By Terry Rooney and Jay Max Kraidman
Is your company contemplating an initial public offering?
Going public requires enlisting the services of a crackerjack, capital-markets-savvy team that includes legal experts, banking specialists, and equally experienced communications professionals.
The last major sustained mad rush for IPOs occurred in 2020–2021, driven by low interest rates, high liquidity, and a surge in pandemic-era technology and SPAC (Special Purpose Acquisition Company) deals. This period featured 1,415 U.S. IPOs over six quarters, representing the busiest market since the dot-com bubble.
As recently reported in The Wall Street Journal, “The U.S. IPO market, dormant for years, finally started to look up for tech companies last year.”
Recent market turmoil appears to have temporarily postponed the next IPO party, and unless your company is a blockbuster brand, that means it’s prime time to adroitly raise corporate visibility with investors. There is no standard playbook to follow in this regard. However, a concerted and customized communications plan should include a few key components.
First, develop a communications plan specifically to condition the market in advance of the IPO. Behaving like a public company from a communications standpoint means establishing a regular cadence for announcing news developments such as acquisitions, divestitures, leadership hires, private capital raises, client wins, and geographic expansion.
Enlisting the services of an agency with deep contacts up and down the proverbial masthead of top business and financial media can facilitate meetings and interviews ahead of the quiet period, which starts once the S-1 registration is filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission.
Generating quality spotlight coverage of the company in the national business media is the objective. Don’t settle for excuses that private companies do not qualify for consideration — it’s not true! But success will require creative storytelling that measures up to editorial standards. Smart PR will weave in the right elements about a company’s unique value proposition to ensure the resulting article resonates with prospective investors.
Devote resources to bolstering your social media strategy, both organic and paid. Social media deserves more rigor in a pre-IPO period than it may otherwise get. Too often, it’s handled as a marketing channel when it should be treated as part of the company’s public surface area. That means tighter coordination between communications, investor relations, legal, and the executive team. The tone should be steadier. The messaging should travel cleanly from corporate announcements to leadership posts to the company’s newsfeed. And the people representing the business online should look and sound like they belong to the same company, not three different versions of it.
Paid social media also needs a different mindset at this stage. The point is precise repetition with the audiences who shape perception in the market. Put real budget behind milestone moments, management visibility, and the pieces of the story that help investors place the company quickly. Watch for resonance in the right circles, not vanity engagement from the wrong ones. A pre-IPO social strategy should leave the market with a clearer impression of who you are, how you think, and why you belong on the screen when the window opens.
Conduct a ruthless digital audit of your website. Today, diligence starts online. To avoid short-lived interest, look at your public footprint the way that an investor will: quickly and skeptically. Does your website say what you do in plain language? Can your business model be understood without a call? These details may seem small, but investors will use them to generate a point of view about your firm and a future investment.
When it’s time, you will also need to harness the website by creating a campaign landing page. This can be a powerful way to elevate the profile of management. At the end of the day, investors are buying management teams, so it’s key to create a content hub that introduces prospective investors to the perspectives of the company’s leadership.
An effective pre-IPO communications campaign will enable you to separate your company from the pack of candidates seeking to secure investor interest. At the end of the day, the campaign is all about conditioning the market before the onset of the quiet period.
The window will open again. The question is whether investors will recognize you when it does.