Digitisation is changing the face of mining companies and influencing their interactions with potential investors throughout the investor journey. An increasing number of mining companies are adopting innovative marketing technologies to enhance their reach and drive future growth.
So, it’s no longer enough to rely purely on word-of-mouth to spread your company’s news, advancements, and achievements through the mining investor grapevine.
There’s an all-encompassing solution – it’s called digital marketing.
At WhiteOwl, we pride ourselves on being the one-stop shop you need to take your company’s online presence to the next level. This article discusses digital marketing for the mining industry, specifically, how to attract investors online.
Why digital marketing?
Digital marketing not only helps you reach potential investors but enables you to gain a deeper understanding of them through detailed analytics. Equipped with this insight, you’re in an optimal position to identify your investor personas, refine your approach, develop the right marketing messages, and deliver them consistently.
Below are some of the key benefits of using digital marketing to attract investors online:
enables you to target specific groups through your marketing efforts
provides insight that helps you understand your investors’ journey and how to approach them
more economical and resource-effective than outbound marketing initiatives
levels the playing field, allowing you to get noticed amongst bigger/more mature mining companies
performance is measurable to a significant extent
offers flexibility and a high level of adaptability
facilitates engagement with investors at every stage of the investor journey
Digital marketing for mining companies
Below, you can explore several methods of digital marketing mining companies can deploy to attract, nurture and win mining investors online:
Search engine optimization (SEO)
It’s no secret that most modern-day mining investors will conduct research online before committing to an investment. What many mining companies may not realize is that if they’re struggling to find investors online, investors are likely struggling to find them too. That’s where search engine optimization comes in!
SEO involves optimizing your website to ensure it’s easily discoverable by potential investors using search engines. An excellent SEO strategy can increase the amount of organic investor traffic your website receives.
SEO comprises three core areas, which require equal focus for success. These core areas are on-page SEO, off-page SEO and technical SEO. Collectively, these involve factors like your website’s use of keywords, backlinks and coding. In short, search engines favour certain types of websites. Pro tip: it’s not those that lack relevancy, authority or speed.
Content marketing
Does your mining company’s online presence reinforce its credibility in the mining industry? Does the information your mining company shares online provide enough value for a potential investor to make a confident investment decision? If not, your content marketing may require a shake-up. Content marketing refers to creating and promoting assets as digital content. These assets can increase investor awareness surrounding your mining company, grow organic investor website traffic, and ultimately, increase your shareholder base.
Common investor roadblocks in the mining industry derive from not knowing what a company stands for, what kind of reputation it has and what its track record looks like. They also stem from not being able to gauge the company’s experience, expertise, credibility or credentials.
Content marketing offers the perfect opportunity to fill these critical information gaps and empower investors to make confident investment decisions. Blog posts, white papers, eBooks, infographics, and video and audio resources are all examples of content marketing.
Social media marketing (SMM)
Investors’ expectations have evolved. Gone are the days when they wanted to be pitched to by mining companies. Today’s digital age sees investors expecting a high level of engagement, and essentially, relationship building. Social media is the ultimate tool for connecting mining companies with retail and institutional investors in a space that facilitates interaction, sharing of opinions and two-way conversations.
There are various social media channels you can use, for example, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn and Twitter.
There are no firm rules for SMM success. However, delivering a consistent brand message across your social media channels, populating your feeds with relevant, value-adding information and proactively monitoring interactions can be a beneficial starting place. As social media marketing continues to dominate traditional marketing methods, it makes sense that mining companies want in.
Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising
Pay-per-click is a form of paid digital advertising that offers a quick and effective way of growing a mining company’s online presence and establishing it as an authoritative voice in the industry.
The beauty of (well-managed and optimized) PPC campaigns is that you’re paying for focused website or landing page traffic and the publisher only charges you each time a potential investor clicks on one of your ads.
PPC advertising is available across multiple platforms, for example, Google, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Instagram. Effective PPC campaigns often have a specific audience, a well-defined goal and a clear call to action. Your PPC campaign goals may be to improve website traffic, grow the company’s social media following, encourage prospect engagement or generate resource or application downloads.
Email marketing
Email marketing involves sending emails to parts, or all of, the mining company’s mailing list. This form of digital marketing deserves a spot on every mining company’s marketing plan because of its effectiveness in warming up potential investors and nurturing existing ones.
It’s important to note that a mailing list often provides an audience that’s most likely to engage, given the genuine interest they demonstrate when they voluntarily opt-in to receiving communications from the company. Conveniently, you can use every digital marketing tool discussed in this article to help grow a quality mailing list.
Email marketing is an excellent tool for delivering personalized messages to the right people at the right time. Emails may be newsletters featuring current projects, advancements and predictions to keep potential investors up to date, or they may contain general investment tips and advice to provide value to potential investors.
Top tips for attracting investors online
Here are a few top tips from our team of online marketing experts for attracting mining investors online:
Be present. To be trusted in the digital space, you need to show up consistently. Before you get started with a digital marketing strategy to engage investors, it’s a great idea to be realistic about how often you can deliver valuable content, and then plan to post, advertise and/or email accordingly.
Add value. In the online space, the content you create essentially forms the basis of the public’s perception of the company. Ensuring your digital marketing strategy has a large focus on delivering consistent value, such as expert advice, can encourage investors to perceive the company as experienced, reliable, approachable and worthy of their investment.
Monitor performance. Tracking your digital marketing performance helps you determine the success of your efforts, use your marketing budget in the best way, learn about your audience, and improve your ROI. Thankfully, the abundance of comprehensive data that’s at your fingertips when conducting digital marketing campaigns makes it easy.
Wrapping up
Effectively promoting your mining company online, establishing an authoritative voice in the industry and standing out amongst the competition is a great recipe for attracting new investors. With a highly strategic, perfectly executed digital marketing strategy, it’s also very achievable.
Contact our expert digital marketing team to see how we can help.