What 208 seconds reveal about investors’ interest in your company

It's a popular belief that investors only care about the dollars and cents, but for today’s article I am here with more InvestorHub data to show you that this is not the case.

Ok - so some background information for context.

1. I run InvestorHub, a new IR tool that enables companies to scale their message to reach & engage more investors directly.
2. We released a big product update in July to 135 listed clients (which is the source of this new data).
3. Prior to the update, the investor-facing part of the product just solved for traditional investor centre pages like announcements, compliance, charts, etc.
4. The new update brought the ability to build a broader set of investor-facing pages, allowing clients to create any page like people, projects, etc.
5. Clients are adopting en masse and loving it - even replacing their whole website with an investor hub.

This is great for both sides of the market: companies can tell a deeper story, and investors can get closer to the companies they are buying stock in.

I have spoken a lot about the company and the code, and how one of your goals as a listed company is to get investors to see the actual business through the tradable code. And, intrinsically, I have always believed that every investor wants to know more about the company that they are investing in.

And now I have the data to support this belief.

With this new release, we are now seeing how investors behave when they are interacting with a company. So which page do they spend the most time on?

The pages that showcase your leadership.

They want to learn more about the people behind the company, so much so that they are willing to spend almost double the amount of time understanding your team vs. your projects:

Investors care about you a lot!

208 seconds - or 3.5 minutes, is actually quite a bit of time. It is 4 x the average time spent on an individual page across the internet (52 seconds).

Other pages like the individual announcements and updates have more views in a session (i.e. investors look at more than 1 announcement at a time), so in aggregate this can add up, but the time that your investors are spending dwelling on your leadership team is significant.

We had seen green shoots of this behaviour early in the piece, and actually made building your personal brand one of the seven habits of highly effective market engagement.

But now that we have more evidence that we know that investors care, and that they are visiting and spending a lot of time on your people pages, what are some ways we can utilise this and take advantage of it?

1. Make the page better! Don’t just treat it as a box ticking. Good photos, good bios are key - how about a video? Think through how you can build the connection between your ASX code and your people. The more they know you the less likely they are to sell.
2. Introduce new board and management members properly. Given this level of interest don’t just put a 1 page ASX release up - take the time to record an introduction video - let people go deeper (they clearly want to) and don’t just answer who the person is, but why they are joining the company. Celebrate key hires with your investor base.
3. It’s not just the CEO. People want to know the whole team - if investors were only interested in the CEO it wouldn’t take 3.5 minutes on average to get up to speed on them. It is clear that investors are going deep on all the board and management team - so use this to put more members of the Board and Management in front of investors more frequently. This (1) spreads the IR load, and (2) deepens investors relationship with the whole business.
4. Lean into your personal brand. I wrote an article on how to do this 11 months ago, but I’ll reiterate the key point: personal brands are built through repetition. Get out there and stay out there.

It is actually pretty cool and reassuring: investors care - who knew?