Top 3 Trends in Engaging Investors in the modern world

How to stand out in the information overflow? 

Virtual interaction has brought about new types of problems among investors, the main stakeholders of IRO’s. The information overflow is massive with all types of virtual webcasts, meetings and you-name-it. When was it? Where? Which link? Oo… missed it! It can be really frustrating. And let’s admit, who really listens to recordings afterwards…

Sounds familiar?

What to do in order to help your “busy and buzzed” audience to grab the essential message about your company, whether it was an earnings announcement, pre-silent call or CMD.

One answer is to cater the message in a way that the target audience can digest the most important messages easily and fast. Let’s call it investor message formulation. This needs a little extra attention from IR departments to really think through the message and its delivery in a way that it is both efficient, informative, and easy to grab in today’s world of information overflow - which is massive as we all know. All at once can simply be too much digest.

So why not deliver little pieces at a time and help your audience understand a little better. For example, Ocado group, a shopping company, made an animated video of their annual results, helping investors digest the relevant information, according to the article by IR Magazine (Fall issue 2022). 

Catering a continuous information flow

As we all know, the operating environment of companies has changed quite a bit only in months. Inflation, interest rates together with political instability have created a new type of dilemma, where the information delivered by companies for example only a couple of months ago in their last CMD, has quite soon become obsolete. How to keep investors up-to-date? While large annual events such as CMDs continue to have their places in IR strategies, there is now a need for a more continuous information flow, meaning catering smaller pieces of information, but on a more continous basis. For example, the American giant General Motors is considering whether rather a series of smaller events in a year could be arranged instead of their traditional annual CMD, according to a recent IR Magazine call. 

Transparency and equality

What to do in order to ensure transparency, equality, same treatment of all investors, or democracy – if we may call it that way. The baby has many names. This trend is opening the cabinet doors for all investors not depending on the size or current position of the investor in company’s shares.

To summarize, there are multiple trends “bubbling under” right now in the field of investor relations. In a positive way.

Writer is a co-founder in Blue Berry Share, a self-service tool for choosing IR freedom. www.blueberryshare.info