Q: What will an effective investor relations program cost me?
A: What will cost most is to not communicate. Take a real-life example: If a company website shows no update for a year or more, what is the message to the investment community? Either there was no progress worth posting, or the company doesn’t care telling investors about. It requires a lot of effort to catch up later, and still the gap in the track record will remain. The cost of raising capital will increase.
When actively educating the investment community, you will incur direct costs for your IR manager or an external agency, plus costs for logistics (typically wire services, congress fees, printing jobs, etc.). Necessarily, there are significant indirect costs involved, too, mainly for precious senior management time. The better your agency understands your business and your industry, the more time you can allocate to other areas.