Council Post: How To Find The Right Shareholder Relationship Management Tools

Understanding your shareholder base and its changing interests is and always will be a challenge for public companies. Today, demands from shareholders are higher than ever. Plus, shareholder activism and regulation has greatly escalated in the past decade. Activism-related trends are just one indicator that the landscape is constantly moving, which means that, as a public company, your tracking and communications strategies should also evolve. And even then, it’s not enough to understand how the landscape at large has changed or is changing. You need to understand your own shareholders on an individual level and work to engage them in dramatically new ways.

The most popular stated goal for investor relations programs in the past few years has been to expand or enhance engagement with existing shareholders. While this number increases year over year, I wonder to what extent they want to expand engagement. One mistake I see many companies make is thinking that engagement only happens in a few short shareholder meetings or calls throughout the year. In reality, it’s a continuous relationship-building process.

So what does it take to manage quality engagement with your investors throughout the year? Let me ask you this first: Do you know what your investors did today? Do you know who’s buying your stock? Those are the answers that, when found, will help you identify opportunities for investor retention. Although this ongoing process of monitoring and engaging shareholders can seem like a daunting task, keeping track of these movements is no longer unreachable. New technological innovations have made it easier to do just this.

In the past, public companies didn’t have a clear view of what happens between quarters. The technology wasn’t in place for management to understand what both retail and institutional investors were doing on a daily basis, let alone have the tools to manage these relationships. But advanced technology is making quite a shift on many fronts. There is a changing communications environment with a trend toward social media and shareholder relationship management and intelligence platforms. Now, with shareholder intelligence tools, companies are able to analyze buying and selling trends and engage directly with shareholders through these platforms. These developments help to ensure that investor needs are met in terms of providing an opportunity for equal understanding of the company’s position and the opportunity to interact more with the company.

Here’s what you should look for in a shareholder relationship management and communications platform:

1. The basics: As a public company, you’ll need the ability to track shareholders’ buying and selling behaviors on a daily basis with the ability to identify an individual shareholder and analyze their historical activity. You should also be able to see your newest shareholders and identify who are the top shareholders and market makers.

2. Real-time data: Along with tracking your shareholders’ behaviors and trends over time, you should look for a platform that gives you access to real-time market data including your company’s level-two trading data, current share price, volume, percentage change and more.

3. Easily accessible and accurate contact info: Activate a platform that gives you the best actionable information, such as a tool that builds complete contact profiles on your shareholders including emails, phone numbers and social media accounts.

4. Communication and marketing plans: This data is not useful until you can take action against it. The shareholder management platform you decide to go with should make it easy for you to roll up all the data listed above, define opportunities for marketing campaigns and seamlessly execute those campaigns across channels.

To sum it all up, building a good relationship with your investors is critical. Let go of the idea that engagement only happens on a quarterly or annual meeting basis and start creating strategies that exercise ongoing communication. The best way to do this is to activate an all-in-one shareholder relationship management and communications platform. For companies where resources can be scarce, specifically in team size and budget, these tools are cost-efficient and can deliver high returns when used to their full potential.