Many companies think about customers and potential customers when setting out their digital marketing plan but you also need to consider other stakeholders in this. In this blog we will focus on investors as it's a group many start ups need to attract.
Investors are typically busy people, who receive many pitches a week meaning you have a short amount of time to get their initial engagement. Let's assume your initial email and conversation went well and they want to find out more about you and your business. Let's look at some of the places they may look as part of due diligence.
Your website from an investors point of view
As we have already said invertors are typically time conscious people so here are a few simple initial rules for your website when it comes to investors.
Value proposition, a value proposition should cover succinctly what you offer and what makes you different from the competition. Make sure you have one and don't hide it, make it easy to find and clearly written, ideally on the home page as the first thing people see. This will help other people too as if you offer a unique device for treating heart disease and the user wanted information on a healthy heart disease they probably aren't looking in the right place. This will help improve your users' experience of your site.
Make sure your branding standard and messaging are consistent and in line with your brand guidelines. If you are using someone else to design your website you need to make sure they have your brand guidelines and understand your value proposition, mission vision, and values as well as the key messages you need to get across and your target audience. We wrote a recent blog on branding colours which might be useful to you. These will all play into the design of your website if you are just developing one or looking at your existing one with a critical eye. If you want assistance in developing your brand contact us.
Next are links from your website to your other social channels. A potential investor will want to see you have this all joined up They will be able to see at a glance the social channels you are on as well as quickly link to them. There is nothing worse than doing your due diligence and having to go from a website to type in the company name to LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, etc to see what sites the company is on and how they portray themselves. Make sure these links all work, nothing worse than a broken link.
If you are collaborating or selling to any pivotal companies in your space make sure, with their permission you have their logos on your website as well as a link to their site. Ask them if there is an appropriate place for a link to you from their site. For example, if you are carrying out a trial of your product in a prestigious centre have their logo on your site and ask if they will place yours or a link to your site in their website section on trials.
If you have a news section you need to make sure this is current. Potential investors want to see a news section that is current, not one that hasn't shown anything new in the last 6 months. This looks like a very static company. If you don't have a plan and time to keep this updated then don't have the section. Having said that it doesn't need a new story every day but one a month as a minimum. These stories can be new hires, significant milestones in the business, awards, funding raised, trials commenced, or updates along the way if the trial design allows, as a few examples.
Keep text into short paragraphs with the key message at the start of a section. Use images and custom animations where available. Try and avoid stock images if possible, a photo shoot can be a cost effective part of marketing if well planned. If you have a set of key items/ people you need to photograph in the right place at the same time you can achieve a lot. Talk to your photographer ahead of time so they have the right environment for the photo shoot. Don't just employ someone to come and take a few shots but take time to plan what is needed.
Show you are engaged with your customers and have lead generation as part of your site. Each page should have a call to action. By this we mean what do you want the person to do as a result of having read this part of your site?
Get in touch to find out more about this amazing new development
Want to find out about having this product in your hospital
Want to be kept up to date on developments sign up for our newsletter
These are all a few examples, which should have a link directly to a form to collect the information. Make sure someone in the company is going to receive these and action them immediately so you don't lose any traction. Imagine if a potential investor asks to be kept up to date with a newsletter and then they don't hear anything for 3 weeks. You can always send an email to thank them for signing up and send the last newsletter, then notify them they have been added to a database to receive the next one when published.
Investors will want to know more about the team involved in the company, depending on the size of your company you can either have all team members or if you are a larger organisation just the key people. For all included you should have an image and a few sentences, about what they do at the company. A link to their LinkedIn profile if it's up to date is good to include. It might also be nice to include a little know fact about them or what they like to do outside of work to show a little of their personality too.
Social Media channels for investors
Social media can play a really important part in investors' research and decisions a recent article on social media influencing Investment found
48% of the investors said information from social media prompted them to do additional research on an industry issue or topic
37% said they shared information from social media with decision-makers at their companies
34% said information learned on social media influenced a decision to work with a particular client or company
33% said information obtained on social media triggered a discussion with their investment consultant
You will already have decided what social channels are appropriate for your business when you developed your marketing plan. Here is a blog covering this topic if you haven't done this yet. You need to make sure the content on these channels covers your sector only. Don't be tempted to share what the team had for lunch but stick to your company and your sector. So if you are in medical education make sure you talk about your developments, and courses you have run but also remember to include some educational pieces. These might be on trends in education or the latest apps used in medical education. You can share other people's posts so long as they are relevant to your sector and business. The tone of the posts will be different depending on the channel used and the intended target audience. You might be more technical on your LinkedIn posts to potential distributors for example than to facebook if this is intended for the end user. This will of course depend on your product and end user. you can also include some personality in these posts but keep to the sector and your business.
A quick note on your personal profiles. It's common to share your team's LinkedIn profile as we mentioned in the section on the website above. You need to think of these as an extension of the company page. Remember people buy people so your potential investors will want to get a feel for you and the team. These personal profiles are an opportunity to show you are an expert in your field so encourage team members to share, comment, and post on these topics as well as the company posts. If you have a head of HR then seeing them comment on HR topics or share posts talking about how we manage a team in the new world of hybrid working will go a long way.
We hope this has been beneficial to you in your investment work. If you want to be kept up to date on future blogs, please sign up
If you have a particular issue with your social media or website and would like us to take a look please contact us we would be happy to discuss this further with you.
