Benchmarking reports can help companies better measure their IR performance against peers and help improve overall engagement, says Darrell Heaps, chief executive at Q4.
In the latest IR TV video, Heaps discusses how IR teams can look more closely at their performance through the new benchmarking initiative launched within the Q4 Engagement Analytics product.
The update to the product aims to aggregate digital investor interactions through web visits, email alert openings and event attendance to enable IROs to see how their individual program is performing against industry and market cap peers.
‘[Companies] that receive the same level of engagement as their peers can look at their programs in order to improve because, ultimately, we know companies that received the most attention and engagement typically have the most interest from investors,’ says Heaps. ‘There is a great correlation with buying behavior or selling behavior.’
‘Research leads the investing process’
The capital markets communications platform boss remarks how the data that drives Engagement Analytics is based on all the website, email and event analytics that come from clients across the entire platform.
He suggests that while research leads the investing process, through data ‘you can see certain individuals or certain investors starting to engage with one particular company and then that shows up in ownership months later.’
One of the challenges in IR is: how can it be measured? ‘How do you know what good investor relations is from bad?’ asks Heaps. There are many qualitative aspects to measure an IR program, he says, but when looking at quantitative data, ‘I think what has been missing is what that measure is.’
What Q4 can do now is measure the engagement of investors by looking at the content they put out there, Heaps says, whether that is in the form of news or presentation of annual results.
‘Through the content, it can then be analyzed to understand whether it is being consumed. Is there engagement occurring in that content?’ he adds.
‘The ability to understand how the external IR content is being consumed is something we think is a new piece of data that is really essential for all IR programs.’
