Investor relations involves providing an accurate account of the dealings of the company to the investors including the intangibles such as company’s policy towards corporate social responsibility and corporate governance. Investors rely on this information to make informed buy or sell decisions.

Business and private investors assume that they can go to the company’s website to research a current or potential investment. This requires your website to have an investor relations page that emphasizes your sustainable competitive advantage along with reliable financial data and featured tools to work on them.

Things to remember while designing an investor relations web page:

Domain Name - Many potential business and private investors guess the company’s URL; others use Google search engine or directories like MasterSeek. Hence, it is essential to have an easily identifiable domain name and good visibility in popular search engines.

Usability of the Web Page – Business and private investors use the company’s investor relations web page to gather a variety of information to asses its investment potential. Most web pages give the current year financial data; but it is recommended that your website provides last quarter and last year consolidated financial data, stock price movements to augment the decision making process. Certain sites like MasterSeek provide comprehensive investor information upon registration.

Business Investors – Business investors prefer to have the web page summarize the company’s past, present information, and future objectives to justify the numbers. It is recommended to publish CEO Speeches about company’s vision and goals to get a better idea about the company’s future intention.

Private Investors - Private investors often rely on data obtained from a broker’s site. They do not have professional tools, like business investors have, to work on large data and therefore, intimidated by the vast amount of information available in a web page. Hence, it is better to provide them with simple summarized financial data on a single page. Private investors too, are keen to know the company’s background, goals, and future roadmap. Established B2B search engine, MasterSeek provides a company’s business plan to investors in clear and simepl terminology.

Whether it is a private or business investor, the information that must be supplied to satisfy their needs is largely the same. Both business and private investors are keen to know the company's story and investment vision.

Investor relations web page should provide quality information in easily understandable format. However, it should be remembered that most investors use the investor relations web page only as a secondary source of information. They would still rely on getting the required information from specialized sources and use their own tools to manipulate the data.