Strategic Positioning & Messaging

A thorough understanding of how a company perceives itself in the marketplace, and in turn, how key audiences and stakeholders perceive the company is central to our communications efforts. The first step in building visibility and credibility is to understand how a company is perceived by its own management team. We take senior management through carefully structured interviews to gain a complete understanding of their collective picture of the company and its business environment.

It is equally critical to understand how our clients’ peers and competitors are approaching their corporate communications challenges. SMA uses its extensive online research resources and proprietary market intelligence tools to identify an appropriate set of business and financial peers for each client company. We then work to understand the operational and financial metrics these comparable companies are using to tell their stories to Wall Street. We use these same research tools to uncover the metrics that are important to our clients’ existing institutional shareholders.

Armed with an understanding of the factors that are driving a company’s reputation and valuation, SMA develops a positioning and messaging strategy that creates a distinct corporate image for our client and efficiently communicates the company’s prospects as an investment. We work closely with management to establish the messages that will reinforce the company’s desired positioning, and then incorporate these messages into written and online materials.

SMA ensures that each client’s investor communications include important proof points such as the company’s long-term vision and mission, near-term objectives and accomplishments, and the financial and operational metrics that matter most to targeted investors. Increasingly, these are the concerns that corporate audiences on both Wall Street and Main Street want companies to emphasize and clarify.

We place a particularly high priority on establishing financial and operational milestones that investors can use to evaluate the company’s success. There is no better way to build visibility and credibility than to deliver performance as promised.

SMA helps its clients communicate their position to the marketplace using a wide range of tools. We have extensive experience in creating:

• News releases
• Conference call scripts, Q&A preparations
• Investor presentations
• IR website content
• Annual reports and letters to shareholders
• Fact sheets and IR collateral materials
• Bylined articles and speeches

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