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When you’re tasked with creating print materials for presentations, one of the first decisions to make is a tactical one; which type of marketing piece would be the most appropriate choice for communicating the content your executives need to deliver to a selected audience.
Match Your Tools to the Communications Objective
There are a handful of key document types in your IR communications tool kit. Aside from the tools used for reporting event-driven news and SEC-required communications—news releases, quarterly letters, and the annual report—the IRO produces other types of marketing collateral. We can classify them into two broad categories:
Horizontal, such as bullet-point flip charts; and
Vertical, such as background fact sheets, white papers, and brochures.
The trouble is, some formats are frequently misused – and others are underutilized. The horizontal format of flip chart documents is typically the better choice for communicating data-based information. Text-heavy information, on the other hand, is better absorbed by readers when presented in a vertical layout of sentences and paragraphs.
Get Consensus on the Type of Collateral to Create
Wouldn’t it be useful if you could guide your executive team toward selecting the correct tool for the job, thereby allowing you to craft the type of marketing collateral most likely to support their communications objective?
Before going through the time, effort and expense of copywriting, designing, and producing the wrong type of marketing piece for the job at hand, ask your executives these important questions about content and purpose:
1) Is the majority of the information you have to communicate in the form of charts and graphs? Or, is it in sentence and paragraph form?
2) Will the document serve as a visual aid supporting a verbal presentation? Or is it meant to work as a stand-alone piece that communicates the full story the company has to tell about some topic?
An answer of “Yes” to the first question means a flip chart/slide presentation is needed. An answer of “Yes” to the second question tells you that a different type of document is needed—one that is written in complete sentences, not in the bulleted form used to support a verbal presentation. A “Yes” to both questions means that two documents are needed—a visual aid and a more detailed leave-behind piece.
If your company has requested the wrong communications tools for IR tasks in the past, going through this process a few times with your executives and staff should help them make smarter decisions and allow you to produce better work.
Score More Communications Goals
There are two additional side benefits from asking questions before beginning creation of a requested marketing piece:
1) You’ll increase the odds that readers of your marketing collateral will absorb what your company has to communicate; and
2) You’ll reduce the odds that your audience will mess up retelling what you communicated when they discuss your company with their investment committee, peers, associates and customers.
Start each IR collateral development project by first identifying the right type of marketing document to create, and you’ll achieve these communications goals.
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© 2024 Frumerman & Nemeth Inc.
Bruce Frumerman is CEO of Frumerman & Nemeth Inc., a 37-year-old financial communications and sales marketing consultancy that helps financial services firms create brand identities for their organizations and develop and implement effective new marketing strategies and programs. Frumerman & Nemeth’s work has helped money management firm clients attract over $7 billion in new assets, yet they are not third-party marketers.
Frumerman & Nemeth is internationally recognized for its work in crafting for clients the beyond-the-numbers story of how they invest — content that investment committees actually discuss, debate and vote on behind closed doors when considering firms on a short list for potential investment. Importantly, this is required due diligence content that cannot be communicated in pitchbook format.
Frumerman & Nemeth’s work also includes providing strategic consulting on product and strategy-specific branding, crafting the required strategy-specific content detail and designing and producing the marketing tools needed to make it through the two-month to two-year institutional selling cycle. Clients also employ Frumerman & Nemeth to help promote the intellectual acumen of management — helping them get speaking opportunities, write and give speeches as panelists or stand-alone speakers at industry conferences, and through media relations marketing services.
Mr. Frumerman can be reached at info@frumerman.com, or by visiting www.frumerman.com.