The following is a guest post from Moira Conlon, CEO at Financial Profiles. Opinions are the author’s own.
As CFOs finalize 2025 Wall Street engagement plans with investor relations (IR), it’s important to reflect on how the IR landscape has evolved since the pandemic and plan accordingly. In a nutshell, investors have become quite comfortable in the digital world. Hybrid investor engagement is here to stay, and the channels for engaging investors have expanded.
This paradigm creates many new opportunities for companies to ‘meet investors where they are’ by leveraging new channels and a more nimble and flexible approach to engagement. The following is a checklist for your 2025 plan.
Balance in-person and virtual investor meetings
Both investors and companies have come to appreciate the many benefits of virtual investor meetings, which have proven to be both efficient and effective. Importantly, the ability to schedule virtual meetings with top-target investors without any geographic or time constraints allows companies to advance their investor targeting strategies.
Now you can conveniently meet with investors anywhere, any time or maximize your time by virtually engaging with investors in a variety of cities all in the same day. With virtual meetings, management can meet with investors who are off the beaten trail in cities like Kansas City, St. Louis, Salt Lake City or Seattle or even extend their reach to global investment communities in Europe and Asia. Additionally, many investors are still working from home part of the time, so it can be challenging to find top target investors all in their offices on any given day.
That said, face-to-face meetings have always been the best way to make a personal connection, and that hasn’t changed. In fact, there has been a marked increase in attendance at investor conferences, which tells us that investors still place high value on personal interaction and connections with management teams and view in-person meetings as an important opportunity to get to know the leadership team and assess their ability to execute.
Against this backdrop, the key to success is developing a strategic marketing plan with a set of investor targets and a flexible approach to meeting with current and potential investors through a combination of in-person and virtual meetings throughout the year. Sometimes that means traveling to a specific city for in-person meetings and spending time in your hotel room hosting a couple of Zoom meetings as well.
Leverage social and digital media
Growing investor comfort with the digital world has led to the widespread adoption of digital media in IR — social media, video and podcasts. According to a recent survey, more than 80% of investors have made an investment decision after sourcing information on digital or social media, so it’s no surprise that companies have stepped up efforts to leverage these channels. Social media provides a platform to amplify news you already announced in press releases — quarterly earnings, conference presentations, management changes, etc. — and it’s also a great way to stay top of mind with investors even when you don’t have material news.
Companies are using social media to put a human face to their leadership and to showcase their talent, to bring products, properties, technology and services to life or to present customer, partner or employee case studies or testimonials, educational information on industry or key growth drivers. They are also leveraging social media to showcase media stories, broadcast interviews, thought leadership, conference presentations, or corporate governance and social responsibility initiatives. All of this allows investors to gain a more holistic view of your company, talent, culture and value drivers.
Many companies already have large followings on social media that can be further cultivated to become investors with some thoughtful engagement. Start with determining the best social media channels for your company — LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram and/or Twitter. Upgrade your company home pages and executive bios to align with investor interests, not just customer interests. Create a content calendar that ensures a consistent cadence of engaging content that includes captivating graphics, images, infographics, photos, videos and podcasts.
Crucial to success is allocating sufficient resources for ongoing engagement with this audience. For inspiration, check out the IR Magazine’s award winner Jushi Holdings, or one of our favorite small-cap examples Pagaya Technologies.
Bring investors up the learning curve faster with shorter-form video content
Studies show that the average viewer retains 95% of a message presented in video form, so it’s no surprise that videos are becoming critical investor relations tools. Given that attention spans are increasingly shorter, companies are creating short, high-impact videos on a broad range of topics — “Why Invest?” on the IR landing page, CEO welcome to potential investors with a quick stock pitch, key takeaways from a quarterly earnings call or a video series showcasing different aspects of the company or business model. These tools make management and the company story more accessible and allow investors to choose where and how they get information and how long they want to spend on it.
Reimagine your approach to Investor Days
Investor Days are a heavy lift for companies and success rests on determining the best format and venue to attract your target audience. While many companies were quick to return to large-scale in-person events following the pandemic, there is no one-size-fits-all and investors and analysts prefer to attend full-scale analyst events when companies have some new, actionable information to present.
There are many alternatives to consider:
- Focused events such as an innovation day, product demo day, property, project or plant tour;
- Smaller events such as a private dinner with a compelling guest speaker that provide an opportunity to personally engage with investors and analysts; or
- An exclusive event for your champion sell-side analysts to invite their top institutional clients for access to business unit leaders.
It’s all about finding novel ways to connect with and build relationships with investors while providing new insights or information that help them better understand your investment thesis and build confidence in your leadership team.
Think strategically about your conference calendar
Year-end is an ideal time to check in with covering and prospective sell-side analysts to determine the optimal lineup of investor conferences for the coming year and to review the more than 650 conferences listed in The Seminar Schedule, which includes conferences around the globe for every industry. There are also some great conferences where presenting companies are recommended by the buy-side such as Fury Research Partners’ Hidden Gems or Southwest Ideas Conference.
Finally, the stock exchanges host a variety of conferences and corporate access events, and more recently corporate access teams at large buy-side firms have begun to host their own conferences to connect their portfolio managers.
Don’t overlook the power of media as a key conduit to investors
Today, companies of all sizes are successfully leveraging the media to reach both retail and institutional investors and other important stakeholders. A growing number of outlets such as Yahoo Finance, Schwab Networks and Motley Fool interview companies specifically on their stock stories. Local business journals, daily newspapers, local television news and radio stations are always interested in companies in their backyard.
There are opportunities every day in broadcast and print media for executives to provide a unique and timely point of view on topics being covered in the news cycle. Media is an important conduit for engaging investors and articles and video content are excellent content for your website and social media.
