PART FOUR: *Broadening Your Stakeholder Engagement*
The rise of the retail investor is a trend that shows no signs of abating. According to a September 2023 Nasdaq report, today’s individual investors are typically trading between $34 billion and $39 billion a day.
That said, the percentage of retail investors on a company’s shareholder roster varies greatly, and so this audience is more of a concern for some companies than others.
Individual investors are not an easy audience for an IRO to size up for many reasons, demographics chief among them.
New retail investors tend to skew younger, with the average age of do-it-yourselfers on Robinhood just 31, relative to an average investor age of 52 for customers of Charles Schwab.
An influx of younger investors suggests that IROs should lean more heavily on technology for outreach. Not only should your IR site be accessible on a PC, but it should be appealing on mobile devices, as well.
Reaching a younger audience also means maintaining a strong social media presence. Are you active on Reddit’s r/WallStreetBets, StockTwits, 4chan, TikTok, and other places where online message boards are housed? Given that so many retail investors are active there, IROs need to consider making themselves present, too.
In a March 2022 report, Nasdaq found that younger investors are very active in terms of accessing their accounts and researching investment opportunities. In fact, 48 percent of Gen Z investors check their portfolios several times a day, compared to only 16 percent of Gen X and 10 percent of Baby Boomers who do the same.
What this suggests is that providing more in-app educational content and refreshing that content frequently are two important ways to keep your retail audience engaged and happy.
IROs know that many employees are shareholders. And yet with IR staffs leaner than ever, employees are an IR audience that is sometimes overlooked.
Some employees are extremely knowledgeable about a company’s inner workings. While in many ways that’s good news, it also means that IROs have to stand ready to answer questions that are granular and (occasionally) pointed.