In the last few weeks I’ve attended a number of events where buy-side professionals have demonstrated how they evaluate companies in the early stages of making an investment decision.
What became clear after listening to the 5th investor was that if your content isn’t easily accessible and legible, they will quickly be moving on to the next company.
The explosion of channels that we have to communicate through has meant that the pressure on corporate communicators to be consistent and transparent has increased with it. In many cases this means that the quality of content produced suffers, primarily because time and resource limited teams opt to use their annual report as a primary content source and then simply cut and paste to various other channels such as their digital properties.
As technology has advanced and investors become savvier in the type of content they consume, this cut and paste approach is now rather inadequate, primarily because the cutting and pasting of an image from a book will often be extremely limiting to a user when it is viewed on a screen. The majority of the research these buy-side professionals are doing is predominantly via websites and presentations on screen. If the major set piece content that conveys who you are and what you do isn’t easy to consume, investors will likely not spend the time trying to work it out.
When we talk to companies that face similar challenges in showcasing content effectively online, they are often amazed at how much more engaging their strategy, or their investment case, can be made; when you think about what you are trying to say before the idea is committed to paper (literally), this has the added benefit of not requiring large quantities of additional budget after the fact, because the content has been defined and designed with each channel in mind.
Designing content that is suitable for a specific medium isn’t rocket science; it just requires a little more forward thinking than the after-the-fact cut and paste approach.
The next time you’re looking at your own website and wondering whether the diagram that has been cut and pasted from page 22 of the annual report is really fulfilling its role, consider the fact that the person you really want to look at it has probably already gone elsewhere to try and find the information, and how can you engineer the content in such a way to stop that from happening.
If you would like to find out more about how we can help optimise your content across all channels, then please get in touch here: hello@design-portfolio.co.uk.