The Westwicke Blog is designed to deliver information and insights into the ever-changing world of healthcare communications.
Over the past few weeks, cities, states, and businesses have begun taking measures to help slow the spread of COVID-19. For many companies, that means encouraging or requiring employees to work from home. For others, it means cancelling conferences, meetings, and investor days.
Any company looking to attract market attention today shouldn’t underestimate the importance of a sophisticated corporate website with a high quality investor relations section.
Potential investors interested in learning more about your firm will likely visit your website before anything else, so put your best foot forward by making your IR website appealing and its pages informative and easy to navigate.
Finding out how others view your company can be intimidating, but to make sure your business is headed in the right direction, it’s necessary. A perception audit — an independent investigation into investor and analyst impressions of a company — can help you benchmark your progress over time, identify ways to improve your investor relations plan, and pinpoint any misperceptions in market views. Learn the basics of how to conduct a successful perception audit with this checklist.
In today’s world of ubiquitous, instantaneous, and interconnected information, integrated communication should be a key strategic priority for all companies. However, it is even more important in the healthcare space, especially for early stage, pre-revenue life sciences companies, where the investor story is indistinguishable from the product or technology story.
Many companies struggle to unify their message and deliver a cohesive story to the marketplace. As a consequence, the many other voices in the arena — competitors, analysts, key opinion leaders, regulators, investors, advocacy groups, the media, and others — shape the perception of your company for you.
For publicly traded healthcare companies, clinical trial data and milestone disclosure can present great opportunities as well as significant challenges.
On the path toward regulatory approval, life science and medical device company management will encounter difficult disclosure decisions surrounding clinical and regulatory events. Finding the right balance between the “duty to disclose” vs. “pressure to disclose” dilemma is not easy. If done right, such milestones are a great way to raise visibility within the investment, clinical and scientific communities. If done wrong, the consequences may be severe.
The decision to host a company research and development (R&D) event for investors and analysts should not be taken lightly. Beyond the associated costs, the amount of time it takes to properly prepare is a big endeavor and can be a significant distraction to a company’s management team. Continue Reading
Creating a presentation for an audience of investors is a balancing act. On the one hand, there are specific pieces of information that investors want to see in a certain way, and if you don’t provide that information, they’ll wonder what you’re trying to hide. On the other hand, investors see so many presentations every month — hundreds of slides, thousands of charts, and an endless barrage of bullets and sub-bullets — it’s no wonder that so few make a lasting impression.
Face-to-face meetings with key members of the institutional investor community can be critical to your company’s success in the public markets. However, it can often be challenging for companies to reach the right institutional accounts and appropriately balance these IR activities with the many other demands on management’s time.
Earnings calls are your opportunity to communicate your company’s story to the world. These calls give analysts and investors insight into the progress you’re making on financial metrics and clues about future performance. It’s critical to make these calls count.
It may seem a bit early to start creating an investor relations plan for the coming year, but considering there are several major external factors primed to drive structural change and market volatility, it’s critical to start planning now. After all, there is a major U.S. election in November 2020, a recent inversion in the yield curve that may be a predictor of an approaching economic slowdown, an ongoing trade war, and plans for investor conferences organized by corporate access teams at major buy-side institutions that cut out the investment banks.
