Your internal communications strategy defines how you engage your employees to help you meet your business goals. It provides your workers with the tools they need so they can play their part in meeting these objectives, while feeling invested and valued in the process. Keep reading to find out how to deliver this most effectively and to find an internal communications strategy example that can help inspire your employees and senior leaders.

Why Develop an Internal Communications Strategy?

The world is changing and organisations must keep up so they can address some of the most pressing human capital challenges:

• The increase of remote working, driven by the COVID-19 pandemic, means that workforces are more disparate
• Employees are taking the lead as they assess their work lives. 40% of employees around the world are looking to change their employer this year, according to Deloitte
• Whilst nearly three-quarters of employers rate teamwork and collaboration as “very important”, Queens University of Charlotte found that 39% of employees felt that there was not enough collaboration within their organisation.

An effective internal communications strategy provides the following benefits:

• Enables you to develop a coherent, strong internal communication policy that garners the sense of being part of a team and creating a shared goal.
• Helps avoid or minimise the talent drain and makes employees feel integral to the strategic goals of the company.
• Makes workers feel valued. Valued workers are more productive.
• Encourages everyone to work together, rather than simply creating a string of top-down demands.
• Creates a healthy feedback loop. Leaders are better informed about their employees and their strengths, weaknesses, hopes and fears.
• Allows managers to respond more quickly to events and even head off trouble before it occurs.
• Makes your workplace more agile because everyone is up to speed with the current projects. This means that they do not need to catch up when something goes wrong and can respond knowledgeably and swiftly.
• Increases employee buy-in. Your staff is confident that they can instigate and support changes, feel more connected to goals, and are more comfortable approaching leaders with issues and suggestions.

So, there are plenty of reasons to improve your internal communications. Let’s take a look at  how you can do that.

Steps To a Better Internal Communications (IC) Strategy

1. Inspect your current IC practices

You should review and audit the strategy you have in place for employee engagement and find out where it is successful and where it needs improvement.

Is it focused on your business mission and goals?

Does it work for the structure of your organisation?

Knowing the answers to these questions will help you develop a new strategy to be more effective and efficient.

2. Understand your internal audience

Your new strategy must work for the people you have in place in your team, the environment they work in and for the things that motivate them. This will be different for every organisation and it can even vary by event. For example, you will have a broader audience when organising your company’s town hall meeting but a much smaller one when planning an internal training webinar for the finance department.

Whatever the case, you must consult with your employees when formulating your IC plan. It is not a case of one size fits all – you might need to use different forms of communication for different sections of your workforce.

Consider the ages of your employees, their locations, their outlook on the business and any other factors that could dictate the specific methods of communication to really engage them.

3. Set realistic objectives

You cannot run a successful internal communications programme without having clear goals in sight. Perhaps more importantly, they should be realistic goals, too. You can always set a new goal when you meet your original target, but you need to always be working towards something in order to best engage with employees and create that focus that you need.

Think about the value you want to add to the business and make sure it is clear why it is of benefit to achieve it. This will help employees understand the reasons for the goal and how they can help achieve it and get behind the internal communication strategy.

4. Select your internal communication channels

Once you know what you want to achieve with your policy, you have to decide how to communicate with your employees. This might include a staff intranet, social media, messaging apps like Slack, newsletters or any manner of other tools used in combination.

Regular meetings are advisable, as that gives leaders the opportunity to talk directly to staff and answer their questions.

Right now, it may be difficult to schedule all-hands meetings due to flexible working, remote working and employees based in different countries and timezones, but video conferencing can help.

If you need a reliable, professional video conferencing and webcasting platform for your company, try Company Webcast. It provides a secure and stable environment for multi-department meetings and management updates that everyone can join, wherever they are.

5. Consider timing

Timing is key when distributing messages to employees. If the communication reaches them during a busy time, it can get lost in the noise of the situation. Similarly, sending out a message last thing on a Friday afternoon runs the risk of being ignored or missed as colleagues wrap up and leave for the weekend.

Scheduling communication in advance allows you to pick the right moment and follow up in good time if you do not receive the replies you desire. You can also gather data on open rates and responses in order to help plan the best time to communicate.

Still, keep in mind that much of your internal comms should be based on context. Sending a message about something relatively innocuous like a staff drinks night when everyone is doubling down to hit a hard deadline is unlikely to be effective, for example.

6. Create a template

Create a template to help you plot your employee communication efforts or download an example from the internet. This resource will help you visualise your internal communication strategy to take you from your current situation to where you and your key stakeholders want to be by acting as a roadmap.

7. Measure your progress

You can measure the progress you make with your strategy using a variety of metrics. These include page views on intranet articles, open rates on emails and engagement statistics from Company Webcast’s webinar tools, such as polls and questions. If you track these over time, you can work out whether you have succeeded in your efforts to engage employees.

As well as this quantitative data, seek out qualitative data from focus groups with employees to find out about their experiences and the things you can do to improve your engagement with them. These insights are invaluable for your internal communications!

Best Practices for Internal Communications

Make it a dialogue

Engagement is a two-way street. If employees don’t feel heard, they will not buy in to your strategy and your goals. Encourage participation, suggestions, comments, questions and more. If staff members don’t understand something, the messaging needs tweaking, but you don’t know that until you invite feedback from stakeholders.

Check in on employees

Leaders should make sure they meet regularly with employees to discuss the goals and targets of the coming months. This keeps everyone in the loop and working to the same end. It shows that management is keen to work with employees, rather than impose tasks without explanation or reason.

Keep it simple

There is probably a lot you would love to say to your employees, but the skill is in distilling this into messaging that is as simple as possible. Too many internal messages, combined with external emails, can overload employees and distract them from their work.

Leave breathing space between messages to allow employees to digest and process the information, especially if any of it requires action on their behalf.

Share knowledge

Knowledge is power, as they say, and it can certainly be powerful in an internal communication strategy. Knowledge sparks conversations and ideas, it engages employees who feel valued as they have been given access to valuable information. If exciting things are happening, tell your employees about that. They might be able to add suggestions that take your internal comms to the next level.

Share good news

Good news can improve morale and foster that sense of team bonding. If everyone is working towards a common goal, they can share the enjoyment when something goes right. As long as you are certain it is good news for everyone, communicating your wins is a powerful move.

Recognise employees and teams

Everyone likes receiving praise for their achievements, so shout about them. Give other teams the chance to congratulate individuals or departments on a job well done. Talk about these successes and make your employees feel valued. It doesn’t even have to be work-related! You can highlight the successes that team members have achieved in all manner of fields.

Encourage communication between departments

Internal communication is not just a top-down or bottom-up process, it should also work across departments. The more each department knows about the others, the better it will be able to direct queries and find solutions. Companies work better when there is an understanding across departments and good internal communication.

Make it visual

Visual media, such as images and videos, are proven to be more effective than text. Hubspot reports that 90% of the information transmitted to the brain is visual and visuals are processed 60,000 times faster by the brain than text.

In addition, Marketing Sherpa explains that videos can increase visitor numbers to websites by two or three times and that they double the length of time that people spend on those pages. This shows the power video has when it comes to increasing visibility and engagement, which is another reason to use Company Webcast for your communications.

Examples of internal communication strategies

Here are some examples of effective communication strategies:

Company	Objective	What Happened
KLM	To keep employees up-to-date	Multiple internal webinars to keep employees up-to-date on all happenings within the company. Not only is the CEO (Pieter Elbers) more visible and involved within KLM. Read the full client case here.
MHS Homes (estate agent)	To promote a new intranet	Used information from registered users to create posters featuring fun facts about staff members. Other employees had to sign up and fill in their profile details to guess the identity of the featured team members, leading to 85% of active users on the intranet.
Nationwide Building Society	To renew the company’s sense of purpose	Talk back events and pulse surveys garnered employee feedback and resulted in marketing the business as a company that improves the quality of people’s lives, using the slogan “building society, nationwide”.

 

Conclusion

Your employees are integral to the success of your business. They need to buy into your goals and plan in order to help you carry them out. They act as advocates for your organisation and its company culture, so making sure they feel valued and a part of the success story of the business is important. Involving workers keeps them engaged and motivated, not to mention productive, too.

In order to harness this power, you need to converse with them, talk to them, listen to them and work together. Take a look at the internal communication strategy examples above to discover how businesses have successfully worked with their staff to drive success.

Finally, using webinars and other video communications is an effective way to engage with your employees. If you want to improve this aspect of your internal communications, we invite you to try Company Webcast. Our platform is trusted by leading companies such as Heineken, KPMG and Siemens.

References and Further Reading

• How to organise company town hall meetings
• Reasons to improve internal communication
• Epicom internal communication study
• Benefits of webinars
• Webinar checklist

 

 

In a world where we are more connected than ever with friends, colleagues, and businesses, it is key to have an external communication strategy that makes you a part of the conversation. If you are not constantly present, you will lose customers to competitors that don’t shy away from making themselves known.

Steve Harvey of creative agency Fabrik Brands in London defines a solid external communication strategy as follows:

“External communication strategies are the methods you use to capture the attention of the public…initiating a conversation with the world that exists beyond your business. That means they include everything from social media marketing to presentations for shareholders and customer service.”

The difference between external communications and targeted marketing campaigns is that the former looks to make the brand known to a larger audience, whereas the latter looks to focus on a specific audience.

However, the more wide-ranging approach can prove difficult to get right. As US-based PR firm, Rave Agency, formulated it:

“Merely communicating your message to a broad audience without any strategy…will likely result in failure. Brands need effective communication to survive. For communication to be effective, a strategy with outlined objectives needs to be established”.

This brings us to the next topic. Let’s find out how you can make a difference for your organisation and create a winning external communication strategy.

What is external communication today?

Your external communication is an attempt to speak to as many people as possible about your business. It needs to reflect what your target audience cares about. With that in mind, it should include the following elements:

Crisis planning

Some organisations handled the pandemic better than others. Firms like the Spanish Banco Santander showed the world their agility and proved their commitment to employee wellbeing. They enabled all 26,000 Spanish staff to work from home before the government even announced a national lockdown. This was a sign of expert crisis planning, which will certainly play a key role in communications strategies across the board, especially following the events of the last two years.

Reintroduction to the audience

The pandemic has changed the way most of us live and work. We interact with brands differently than we did prior to March 2020, so now is the time to reintroduce yourself as a business. Even if you can no longer rely on the loyalty of customers from before the coronavirus era, there are opportunities to appeal to many people who might be new to your brand.

Sustainability

Issues of sustainability are high in the minds of customers, and you need to show them that you are on the same page. This was confirmed by a recent McKinsey study:

 “European consumers want a stronger focus on sustainability and the environment—and they want industry stakeholders to act accordingly.”

If you are going to sway consumers towards your brand, you must show them how you are embracing a more green, environmentally friendly way of working and how you envisage it affecting the battle against climate change and similar risk factors.

Diversity and inclusion

The murder of George Floyd by a white police officer in Minneapolis in the US brought the subject of racial segregation back into sharp focus. From that incident and the ensuing Black Lives Matter protests, the discussion widened to include questions of where society is in terms of diversity and inclusion. This sparked debates not just about race, but about gender equality, treatment of those with disabilities, LGBTQ rights and more.

It makes sense that a business should reflect the society in which it works and the broad customer base it wishes to attract. Therefore, diversity and inclusion will form an ever more important element of external comms.

How to develop an external communication strategy

1. Define your mission statement

Your mission statement is the North Star of your communications strategy. It guides you in the right direction. Whenever you develop a message to send out into the world, you should check that it aligns with the values and goals instilled in your mission statement and you will achieve the consistency you need.

2. Define the objective

Work out what you want to achieve with your strategy. It could be that you want to bring in more customers, but it could also be for brand-building or another reason altogether. You should understand why you are communicating so you can work out how to achieve that objective.

3. Know your audience

External communications typically target a broad audience but, within that, you need to focus on the different groups you want to talk to. It is not a ‘one size fits all’ situation. You need different types of website content or advertising copy to talk to your investors compared to your customers. Both are important to consider in your strategy, but both want to hear different information and in a different manner. Remember who you are communicating with before you send out any message.

Analyse your organisation’s current situation

To know how to move forward, you need to understand where you are now. There are three key elements to help you assess your current situation. They are:

• PEST Factors – These are the political, economic, social, and technological elements that could affect your business, positively or negatively. Work out how you would handle a change in any of them so you can be agile if the change does occur.
• SWOT Factors – What are your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats? How can you communicate your strengths, fix your weaknesses, make the most of your opportunities and turn threats into more opportunities?
• Competitors – Rank yourself against your competitors as objectively as you can. How do you compare? What are they doing that you are not and vice versa?

Establish your tone of voice

The best external communications plans are instantly recognisable as coming from the brand in question. That’s why you need to develop a tone of voice in your messages that sums up what your brand is and does, in a way that engages with the people you want to talk to. Don’t copy your competitors. Make it your own.

Choose the right platforms to distribute

There is no point in trying to employ the same key messages over every available platform and network. It is not an efficient use of time, and you should instead concentrate on the outlets that will best reach the audiences you want to engage with.

For customers, these might be your blog articles, social media profiles such as Facebook, Instagram or Twitter, podcasts, stories based on your press releases. For investors, you might try videos, newsletters or webinars, for example.

Involve customers and employees

Both customers and employees can be great ambassadors for your business. They have access to social media where they can provide word-of-mouth recommendations.

A happy customer sharing their experience online can be indispensable to your external comms. Their friends, family and followers will trust their first-hand experience more than any type of branded message.

Your employees have the inside scoop on the business, so their recommendation shows others that they are proud to work in the organisation.

Determine how to measure success

To understand how successful your strategy is, you need to be able to measure your progress towards your goals. Otherwise, you will not know when to keep going with a plan and when to change course for a more effective external communication strategy. Pick KPIs that will allow you to measure the impact of your communication strategy.

Tips to improve your external communications strategy

Be relatable

Customers like to feel that they are heard and seen, so try to put yourself in their shoes when communicating with them. Investors want to know that you understand their hopes and fears, too. Listen to both audiences and learn about their concerns, their interests and how they feel. Then, reflect that in your messaging.

This shouldn’t be a one-way street. Be sure to respond to feedback so that it becomes a conversation, and your stakeholders feel included.

Know the value of repetition

You want to make sure that people remember your brand’s message, so you must keep putting it in front of them. Sometimes, it’s as simple as that. However, this requires you to constantly look for new ways to communicate that message so that you don’t annoy your audience.

Keep it simple and short

People are busy. They don’t want to read through reams of reports or listen to podcasts that last longer than their commute. They also don’t want to have to spend additional time trying to understand jargon and unnecessary technical language.

Your messages should be short, to the point and easy to understand. You are trying to spread the word about your brand, not overwhelm people with unnecessary information.

Always deliver value

It can be a massive turn-off to be the target of an external communications campaign from a business that offers no value. It is instantly forgettable if it adds nothing to the recipient. You won’t be successful if the message doesn’t interest them, make them think, solve a problem, provide them with social currency to pass on to their friends or have some other way of making them feel that they were enriched by reading, watching, or listening to it.

Align internal and external communications

When you attempt to create a consistent brand identity for your business, it needs the input of both internal and external stakeholders. There is no point in creating a brand image externally, only for customers to engage with employees and find that this company culture is only an image. Everyone needs to buy into your message to make it authentic.

If you communicate your brand values internally in the workplace, they will be seen by an external audience too. Employees need to feel that the messages the company puts out reflect their experience too to act as brand ambassadors for the business.

Conclusion

Creating a cohesive external communication strategy can be a challenge but it is incredibly valuable. With so much choice in the market, customers and investors need to know what you stand for, how you can improve their lives and why they should shop with you or buy your shares. Standing out from the crowd is key, as is making sure you communicate with stakeholders using the external communication channels most likely to reach them and listening to what they have to say too.

Hopefully, we have helped you come up with some ideas on how to move forward. If you want to engage customers and shareholders with quality, secure and professional video communications, try Company Webcast.

References and Further Reading

• About Company Webcast
• Virtual conference room
• Communication strategies for CEOs
• Communication failures
• Internal and external communication issues
• Webinars for Investor Relations

A company town hall meeting is the perfect opportunity for organisations to engage with their employees. Also called all-staff meetings or all-hands meetings, these events have historically focused on one-way communication — from management to staff. However, things have changed. The best and most effective town halls consist of a collaborative dialogue to help create a shared set of goals for all employees. 

According to a Forbes study, 74% of employees say they are more effective at their job when they feel heard. The company town hall is one important place to make that happen.  

Engaging employees in more and better ways is increasingly important. This is especially true in Europe where polling company Gallup reported that employee engagement rates have stagnated. At the same time, they are continuing to rise in the US.  

Another factor is the remote office. The percentage of workers in Europe working from home has increased from 5% to 12% since the COVID pandemic hit, presenting additional challenges to organisations that are looking to engage with workers. This is where the virtual company town hall meeting comes in.  

What exactly is a virtual company town hall meeting? 

A virtual company town hall meeting is an online variant of the traditional in-person event. This could be a fully virtual meeting where all participants join on their various devices. Alternatively, it may be a hybrid event where some people attend live and others take part remotely.  

The meeting usually involves the entire company. It is an opportunity to update staff on the most recent developments as well as to ensure everyone is aligned with the overall mission and goals of the business. The company town hall is also a chance for employees to connect with management and clarify any areas of concern.  

A virtual town hall takes place using video conferencing or webcasting technology, such as Company Webcast.  

Why should I host my town hall meeting online? 

There are a number of reasons to hold your town hall online. 

• Remote working is an ever more common practice and a virtual event makes it easier for those working from home to attend the meeting. Even before the pandemic, working from home was becoming more of a regular occurrence. A virtual town hall simply reflects this change in the way we work.  
• Similarly, flexible working arrangements mean that not everyone is on-site at the same time or able to be physically present at the meeting venue when the event is scheduled. For example, if you hold your town hall at 9am, this makes it difficult for parents who begin their working day later to make the physical meeting after the school run. However, it is likely that they will be able to drop their kids off and then return home in time to join the virtual version.  

• You might also have employees that work in various locations. Rather than take up their time by asking them to attend the event in person and spend money on travel and accommodation, you enable them to dial in from their home or office to take part. This is a more efficient use of their time, saves the company funds and is better for the environment, too.  

Virtual vs hybrid town hall meeting 

Here is a comparison between fully virtual and hybrid town hall meetings: 

Fully Virtual	Hybrid
No venue costs  Don’t need to spend time finding and booking the right venue  Can be organised more quickly  No travel or accommodation costs  You don’t have to worry about protests outside or inside the venue if you are discussing fraught topics	Provides more flexibility and convenience as staff can choose the option that suits them best  Offering both options can increase the reach of your event  Venue costs are lower than fully live events as you don’t need as large a capacity  Fewer travel and accommodation costs than fully live events

Both types of online company meetings offer the benefit that the meeting can still continue even if there are adverse weather conditions. They would also be minimally affected by incidents such as roadworks and accidents that could significantly delay an in-person town hall.  

Another benefit of both fully virtual and hybrid events is that you have a recording of the meeting to keep and make available on your employee intranet for anyone who couldn’t attend or for staff to rewatch if they wish to.  

How do I plan a virtual town hall meeting? 

1. Choose your platform

The platform you use is important to the success of your virtual town hall. It should be stable and secure as well as able to take a large amount of traffic, particularly if you work for a multinational business. You should look for a tool that is specifically created for these sorts of events, rather than a simple video conferencing solution. You need access to the specialist technology that enables you to stream large-scale events.  

It should also be as simple as possible for users to join. 

If you are currently considering solutions for your online town hall meeting, we invite you to try Company Webcast. The platform has created smooth, professional webcasts for more than 15 years and is ISO certified (27001), meaning that it can keep your sensitive information secure. You can take polls and ask questions. Your attendees will enjoy a simple user experience with easy sign-up, invite and log-in procedures.  

2. Define the objective of the meeting

Every town hall meeting has to have an objective — a reason for taking place and an area of the organisation’s work to concentrate on. This could be a major business development such as discussing sales figures or the details employees need to know about a new product launch. It could also be to foster trust within the business or to provide motivation.  

The objective helps you plan the right agenda, decide on the speakers and work out whether you need any breakout sessions or exercises, for example.  

3. Set a fixed date

You should fix a date for the town hall as soon as you can to give people as much notice as possible. When plotting the time and day, you should take into consideration the availability of your staff. This could involve thinking about different time zones as well as employees who might work in countries where the workweek is different from where you are based. But it might also include not holding the meeting too early or late in the working day so that you don’t exclude flexible workers.  

4. Build a clearly structured agenda

Once you know the date of the event, you can build the meeting agenda whilst bearing in mind the objective. This helps you choose the speakers and plan the presentations in a way that keeps the interest of the attendees and also delivers the information you need to impart.  

Ensure that you don’t devote too much time to one particular area as you need to keep people engaged. There is also the danger of trying to fit too much in. Instead, choose two or three crucial areas that relate to the objective and concentrate on them. The topics you cover must add value to the employees. Otherwise, they could become distracted and stop listening.  

5. Send out meeting invites

With the date and agenda settled, it is time to invite your staff. Include the agenda so they know what to expect and lay out the details of how the event will run on the day. This should explain how the live stream will work, what will be expected of the participants during the meeting and when they will have a chance to contribute. Also, note down the technical requirements for joining the meeting as well as details on who to contact in case of issues.  

6. Prepare your presentation

Presentations should be as engaging as possible, so it’s best to think beyond slides. Try to include visuals such as images and video, audio and other elements to capture the audience’s attention. Keep it simple and provide new information that staff need to hear. Returning to old topics that employees already understand can prove a turn-off in situations like this.  

You could even ask employees in advance about what they would like to hear regarding the topics on which you will be talking. This will enable you to prepare the content that is likely to be of most value on the day.  

Once you have your presentation complete, you should make sure you practise it as much as possible to ensure it runs smoothly on the day.  

Tips for holding your company’s town hall meeting online 

Keep the opening short and use icebreakers 

To give the meeting some momentum, the opening should be short and interactive. There is no point in spending a lot of time telling people what is going to happen. First, they know because they have already seen the agenda and, second, they are about to hear the speakers anyway. If people are watching from home, there are many distractions that can seem more attractive when the stream is not offering them any value. 

It is more useful to settle people in with some interactive icebreakers. This could be a poll, a fun question or a story related to the point you want to make. Such an opening immediately grabs attention and engages people. 

Celebrate the company 

You want to foster an atmosphere of togetherness and community with your assembled staff, so celebrate their achievements and wins. Mention the successes of individuals or teams. Highlight milestones that staff members have hit. Talk about the business results and show that you appreciate everyone’s hard work for the cause.  

Team spirit is key and this is your opportunity to help develop that. Forbes found that  employees who acted collaboratively stuck at their tasks 64% longer than their solitary peers. These employees also reported higher engagement levels, lower fatigue levels and higher success rates. 

Give employees a voice 

Your virtual company town hall should offer the chance for a discussion on topics that matter to employees. That’s why we recommend dedicating time to a live Q&A session. It is certainly handy to invite questions in advance because it gives management an idea of what might come up and helps them prepare, but you should also allow staff to ask questions live as a marker of the company’s dedication to transparency, openness and honesty.  

Give department leaders a chance to speak 

Leaving the entire event to be hosted by the CEO can be seen as only offering a narrow view of the company. Team members want to see their departments’ leaders talking on their behalf. Allowing your top-level managers to take part in planning the agenda and announcing their news makes for a more inclusive experience.  

Choose the right frequency of virtual town hall meetings 

The frequency of your virtual town halls depends on the nature of your business. Some companies hold them once a quarter, others once a month. If you do them too often, people will be less likely to attend as they can become run-of-the-mill. However, have them too infrequently and you lose momentum with the sense of community that a virtual town hall can foster.  

Conclusion 

As more of modern life goes online, elements of working life like the company town hall meeting begin to change. Going online makes sense to fit in with the way we work and play today, offering the chance to staff members who live further afield and don’t visit the workplace to take part and feel like a valued member of the team. It also brings teams together across different territories and fits in with flexible workers. However, it is essential that you choose the correct platform for your needs.  

Company Webcast is experienced in delivering seamless online events, with innovative peer-to-peer technology ensuring everyone attending receives a quality experience. Contact us here to learn more. 

References and further reading 

• Hybrid events 
• What is a webcast? 
• Internal communication webinar solutions 
• Forbes on employee engagement  
• Employee engagement in Europe  

As more aspects of our everyday lives go online, both professionally and recreationally, it makes sense to embrace a virtual Capital Markets Day (CMD). Communicating over the internet is a natural occurrence for us today and the technology now exists to make it accessible and valuable.

Many companies are already leading the way by taking their CMDs online. Here are two examples:

• Bpost – the Belgian postal group had 26 people physically attend a recent CMD, with a further 166 watching online.
• Aalberts NV – The Dutch manufacturer had approximately 60 people physically present at their CMD, with 354 online webcast viewers. This meant they reached around 70% of their total target group of approximately 500 (potential) investors.

Read this article to find out the benefits of holding a virtual Capital Markets Day, the different formats available and how to organise a successful online CMD.

Why organise a virtual Capital Markets Day?

There are a host of benefits to organising a virtual Capital Markets Day but here are the most important ones.

Increased attendance

By offering the chance for investors, analysts, journalists and employees to watch the Capital Markets Day event online, you can reach more people than with an in-person event. Attendees don’t have to take time off work, travel to the event or book accommodation. They can access the webcast at home, in the office or anywhere else they like. If they don’t catch the presentations live, they can watch them on-demand later to view the video in their own time.

At Company Webcast, we have found that the average CMD event was attended in-person by 43 people, with 411 online viewers. Taking into account the proportions of analysts, current investors and potential investors (as opposed to employees), within both types of audiences, we found that a webcast reached 4.2 times more of these key attendees than a solely in-person event would have.

Improved global reach

Not only can a virtual CMD help reach more people within your home country, but it can also increase your reach across the world. Our recent research found that this helps spread your message beyond country borders and is one of the reasons why 95% of CMDs are held in English.

A webcast maximises the ROI of your CMD as it exposes more potential investors to your IR message.

Reveal more about the business

Your investors may have access to your CFO and CEO at roadshows and other events, but the CMD is the opportunity to introduce them to more members of your management team who can pass on relevant information about their roles and projects.

Steps to organise virtual Capital Markets Days

1. Choose the format

There are three different ways to create a virtual Capital Markets Day. You should choose the format that works best for you and the individual requirements of your organisation. Here are the options:

• On-demand only: The CMD takes place at a venue during the day and the video of the event goes online afterwards. This allows more people to find out what happens, but they have to wait until after the physical attendees have heard the update before receiving the information themselves.
• Online only: The CMD is held at a location of the organisation’s choosing, usually their premises. If you’re using Company Webcast, the event can also be streamed from one of our state-of-the-art studios, with attendees joining remotely.
• Hybrid: The CMD is held at a specific venue where investors and analysts can attend in person. There is also a live webcast of the event that people can access remotely at the time. Furthermore, attendees can catch up on the event at a later date if they wish.

2. Decide on the structure of the event

A CMD is your opportunity to detail your strategy, show investors and potential investors how you will add value to their shareholding and allow them to meet management  figures that they might not otherwise get to know at other events.

You should carefully pick which information you want to share, who will speak and if there is a theme you would like to explore for the event. Considering the increasing interest in ESG, you might want to concentrate on this topic and how it relates to your future decision making, for instance.

You might have, for example, a section where you analyse recent performance, another to discuss goals and targets, and yet another to go over the strategy for achieving them. You should also allow time for questions and answers so your online audience can interact with you.

3. Inviting analysts and investors

It goes without saying that you should invite analysts and investors to join your CMD. Send them your invitation, detailing when the event will take place and how to access it, whether that is physically or virtually.

Make sure you give them an idea of the content of the presentations that will take place on the day of the event, as well as the theme or message that you want to promote during the event. You should also add details of how they can sign up to attend either the in-person event or online.

Send this information out to the analysts and investors you are targeting or want to engage. It’s also a great idea to post it on your website and social media for others to find.

4. Make registration easy

The Capital Markets Day is your opportunity to present your story, successes and strategies to your current and potential shareholders as well as to sell-side analysts. The platform you use for your virtual CMD should be easy to use and register with so that you can engage as many people as possible.

5. Issue a press release

You can explore the main points of the CMD in a press release that you issue just before the event. It tells the media more about what you are going to discuss and announce in the presentation, pulling out the most noteworthy points and highlighting them.

It’s a good idea to include quotes from relevant members of your team to help journalists add colour to their stories. You can also provide access to the webcast for the press so that they can find out more from the presentation itself and ask questions to clarify any points.

Send this to all the relevant journalists in your industry’s press to make sure you have the best chance of earning coverage for your event.

6. Measure the impact

The final step is to evaluate the effect of your online Capital Markets Day. Was it a success? Was the audience able to actively participate? Did the virtual event have a positive effect on analysts’ perceptions? Were more investors attracted?

There are many questions to ask at this point and answering them depends entirely on the solution you have chosen.

If you are using Company Webcast, you have access to Euronext’s proprietary data, which makes it easy to see the big picture. Besides the usual attendance statistics, you can also measure your company’s market performance and analyse market participants following your virtual CMD or any other digital investor relations activities.

Best practices for virtual Capital Markets Days

Choose the right topics for discussion

There are many topics that you will want to present to your audience on your investor day, including those areas in which you are excelling. But you should also consider what investors are interested in and what concerns them about the issuers they buy shares from.

Environmental, Social and Corporate Governance (ESG) matters are high in the minds of many investors. So much so that the world’s largest asset manager, BlackRock, is actively voting against or threatening to vote against directors of issuers it says have failed to address climate change adequately. Executive compensation is also high on the list of topics investors are interested in.

Research what matters to your targeted shareholders across all of the different territories and be sure to focus on that during the CMD.

Prepare and rehearse

A fully virtual event means your presenters are not in the same room as the audience, but they still need to prepare to the best of their ability. If anything, the Q&A section of the webcast can be more active, meaning there is more opportunity for them to be wrongfooted by a question out of leftfield. This is why it’s important to rehearse and explore the questions attendees could potentially ask.

It’s equally important to check if your hardware and software are working properly. A rehearsal allows you to work out the optimum camera angles, ensure the best sound and make the lighting perfect. Besides, the presenters might not be used to the technology at hand during a virtual Capital Markets Day, so running through the event will help ease their worries.

Remember the branding

“Companies holding virtual capital markets days need to think like TV show producers to keep the audience engaged.” — Vladimir Zaluzhsky, Head of Communications and IR, Severstal

Your brand will be in the spotlight and you need to make sure everything that happens during the CMD fits in with your corporate image. This includes having consistency with the backgrounds that you use for each speaker and displaying your company logo on the screen.

This is why Company Webcast’s studios come with a green screen. You can overlay any colour or image you like, as well as take advantage of our professional sound, lighting and crew.

Conclusion

Holding a virtual Capital Markets Day is a great way to share your story and vision with your retail investors, institutional investors and analysts. It provides the opportunity to reach more people because the attendees don’t have to book annual leave, travel to the event or find accommodation.

Our experience shows that more and more companies are choosing to webcast their CMD or transform it into a hybrid event. This way, they can get more of the important people to watch their proceedings live and re-watch the recorded stream later. But, most of all, they are able to increase their reach beyond country borders, build trust in their brand and solidify their presence on the international market.

If you want to learn more about the possibilities that a virtual Capital Markets Day could bring, request a demo of Company Webcast’s platform.

References and further reading

• Webcast information
• How much does a webcast cost?
• Company Webcast Testimonials
• Aalberts Capital Markets Day