Concise content, capturing imagination and e-snowmobiles: How to engage the next generation of investors

Recent IR Impact and Totem webinar explored how to capture the interest of a younger investor audience

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 IR Impact 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.

Dempsey agreed, adding that following up on her messaging was a crucial part to Chesapeake’s efforts to broaden the appeal of in-person events. Speaking about the sort of questions she wanted to answer, she added: ‘Who’s engaging, who’s looking for more information, who’s then visiting the website more, which folks do we see on our earnings calls over and over – and how do we get them more engaged?’

Be brave and stay curious

Hughes summed up much of the afternoon with a simple phrase: ‘Capturing imagination is key. ’The only way to achieve precise and powerful messaging was to create and see what worked, he said, as well as a focus on making content that can be utilized for many different purposes.

Randt added that finding the ‘emotional ’core of your storytelling can be a great driver of that innovation. As a leasing company, it can often be hard to identify what will resonate, she added, particularly when thinking of a younger audience and even more so if you consider yourself a ‘boring ’business. ‘You have to wiggle yourself out of this box that you’re being pushed into, and… ask how can a person, be it a Gen Z or a general investor, really relate to [our story]?’

Key to this can be finding the ‘curious stories ’at the heart of your organization. For Grenke, one of these ways was highlighting the funding of a scheme that loaned out e-snowmobiles in Finland. ‘You may not remember me, but you may well remember the e-snowmobiles in Finland, ’Randt joked.

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