How to engage the next generation of investors

In a bid to keep up with the investing youth, many publicly listed companies are shifting their outreach and marketing efforts to meet the preferences of their various stakeholder audiences.

This much is not new to most IR teams, who have been looking into video, social media and other online formats to connect with the next generation of stakeholders, in particular ‘gen Z’ (those born between 1997 and 2012).

Making the most of these channels was the focus of a recent Governance Intelligence sister site IR Impact (formerly known as IR Magazine) webinar – held in partnership with Totem – which highlighted the best practices for engaging investors who are increasingly tech savvy but have vanishingly short attention spans.

In it, Lucia Dempsey, head of IR at Chesapeake Utilities Corporation, Alex Hughes, co-founder of Totem, and Franziska Randt, vice president of IR at Grenke, discussed how to approach storytelling with this new audience in mind, highlighting in particular the need for friction-free, engaging content delivered with a technological perspective in mind.

Here are four things the audience learned during this webinar – which is available to watch on demand via BrightTalk.

Fighting shorter attention spans

It’s a well-reported theory that our attention spans are getting shorter by the year, thanks to the proliferation of content on demand and the rise of short-form video social networks like TikTok. Each of the panelists agreed that they had shifted their content to appeal to audiences who were shorter on time than perhaps they were 10 years ago.

For Dempsey, this can take many forms, distilling messages ‘so that we’re really getting to the point ’as quickly as possible. For example: ‘One of the ways is shorter press releases, ’she said. ‘In the last quarter, I’ve also been sending a quick hit email directly after earnings that summarizes our key messages and then has links to all of our files so that they’re easily accessible from inboxes.’

Diversifying formats to include more visual components and graphs alongside heavy statistical content is also key, the panelists agreed.

Friction-free delivery

Another part of that puzzle is to ensure that people coming to events – both in-person and virtual – can do so with as little friction as possible. Hughes said that Totem’s key aim was to enable attendees of either kind of event to access key information as efficiently as possible.
‘We’ve got to cut through the noise, cut through the overload they have, ’he said, speaking about Gen Z investors. ‘So [we’re thinking about] how can we, as a piece of technology, help ensure events are friction-free but also provide a filter for all of that noise with smart, efficient delivery of content, connections, networking or whatever is best.’

He added that ensuring that content of all kinds – whether from events or around disclosures – is ‘concise, engaging, shareable and chunkable ’helps to achieve this, as does providing instant touch points like polls.

Engagement matters

For Randt, no matter the evolution of formats or preferred routes of engagement, personal contact was still key, regardless of the investor audience. In her experience, younger investors are chiefly using ETFs to invest in German companies, providing an additional layer of complication.
‘You need to have a persuasive equity story that is very straightforward and very well communicated towards the capital markets, especially [for] Gen Z, ’she explained.

sing website analytics – or social media tools – to track how information is received is crucial to be able to ensure you are achieving what is intended.

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