IR Impact Briefing saw IROs and the sell side discuss how to make your investor day work beyond the event
When you have an event that might happen once every few years, that event must shine. For IR, investor days offer a rare opportunity to reset the narrative, deepen investor understanding and showcase long-term strategy beyond quarterly earnings cycles. And with all the effort that goes into an investor day, companies are realizing they can do more to make that day live longer.
This was the topic of a recent IR Impact Briefing, sponsored by Equisolve, and titled Making your investor day work beyond the event. You can listen back online now to hear from Brad Burke, head of investor relations and treasurer at SEI, Alex Kapper, vice president of investor relations at Caterpillar, Suji Desilva, managing director, senior research analyst at ROTH Capital Partners and Tom Runzo, CEO and co-founder of Equisolve. Runzo also shared his screen as he discussed some of the more technical details of what a modern investor day website can do – something you can view through the replay.
By signing up to listen back you also get Equisolve’s free checklist, which you can take to your own website provider.
Long-term value from a single day
A recurring theme throughout the discussion was how much more companies could be doing to make the most of their investor day content – driving direct benefits such as improved analytics but also improving the virtual attendance experience for any key analysts and investors unable to join in person.
The goal is no longer just about driving more traffic but ensuring AI-generated answers point back to official corporate sources
For Caterpillar, whose most recent investor day coincided with a leadership transition and the company’s 100-year anniversary, the event was designed to shape market understanding for years to come.
‘We knew that the content would live on forever essentially,’ explained Kapper. ‘It needed to become a safe source for the buy and sell side, for anyone really, so they can refer back to it and use that as the basis of their understanding the company.’
That long-tail value matters not only for investors already following the company, but also for future analysts initiating coverage, portfolio managers revisiting the story and even AI-driven search tools increasingly surfacing investor relations content.
‘I want to feel like I was there’
A dedicated investor day website is also about bringing everything together for a more seamless – and infinitely better – user experience.
This is key for those on the ‘receiving end’ of investor days, as Desilva explained.
‘For the website, the number one thing is finding the content,’ he told listeners, emphasizing just how valuable this information is. ‘If you make it a scavenger hunt, it’s very frustrating. This is some of your prime content for someone visiting the website to find out about the company from an investor perspective – it should all be in one place. You want to splash that on the front page as well as on the investor relations page,’ he added. ‘That might sound trivial, but it just makes the experience better.’
Desilva also shared his thoughts on other technical elements that make the day better when attended virtually. ‘The quality of the video, the resolution, the bandwidth, the choppiness, the audio [all matter]. I want to feel, as much as possible, that I was there – and that would include having all the information easily accessible and well organized on the website.’
Runzo talked about how other background; technical shifts are also forcing IR teams to rethink how websites are structured and optimized.
‘In the past, companies focused primarily on SEO,’ he said. ‘Now they also need to think about optimization for AI models.’
That includes technical elements such as schema markup, large language model-readable text files and HTML-based transcripts that help generative AI systems correctly identify, summarize and cite company disclosures. The goal is no longer just about driving more traffic but ensuring AI-generated answers point back to official corporate sources.
Harnessing analytics
The conversation around themes like AI and what companies can do with and get out of their investor day website naturally leads to a discussion on analytics – which is deeply linked to the long-term use of your investor day content.
In the past, many IR teams measured success through basic download counts or webcast registrations – something Burke pointed to. ‘Historically, I would be able to see say Okay, 15,000 people downloaded our investor presentation, and that’s the end of the insight I would have. Being able to get deeper insights would be incredibly useful in terms of filling up the top of the funnel and then having more thoughtful investor targeting on the back end.’
Today, analytics have changed radically, with integrated systems allowing companies to track how stakeholders interact with content over time. IR teams can examine which presentations investors revisit, what content analysts engage with most frequently and how stakeholders return to the site quarters or even years later – and make decisions based on that data.
This means the benefits extend beyond investor days themselves. Companies can use engagement data to refine future messaging, identify topics attracting the most investor interest and better understand how both buy- and sell-side audiences consume information.
According to Runzo, this transforms investor day content into an ongoing source of investor intelligence.
‘You’re taking a single day and turning it into years’ worth of investor insights,’ he said.
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