Building Meaningful Relationships With Retail Investors

This week, we attended the webinar, ‘Building meaningful relationships with retail investors’, hosted by IR Magazine and TiiCKER. Three panelists that hold leadership positions in the IR world shared their views and opinions on topics like the change in shareholder bases due to the pandemic and communicating effectively with a retail investor base.

All panelists agreed that interest in stock market retail investing has drastically grown for many companies since the pandemic, despite what one might have expected. Some may say it is due to everyone having more time to invest and to learn to invest. (Click here to learn more about Mexico’s growing tech savvy retail investor market). Others because interest rates have fallen to zero. And others because it’s the easiest way to get exposure to the digital revolution.

The three panelists from TiiCKER, Hershey, and Vista Outdoor, all agreed that a strong communication strategy with retail investors is based on direct messaging that cuts straight to the point. Targeting the correct investor audience (click here to find out how), keeping those investors in mind and interested, and lastly, “cutting to the chase,” is the general foundation to building a successful retail-based platform. Often, companies strive to include every type of investor possible, but what is important is to be effective with a few rather than inclusive to all.

Now how do we put those ideas into practice? IR Magazine editor at large, Laurie Havelock walks us through the 10 essential steps to building a retail investor strategy. Here is what Miranda IR got from it: 

1. Put in time and effort to targeting retail investors  
2. Have a regular point of contact available to investors
3. Call retail brokers
4. Have retail brokers in front of your company’s management 
5. Attend the right events
6. Create personal relationships with your investors
7. Adapt presentation content to your investors’ needs 
8. Leverage your IR website
9. Take care with social media as retail investors are more likely to be influenced by what they read online
10. Be ready to overhaul your share ownership

As we start 2021, and turn to our calendars for the year, it’s a good time to think about what events we can hold to further our communications and engagement with retail investors. For example, it can be beneficial to organize (virtual) retail investor specific non-deal roadshows. Organizing this type of event with financial advisors can give your company access to hundreds of potential retail investors and allows you to tailor your presentations and materials for the event specifically to retail investors’ needs and concerns. In Mexico this includes having materials in Spanish for these financial advisors to be able to share with the end investor. Miranda IR can help you to set up retail investor NDRs and can assist with the materials and content needed for the event.  

In addition to social media, it’s important to make sure that your content is reaching as broad an audience of retail investors as possible. One way to increase this is by using a Newswire service. Miranda IR has its own in-house service, Miranda Newswire, which can help you to reach retail investors via sites such as Seeking Alpha and Investing.com.mx. Building awareness of your company through content on these sorts of sites is one of the first steps towards building and maintaining meaningful relationships with potential and current retail investors. 

Another way to build and maintain these relationships with retail investors is through leveraging your IR website, as mentioned above. Our two tips for content for retail investors are firstly, to include a short video about the company on the IR homepage, explaining what the company does and perhaps touching on the company values. One to one and a half minutes is a good length – long enough to include valuable content, but short enough that visitors will click on it and watch to the end. Secondly, for retail investors with no access to platforms such as Bloomberg, Refinitive and Infosel etc. it can be helpful to have (almost) live (usually a 20 minute lag) stock information on your website, including the share price on the IR homepage and interactive graphs showing your company’s stock performance on a ‘Financial Information’ page, for example.

As always, if you need any advice on IR matters, including how to communicate with retail investors, organizing a retail investor NDR or setting up an effective Newswire feed, our investor relations and newswire experts are here to help.

https://www.irmagazine.com/shareholder-targeting-id/ten-steps-building-retail-investor-strategy

https://www.nasdaq.com/articles/investor-intelligence%3A-the-rise-of-retail-2020-08-26