Your Annual Investor Meeting (AIM) provides crucial opportunities to engage, inform and build credibility with current and new investors. While your investors are gathered together, you want to build strong relationships, reinforce the trust they have in your brand, team and prove that your organization’s future investments will generate profits for them. This is especially important since the financial landscape is extremely competitive right now.
The smart application of event technology can help you reinforce the confidence investors have in your portfolio companies in a number of ways. Let’s examine how technology can enhance financial events, facilitate your planning process, enhance the investor experience and generate additional return on investment (ROI) for your company and AIM participants.
#1
Reinforce the investor-company relationship
First impressions are everything, especially in an industry built on credibility and confidence. From the minute your AIM invitation hits investor inboxes, you’re either enhancing or detracting from your company’s brand.
Reinforce the relationship investors have with your company by using consistent brand messaging. Use brand image and storytelling to build credibility with current and new investors, not only with email and event websites, but also with your event’s digital presence and platforms.
Take, for example, your event app. People enjoy having control over their conference experience. They want to be able to look through the content schedule and plan their agendas before they arrive onsite. But event apps provide more than just wayfinding. They can be a tool that reinforces your company’s brand message before, during and after the AIM. They’re also a way you can provide detailed information and push notifications to participants before they arrive onsite.
If you’re a small department, consider providers who will act as an extended version of your team who can provide project managers to solve your problems in real time, so you’ll never have to submit a ticket and wait for an answer. A good example is Concise, which provides full project management and event support. The Concise team also can custom-brand your platform and help you design touchpoints and messaging that’s tailored to engage your investors in novel and impactful ways.
#2
Help investors engage with content onsite
One of the hottest trends in event production is the application of LED wall technology during presentations. These dramatic backdrops provide branding and scenic support that capture attention and display information in a more immersive way than standard projectors. LED walls reinforce your brand and content in a visually impressive way. It also frees up presenters to display information in ways that transcend the 16:9 PPT box. However, it’s not always practical for a financial firm to go visual-only. There’s a lot of data and information you need to communicate to investors about your portfolio company. How that detail is presented says a lot about your firm. This is where technology like Chime Live℠, can help.
Chime Live is an engagement app built to support finance events. A personalized iPad is provided for each participant to use during presentations. While a presenter is speaking, their slides are pushed directly to the iPad, creating a synchronized second-screen experience. The participant can then pinch and zoom to see details, like statistics or graphs. If there’s something they want to go back and see, they can ‘rewind’ the presentation before catching back up with the current slide. They can also take notes, which they can send to themselves.
The use of hotspots on images is another Chime Live way to deliver the detailed content investors need in an easy-to-consume and entertaining manner. For example, if a presenter shows a timeline or graphic for one of your portfolio companies on the main screen, on the iPad or personal devices, it could have additional hotspots with content investors can interact with. When an investor clicks on a hotspot, it could reveal additional data, like text, images and graphs – even video. Hotspots can be added to supporting materials on the iPad for investors to review during presentations or at their leisure.
#3
Collect crucial feedback
Capturing real-time feedback is crucial to understanding your investors. Chime Live allows organizers to push feedback forms after each session or at the end of the day, directly to the iPad. This increases participation rates because the investors simply click a button to send feedback. There’s no post-event email or hidden place in the app to search out.
Not only does this result in higher response rates, it gathers more accurate feedback because investors are still ‘in the moment’ versus trying to recall what they felt.
#4
Engage investors in novel ways
What your participants experience onsite at the AIM will become inextricably linked with their view of your financial institution. So if you want them to think of your company as being a step ahead of the competition consider employing future-forward technology, like Augmented Reality (AR).
AR is an unexpected and visually engaging way to communicate information investors need to know. For example, an AR poster or a QR code could trigger additional information about a portfolio company when scanned with the investor’s mobile device or Chime Live iPad. As investors explore display stands and talk with company representatives, AR activations like videos, animations, demos, interactive websites and moving graphics present portfolio company information in a more interactive and immersive way.
Technology can also enhance conference activities. Activities help investors and company representatives get to know each other, which builds trust and confidence. These activities should appeal to your core investor demographic. For example, a younger audience might enjoy an active Olympic-themed event, whereas a more mature crowd might enjoy a visit to a museum. Or you may want to capitalize off a key trend — participants’ interest in the local destination — by including a cultural landmark or activity. Event apps can facilitate the networking and team-building aspects of these activities by providing push-notifications and clues, wayfinding maps and guides, and keeping track of team points on a leaderboard.
#5
Maximize networking opportunities
Networking is crucial to building and reinforcing trust. That’s why so much importance is placed on networking opportunities like investor dinners. Different investors have different needs, so it’s important they’re placed with the right partner or fund manager with the knowledge and expertise to answer their questions.
That’s why seating charts for investor dinners are so important. It’s the most efficient way to ensure the right investors are seated next to the right member of your team. It’s too important a process to leave to old-school planning methods like Excel spreadsheets. Save hours of planning time and loads of manual labor by utilizing seating chart-building technology like Check-In, which has a seating planner feature.
Tools like this allow you to identify VIPs, meal preferences and special requirements so you can greet and accommodate guests appropriately. You can edit your seating arrangements easily by dragging and dropping people into place, eliminating hours of manual work. You can also share data in real time with other members of your investment relations team. The digital check-in feature also gives you a more eco-friendly, digital way to register attendance onsite seamlessly.
#6
Cultivate post-event relationships and conversations
Last, but not least, technology allows you to continue to build on the conversations and established relationships with your investors post-event.
The white-glove service offered by Chime Live’s Concise team doesn’t end at the venue. Post-event, they can curate and edit video content so it can be distributed through the digital platform to investors. This allows your investor relations team to showcase the ROI of your event by highlighting attendee participation, engagement and outcomes. Sharing curated content post-event that’s available on-demand also extends your reach, engaging investors who could not attend in-person.
The curated content can also be repurposed to attract new investors as proof of the reliability, inventiveness and trustworthiness of your financial firm.
As you can see, technology is more than just a tool. It can be your investor relations team’s solution to cultivating the most meaningful, relationship-deepening Annual Investor Meetings possible.
Want to learn new ways to apply technology? Contact the Concise team for a free consultation.
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