What is direct-to-investor marketing?
A framework public companies use to own their relationships with investors and measurably increase the reach and impact of their investor relations, without the friction and cost of intermediaries.
The problem
Investor relations never needed to learn how to scale.
For decades, non-institutional shareholders were relatively simple to engage. Outside of institutions, the register was two groups, top shareholders and retail, and you only needed to engage the top shareholders to deliver liquidity, share price momentum or a successful raise.
Give top shareholders the attention
Regular calls, letters and invitations to meetings like AGMs, concentrated on the handful of holders who mattered.
Make sure they hold enough
Engage them personally, build their conviction, and keep enough shares and voting rights in friendly hands.
Lean on those relationships
Turn a few key relationships into a healthy share price and a capital raise that gets away with ease.
A fixed number of investor relationships to nurture meant investor relations never needed to learn how to scale. Then an exponential rise in online trading, unparalleled access to investing resources and unrestricted participation in investor communities produced a powerful demographic of retail investors that public companies and their IR functions simply aren’t able to engage effectively.
Retail investors now trade more shares, disproportionately move share prices, participate in capital raises and influence shareholder votes. Intermediaries rose to meet the moment: brokers, advisors and service providers who would reach retail on a company’s behalf. But IR teams know the most effective way to engage a shareholder is direct, not indirect. The result is that retail is seen as a puzzle many companies simply don’t know how to solve.
Retail investors look, think and act differently to institutional and top shareholders. They have less technical knowledge, less capital, less time, and a stronger preference for video, forums, email and short-form written content. Effective engagement is no longer constrained to face-to-face meetings and handshake relationships.
The solution
The methods to reach beyond your top 20 already exist.
Everyone knows the problem. Direct-to-investor marketing is the answer, and its goal is two-fold.
Definition
Direct-to-investor (D2I) marketing is a methodology public companies use to remove the distance and market directly to investors without the friction and cost of intermediaries, unlocking investor engagement and ownership at every stage of the investor journey to create a measurable impact on on-market performance and capital raise outcomes.
Engage every investor
At every stage of the investor journey, not just the top 20 and not just at raise time.
Scale it efficiently and measurably
Give companies the tools to run engagement at register scale, and the data to prove what it moved.
It gives you direct access to your investors, integrated behavioural data, control over the investor experience, and lower costs with no intermediaries. The outcomes are more reach for your newsflow, higher investor conviction, a faster rate of shareholder acquisition, a measurable IR function, and capital raised on better terms. InvestorHub data shows that effective retail engagement produces raises that cost less and perform better.
IR and D2I
If IR is the tradesperson, D2I marketing is the toolkit.
The role of IR in a public company is, first, to keep the company compliant with listing rules in its communications with the market, and second, to build relationships between the company and its investors. The rise of retail forced that second job to change, but it hasn't changed in the right way.
Most IR teams partially or fully outsource the relationship job to third parties: webinars, conferences, media appearances, email tools, PR and ads. Each one is a piecemeal solution with its own disparate data, which limits impact and strategic input. Worse, most of them only build indirect relationships with investors.
What IR can currently do
Outsource the investor journey to third parties that only build indirect relationships, without the data or the tools to own the journey itself.
What IR wants to do
Efficiently build relationships with all investors, produce measurable data, maximise the impact on on-market performance, and drive better capital raise outcomes.
Direct-to-investor marketing lets IR do what it wants to do. It removes the distance so companies can market directly to investors, and it gives IR the tools to build relationships with all investors at every stage of the journey, without relying on third-party solutions, so IR can make a direct impact on on-market performance and capital raise outcomes.
The framework
The direct-to-investor marketing flywheel.
A step-by-step framework public companies already use to implement D2I marketing: attract potential investors, engage consistently to build intent, convert intent into investment, and optimise the whole process with data. Forces you apply build momentum; frictions you remove keep it turning.
- 01
Attract
Top of funnel
Goal
Attract potential investors through shareholder engagement at scale.
Strategy
Amplify your reach and visibility in the market so you are more than just another code to trade. The first direct interaction is usually an announcement; an interactive investor hub turns that bland PDF into the start of an investor journey, capturing contact details and putting leadership in front of investors through video and text summaries.
The interactive investor hub→ - 02
Engage
Middle of funnel
Goal
Engage potential and existing investors at high frequency.
Strategy
Invest in direct, frequent communication channels to build a consistent engagement cadence. Public Q&A scales individual questions into engagement for everyone, activity updates turn non-regulatory news into a feed, and email campaigns reach targeted segments of the register automatically.
The communications hub→ - 03
Convert
Bottom of funnel
Goal
Convert buying intent into investment and conviction.
Strategy
Identify and capitalise on high-intent investors to deliver capital raise outcomes, maximise buyers and reduce sellers. A registry-integrated CRM spots early selling so you can intervene, and combines hub and registry data into one investor profile for targeting.
The intelligence hub→ - 04
Optimise
Every stage
Goal
Refine the effectiveness of the whole flywheel with data.
Strategy
Engagement and announcement analytics show which channels and content move behaviour, so each turn of the wheel is informed by the last. The register you engage this quarter is the register you understand next quarter.
See it in the case studies→
Related reading: what is the investor journey? and what are investor leads?
See direct-to-investor marketing running for real.
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