Communications Breakdown II: A Plan, Dammit, We Need a Plan
Hard-bitten old geos will tell you, “The drill tells the story, the rest is bullshit.”
Which is both true and only a part of the story. For junior resource companies at the exploration stage, drill results are critical. But there are hundreds of junior resource companies listed on the Venture and many more on the CSE. Unless a company has bonanza results, 1000 gpt gold and up, just announcing drill results will do nothing for it.
The junior markets are driven partially by drill results but, in my view, mainly by how much attention those results get. Gaining attention is what communications planning is all about. 1
Press releases are still the foundation of the communications effort but now there are dozens of other important activities ranging from social media, through online videos, CEO interviews, trade shows and investor forums.
Companies can’t do everything and smart companies look for high ROI activities; but really smart companies actually work with people who know what they are doing to create a communications “plan”.
A comm plan begins very simply with a calendar and a budget. The budget, even if tiny, follows the calendar. There are certain fixed events in the junior resource world: PDAC in Toronto in the first week of March and the Vancouver Resource Investment Conference in late January. (There are lots of other conferences but these are the “can’t miss” events.)
These dates are important even if a company can’t afford to attend with a booth. Junior resource news releases tend to cluster around these two events and investor interest in the junior market is at least stimulated by the conferences.
Next on the calendar, anticipated news flow. In a perfect world, a junior company would have news roughly every three weeks. Which absolutely never happens. Instead, hard news is driven by the drilling season(s) for a company’s projects(s). News that comes in somewhat predictable waves. A drill program starting in early May is likely to have assays back mid-summer and then on into the Fall.
Assume a one project junior and you see the problem: there are, at most, three months where there will be hard news. Now what? Nine blank months where comms have to be creative and tell a story. And the point of that story is to make investors aware of the company and interested in its results.
There are two elements to telling the story, the story itself and building the reach for the story. The story, along with the results of course, needs to position the company positively along a number of vectors: location, prospecting results, sampling, geophysics, metallurgy, infrastructure, permitting, First Nations relations, community relations, management background can all be part of a well-designed comm program.
Reach is about how you get the company’s story in front of investors and potential shareholders. Start with a company email list - existing shareholders, friends, people in the business. As a matter of routine, a company should collect the addresses and send an opt-in email for people to get on the list. And that list’s growth is a good indicator of the relative success of other marketing efforts.
Social media comes next. Five years ago I would not have believed anyone would invest in a company based on a Tweet, now I know people do. I have myself. Growing a social media presence does not have to be expensive but it takes time and effort. Facebook, LinkedIn, Reddit, even Instagram, attract investors. And there are inside baseball “tricks” to expand reach - LinkedIn and Facebook Groups are just two of many.
For some juniors, paid advertising, on junior resource focused sites or keyword Google and Facebook advertising makes sense. For others, paid research and media may get their story in front of investors. (And, I note from my Motherlodetv.net experience, paid media can be the “content” which feeds free social media.)
You can’t talk about social media without talking about influencers - people with large followings of the people you want to know your story. Some of these influencers are newsletter writers, others are purely online presences. Bob Moriarty of 321Gold.com fame springs to mind. But there are several dozen whose commentary can bring attention to a junior company. Some of these influencers charge for their services, others, like my pal David Erfle www.juniorminerjunky.com or Mickey Fulp (who grew a COVID beard almost as good as mine) at www.themercenarygeologist.com are supported by subscribers. Making sure influencers are aware of a junior’s news and, ideally, having the CEO do a one-on-one with the influencer can produce huge results.
See why a junior with a communications plan is more likely to be noticed than one which does these things and more on an ad hoc basis. List creation, social media, influencers, paid media all take time to have any effect.
Having a communications plan and executing that plan can pull a junior out from the herd and into the spotlight when it releases its results. Because, yes, the drill does tell the story and all the rest is highlighting.
When I roll out my paid subscriptions in a few weeks, behind the paywall will be a lot more on how junior companies can win the communications game. There is a lot of detail, including ROIs and other numbers which have taken two decades to accumulate.
The plan is to have a general subscription for interested investors which will be as cheap as Substack allows and then, what I want to call a corporate subscriptions which, along with giving access to what I hope is quality content, will also ensure that a subscribing company has my attention. [One of the reasons I am waiting on the paid subscriptions is that, in the interests of full disclosure, I will want to list corporate subscribers. How to do that is still a bit of a puzzle.]
In the good old days of the VSE and Howe Street, press releases were mailed out. A junior company’s IR guy and its CEO and pals in the brokerage world would have a couple of days to tell their pals the results without the general market being aware. Buzz could be created over a few beers in a couple of bars on Pender and on Georgia “after market”.
That world, with all its characters and crooks, was killed by two things in the late 1990s: the regulatory reforms spawned by the Bre-X scandal and, well, the Internet. Now, news releases had to avoid promotional language, material facts had to be disclosed in a timely manner and, most importantly, a news release posted to the ‘net was instantly available to everyone. No “mail lag”.
These were all changes which were, in principle, very much in the investors’ interest. But they created a firehose of information with no real curation. Without a communcations plan and, indeed, a budget a junior would get drowned out in the noise.
Critically, communications is not IR. (I’d argue that Investor Relations became a dead letter with the arrival of the internet and the widespread use of online trading. With very few old school brokers left in the business the IR guy had no one to talk to.) It is telling a company’s story and expanding reach.
Interesting, thanks !