Do you know how the investment community views your company, including your products, leadership team, business strategy, and financial performance? Asking the tough questions and opening your company up to potential negative feedback can be a scary prospect, but it’s well worth it. By conducting a perception audit — an independent investigation into investor and analyst impressions of a company — your company can realize the following benefits.
1. Understand How the Market Views Your Company
By design, a perception audit collects the anonymous opinions of current and former shareholders, potential investors, and analysts. The feedback received gives leadership a better understanding of how the market views their business and how your company compares to its competitors. With this information as a benchmark, your leadership team can more effectively measure progress over time.
2. Measure the Effectiveness of Messaging and IR Practices
Even if your corporate strategy is on target, pieces of it may be getting lost in translation when communicating that information to Wall Street. A perception audit can help you identify if critical aspects of your messaging are confusing or easily misunderstood. It can highlight ways to improve or clarify your messaging, so you can more effectively tell your story to the market.
3. Prepare More Effectively for Investor Days
The insight you glean from a perception audit can help you plan for upcoming investor days. The audit will essentially provide you with a roadmap of what subjects to cover, common questions investors might ask, how to clearly convey your message, and what information to present.
4. Build Credibility With the Investment Community
Investors and analysts view conducting a perception audit as an indication of a management team’s interest in improving, and they appreciate and value being asked for their opinion. By showing the investment community that your company is committed to transparency, accessibility, and understanding your shareholders, you will build credibility and stronger relationships with investors and analysts.
Conducting a perception audit can help you achieve these benefits and keep your company on a growth trajectory. However, it’s important to make sure you’re asking the right questions, conducting audits at the right frequency, and soliciting feedback from the right types and number of respondents. For more insight into every step of the process, read our eBook, How to Conduct a Perception Audit: A Complete Guide.
In it, you’ll find guidance on:
- Why you need a perception audit
- How often to conduct a perception audit
- Types of questions to include
- How to implement the results of a perception study
