on an initial raise goal of $29.7m (48% oversubscribed)

“Representing a public company, I think it is important to be able to engage with every single one of our shareholders to ensure that they understand what we are doing and why we’re doing it. There are enough factors beyond our control that influence shareholder churn, so we don’t let “lack of communication” or “lack of understanding” - two things that are within our control - be another reason for churn”

Daniel Tillett, CSO and ED @ Race Oncology 🧪

The Solution ✅

🚀 Use the Interactive Announcements Hub through InvestorHub with these best practices

Share your Investor Hub! Include a shareable link of the interactive announcement in the related ASX announcement & add copy that stresses the importance of your investor hub for future engagement. Share your investor hub on socials whenever an important announcement is announced (you can even go a step further and do a mailout campaign if you have shareholder emails on hand).
See how to share your announcements here!
Add links to the Investor Hub on your website to provide easy and visible access to encourage investors to journey through to the investor hub when looking for more information or engagement.
To set this up on your website you will need to contact your InvestorHub Account Manager to coordinate this.
Add video summaries to important announcements and those that might require a little bit more industry knowledge, or where you want to add some personal flair!
See how to add videos to your announcements here.

📍 You can take this further and attach project specific content (like a tour of a site or a technical breakdown of a product) to really differentiate your announcement and provide colour.
Engage with your shareholders regularly through questions and annotations on the announcements and make sure to publish common questions for other shareholders to benefit from.
Check out how to manage interactions on announcements here.

📍 Make sure to answer as many questions as possible and if you get overwhelmed at any point, you can commit to time boxing your responses (e.g. “we will answer questions for this announcement for 48 hours only”) to make it more manageable.

📍 Any interesting questions can be shared on your socials as well to spread the information more broadly and to generate more traffic to your investor hub.

Bring the conversation back under your control. If you notice conversations springing from your announcements on social media (Hotcopper / Reddit / Twitter) reply with a link to the relevant announcement. This gives investors the opportunity to ask their questions directly to you, the company, and join the conversation.

📍 You can also answer these questions directly in your Interactive Announcement. Copy the relevant question from the thread and paste it as a comment on the announcement with your answer! Make sure to reference where this question came from and the username of the user who asked the question.

🚀 Improve shareholder reach and onboard your investors from day 1

Check out our playbook article on best practices for improving reachability within your shareholder base.

🚀 Segment your shareholders with your Register Overview

Reach out to investors who you’ve identified as downgrading or churning through the Register Overview tool and personalise a call or email to determine the motivation from their end and whether anything can be done to address their concerns.
Reach out and create a relationship with your shareholders who are continuously upgrading their holdings to build rapport and understand what they like about you.
Learn more about the Register Overview section here.

📍 Gathering feedback and sentiment from this population can inform you of the areas that shareholders find the most promising, as well as providing insight into potential areas for improvement.

These are our initial pointers for companies who want to boost their shareholder engagement through InvestorHub. We'd love to hear what works best for you, and if you have any questions on the above, you can reach out to your Account Manager.