Communication Tips to Optimize Every Investor Interaction

In today’s market, mining companies need every available advantage to attract and secure capital. Economic uncertainty, dwindling stock prices, and rising costs have brought new challenges for everyone in the sector. 

As leaders look at creating new strategies for growth, effective communication to investors is becoming more important. Institutional investors, retail investors, and private equity firms all have different needs and levels of knowledge when it comes to understanding the potential of your project. 

And as more non-traditional investors enter the space, there’s a bigger range of technical expertise and mining investment experience across the investment landscape.

So how can mining leaders stand out, and get their message across? Catering your marketing, communications, and pitch materials to specific investor segments is key.

Having a wide range of content and communications options at your fingertips is the difference between talking at your audience, and truly engaging them. This looks like creating content specifically tailored to your audience’s level of knowledge, and meeting them wherever they’re at in the buyer’s journey – both online, and off.

 At VRIFY, we work with hundreds of mining companies daily, helping CEOs create engaging presentation materials around active projects. In observing how successful companies market and communicate, here are some specific activities every mining leader should be paying attention to, when it comes to maximizing every investor touch point through communications.

Investor Meetings

All investors are different. They have different concerns, fears, appetite for risk, technical expertise, and intrinsic motivations. But one thing is consistent: every investor who takes a meeting with a mining executive wants to understand and answer questions about your project.

Walking into a meeting with a pre-set powerpoint deck or paper print-out, and methodically going through each slide limits the potential of your meeting. This approach makes your conversation inflexible, and can sometimes get in the way of the investor asking questions about what they really care about.

This is where being open to listening and doing discovery is key. Asking questions to better understand their background and technical expertise will take you much further than an overly prepared deck. Before you leave each meeting, it’s critical you get an understanding of what they were hoping to get out of the conversation, understand their goals, and make sure to address those points.

For example, trying to explain complex geological models, or the scale of a project through a flat, 2D map means you’re already rolling a boulder up a hill. Would you buy a home solely based on room images, dimensions, or schematics? You probably want to understand the local area, how rooms flow, and maybe watch a video walkthrough of the property. 

What we see time and time again with VRIFY users, is that contextual details win over data dumps, every time. Being able to showcase your project through 3D visualizations speaks volumes, compared to static, written text. In a market where there are literally thousands of projects to potentially invest in, optimizing your materials for the best meetings possible is key.

Example: 

Simon Lawson, from Spartan Resources, shared how VRIFY has impacted their ability to present to investors: “VRIFY has allowed us to present our opportunities with unprecedented impact, directly contributing to our company's remarkable 15% stock value increase after just one day of conference meetings. By using the platform in both one-on-one and on-stage presentations, we've allowed investors to gain deeper insights into our business, fostering their trust, and contributing significantly to our stock's impressive growth. We are grateful to VRIFY for its pivotal role in our success and are excited about the continued benefits it offers to our communications strategy.”

Website

While some experienced investors will be quite happy to download the latest PDF presentation deck, many will not. VRIFY clients often embed an interactive site tour built from 360 photography footage, a separate 3D presentation showcasing topography, geology, and satellite imagery. Some also include a 2-3 minute walkthrough of their presentation materials, tying them all together with ample context through a narrative. 

By being proactive and providing content and education around your materials, you’ll have a better chance of connecting with investors of varying levels of technical expertise. 

Ideally, your website should act as an effective lead capture tool for investors, and be an accurate representation of your differentiators, and value points for your target audience. Every website should have a clear CTA (call to action), so stakeholders can easily reach out and get in contact with the right person from your team.

Example: 

‍Nova Minerals includes different parts of their VRIFY content in relevant areas of their website. By doing so they can provide interactive content in the most applicable areas for investors.

Press Releases

In a challenging market, it’s even more important to expand the reach of your potential investor pool, and ensure comprehension when speaking to prospects. When it comes to news releases and putting press releases out on the wire, adding context to your announcements helps here too.

One way to do this is to record a two minute video explaining new developments to investors, covering key details that perhaps you weren’t able to fit into the release. Many VRIFY clients take this a step further and embed an interactive video tour of their project site right onto their press release. This makes it easy for analysts, investors, or other stakeholders to self-navigate through your materials. 

When done well, this helps fast-track your audience to understanding potential opportunities, and helps them build a list of informed questions to bring to future meetings with you.

Example: 

To promote their recent PEA. Hot Chilli created a page on their investor site and video walkthrough to accompany their press release.  By leveraging interactive video content on their website, Social Media channels and through press releases, Hot Chili have been able to maintain investor engagement and have seen a market cap increase of 25% so far in 2023.

Social Media

Whether social media is your strong-suit or something that takes effort, getting yourself out there on social media is becoming more of a table stakes communication channel. Many investors look to LinkedIn and Twitter to stay up to date with companies and upcoming projects. Not having a social presence is leaving opportunity on the table.

In our community, we’ve found that many junior exploration companies don’t have much of a social media presence. In building a stronger following online, these teams would be better positioned to catch the eye of analysts, IR firms, investors, and thought leaders keeping tabs on the industry.

Doing this well with social media takes consistency, and quality content. Rather than doing the bare minimum like many teams, there is a real opportunity to stand out with creative content on social, like using eye-catching videos of your projects.

At VRIFY, we’ve created the ability for clients to record high resolution 3D animated videos at the click of a button, along with an easy way to share the content on social media consistently. In reviewing content types, we’ve found that narrated, geo-spatial project walk through videos are an effective way to meet investors where they’re at, and quickly get them up to speed by showing, versus telling. 

Another great approach here is to create short videos to accompany your press releases, discussing your projects in a live format. Not only does this help differentiate your team in a sea of boring social content, you’ll be educating investors who come across your page for the first time from the get-go. 

Example: 

This simple video interview recorded with American Battery Technology Company CEO Ryan Melsery, and VRIFY CEO Steve de Jong, has garnered over 4000 views on Youtube as well as tens of thousands of engagements across Linkedin and other social media platforms. Rather than go with the standard ‘two talking head’ video interview, Ryan was able to talk Steve through the entire project with 3D and 360 degree content as a visual guide, providing far more context to investors.

In summary, I see communication in the mining industry as a huge competitive advantage for companies who lean into it as a key differentiator. 

Focusing on the diversity of your investor audience, segmenting their needs, and devising custom communication plans to cater to their knowledge and interests will be much more effective than a standard one-size-fits-all pitch approach. 

If mining leaders lean into this opportunity, and make every investor interaction count, I believe the future of the industry could be very bright.