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When most people talk about a digital footprint, they mean the virtual clues people leave behind when they open emails, click links and purchase things online. In this context, a digital footprint refers to the data collected from a person’s online activities and devices.
Corporations have digital footprints, too, and they’re much more expansive than the average individual. In investor relations, IPOs, SPACs, and public companies wield impressive digital footprints to broadcast their value propositions, maintain compliance, and crunch engagement metrics. Beyond that, your digital footprint is integral in collecting analytics for investors and corporate access professionals.
What is a Corporate Digital Footprint?
The corporate digital footprint is synonymous with your online presence. Also known as your electronic shadow, it refers to all your digital products that investors, analysts, and the media engage with to glean information about your stocks.
Your IR website makes up the majority of your digital footprint. The Brunswick Group identifies IR websites as the single most important and trusted source of information about companies. Investors visit this site first before moving on to Google, credible news sites, and social media message boards like Reddit.
The IR website earns its spot at the top because of what it shares. As your brand’s virtual mouthpiece, it’s your IR narrative’s primary source. It showcases the journey your brand took to get where you are today, celebrating victories and justifying obstacles. It’s where investors learn about your intentions for the future.
A strong IR site supports your narrative with clear and easy-to-understand financials and downloadable content (such as press releases, studies, and historic webcasts), using the numbers to show the truth behind your storytelling. These two elements establish your value proposition to visitors.
While your IR site is a crucial feature of your digital footprint, it’s not the only way investors engage with your brand. Your social media accounts represent another large part of your electronic shadow, as do email marketing, online advertising, and publications.
Leveraging Your Digital Footprint
The size and strength of your digital footprint can maximize the impact of your investor relations strategy. However, size isn’t everything. With the right IR tools, even a small electronic shadow cast by a nano-cap corporation can provide incredible insights.
With every visit, investors leave behind their digital footprints. By tracking and analyzing their engagement with your site, email campaigns, and social media, you gain a better understanding of their interests.
The latest engagement analytics collects raw data from online visitors and converts them into actionable insights. These analytics tools make it easy to compare engagement metrics between other investors, your overall market performance, and your peers. The more you know about their behaviour online (and how it translates to your stock performance and benchmarking), the greater your chance of predicting what investors will do in the future.
Following overall engagement helps you identify key messaging and campaigns that succeed — and which ones miss the mark. You can use these insights to tweak your messaging and downloadable content. A more targeted look at individual investors also helps you realize what interests unique shareholders. You can monitor their engagement to accelerate targeted outreach relating to the pages and downloadable content they view.
The Takeaway:
Your corporate digital footprint shares a positive symbiotic relationship with the average investor’s digital footprint. While investors interact with your online presence to make investment decisions, your investor relations platform collects important data that informs your strategy.
Reach out to an experienced IR firm for a consultation to learn how you can strengthen your online presence and invest in engagement analytics.