3 Tips to Stop Wasting Your Investor Relations Budget in 2022
By Apollo Crew
Every public company has to spend money to increase their discoverability but how can you be sure that you're spending effectively in a world full of jargon and vanity metrics?
“Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is, I don’t know which half.” — John Wanamaker
Becoming a public company is fraught with new questions, new considerations, and (seemingly) a million new expenses. Just as you have to market your business to gain new customers, you need to market yourself as a public company to ensure that prospective investors are aware of you.
But, as with anything else, investor communications strategies come with a price tag (and often, quite a sizeable one). Every public company has to spend money to increase their discoverability, but how can you be sure that you’re spending effectively in a world full of jargon and vanity metrics? How can you avoid John Wanamaker’s conundrum and determine which half of your money is being wasted?
Follow these three tips to squeeze the most out of your investor relations budget:
Tip #1: Create transparent communication.
If you’re reading this, chances are that you’re the only connection between your company and all of your marketing service providers. Though it has worked up to now, the silos have to go.
There needs to be direct communication between all service providers working on an account to ensure that messaging, strategies, and results are being shared with one another. Increased transparency and communication allow every member of the team to act more rapidly, get in front of changing trends in the online environment, and reduce the time and money needed for each service provider to reach the same conclusion.
For example: If you have one service provider writing content and another designing digital advertisements, they’re both going to be testing out strategies and verbiage to speak better to your online audience. If your digital advertiser finds out that strategy X is much more effective than strategy Y, the content writer can adjust course and start focusing specifically on strategy X. Once this is happening, your results will improve.
Tip #2: Identify gaps and overlaps.
After implementing tip 1, you’ll see new data present itself to you. Namely, your ‘gaps’ and ‘overlaps’.
You can consider your gaps to be areas that your marketing is distinctly lacking, and your overlaps to be areas that have multiple people doing the same thing.
When are overlaps beneficial, and when are they detrimental?
Let’s look at the difference in overlap effectiveness between digital advertisers and social media influencers:
Typically, digital advertisers make money by keeping a pre-determined percentage of their ad spend. The more you want to spend, the more they make; therefore, they’re incentivized to spend as much as they can to gather results. If you have two digital advertisers working side-by-side, they’re less likely to share and/or implement data from the other, as this would reduce their overall spend. This results in two times the spend to reach the same conclusion.
On the other hand, having more social media influencers can often create exponential benefits and you want them to overlap. If you have a greater number of diverse, recognizable voices speaking about you online, then you’re increasing the likelihood of a prospective investor seeing or hearing about your company and wanting to find out more. After all, if everyone in the neighbourhood is talking about the cool new restaurant that just opened up, people will want to see what all the excitement is about.
What about gaps?
If we consider your marketing plan a recipe, gaps can be small things like not having a garnish, or large things like missing a key ingredient. And if you’re missing a key ingredient, the dish can be ruined.
The best way to understand this is through examples.
If you have two diverse lead generation partners but no one working on producing content for your company, you’re going to end up with an audience of people waiting to hear from you… with nothing to say! This is the digital equivalent of inviting people over for a dinner party, then not being home when they arrive.
Conversely, if you have a multitude of content creators designing beautiful, effective assets for company usage but no distribution or audience for that content to go to, then you’re wasting money creating things for only you to see.
Once you identify your gaps and overlaps, you’re quickly going to see which marketing dollars are being wasted.
Tip #3: Get a quarterback.
The best way to implement these tips is to elect a ‘quarterback’ for your investor marketing plan, allow them to audit all of the services you’re currently using (and what you need to use, but aren’t), and then help you find the right people for the job.
If you’re just getting started, then you’re in luck. You can use your quarterback to construct an effective plan from the start, selecting service providers to kick things off without a wasted cent.
If you’re already neck-deep in a marketing plan, don’t worry. It isn’t too late to course-correct and implement these things.
Reach out to our team at hello@apollorelations.com for a free consultation of your marketing plan, and to see if we can help you reduce your ineffective spend today.
