Six ways to meet the transforming demands of retail investors online
There’s a dusty old stereotype of a retail investor: a wealthy retired person who loves the printed annual report and the biscuits at the annual general meeting.
That stereotype is dead – and companies’ online investor relations output needs to adapt accordingly.
Crucially, as a stakeholder group, retail investors are getting more influential, and younger.
According to a 2025 US JPMorgan Chase report:
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Retail investing flows rose by 50% between 2023 and 2025.
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The share of 25-year-olds using investment accounts rose from just 6% in 2015 to 37% in 2024.
At the same time, the rise of AI search, and changing social media habits, are transforming the ways that retail investors get information about their current and future investments. For example, almost a quarter of Millennial and Gen Z investors now get investment advice via social media, according to a recent World Economic Forum report.
Here are six steps that digital communications teams and their investor relations colleagues should take to inform and engage retail investors online.
Taking these steps will not only better serve retail investors; it will also boost the AI search visibility of your company’s business, strategy, leadership and performance information for other stakeholders, too.
Move beyond mere compliance to clearly inform and explain
For years, the Investors sections of many corporate websites have been narrowly focused on ticking regulatory disclosure boxes – and the needs of professional investment analysts.
But what today’s retail investors really want is interpretation, context and clarity.
So, it’s important that your company’s Investors section includes:
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Plain-language summaries alongside official disclosure PDFs.
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Short explainers on business strategy, risks and key social, environmental and governance topics.
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Infographics and other easy to understand data visualisations.
Visit results pages from bp and GSK to see these elements in practice.
Optimise Investors section content for AI search visibility
Retail investors, like other stakeholders, are increasingly getting company performance information from AI search platforms like ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google’s AI Mode.
Steps you can take to maximise the chances that your investor relations content, rather than third-party sources outside your control, feed the AI answers include:
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Provide comprehensive investor FAQs – posing and answering all common retail investor queries in clear, jargon-free language, with relevant onward links to more detail elsewhere on the site.
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Ensure that investor relations messaging is rigorously consistent across channels – the Investors section, press releases, LinkedIn posts and so on. This consistency is a cornerstone of authority-building in AI search.
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Provide a glossary of terms, like this one from BASF.
Harness video to bring your performance and leadership team to life
In a world increasingly awash with AI-generated content, retail investors, like other stakeholders, are increasingly thirsty for human, authentic messaging.
In the world of investor relations, video is a powerful medium for providing this. Netflix’s YouTube “earnings interviews”, which each regularly attract more than 20,000 views, are a good example.
Short, informative video clips on social channels, like this Shell LinkedIn post featuring the CEO, are another effective approach.
Provide an engaging online summary of the annual report
Some retail investors will still want to download the full annual report in PDF – but others will much prefer to scan an online summary on the website.
An online annual report summary will also be appreciated by, and build trust among, other stakeholders, including jobseekers and journalists – as well as feed the AI search beast.
For an example of what an effective online summary can look like, see this 2025 one from Nestlé.
Look to Nordea's case for investment page
Offer an editorially rich “Why Invest?” subsection
It’s surprising how many corporate sites’ Investors sections lack clear narrative information about the company as an investment proposition.
Providing this will be appreciated by retail investors, as well as other audiences including financial journalists, jobseekers, partners and suppliers. Again, it will also support AI search visibility in many search scenarios.
Nordea has a very clear and comprehensive “Nordea as an investment” subsection.
Don’t treat the Investors section as a silo
Bowen Craggs’ research, based on thousands of survey responses across many of the world’s largest companies’ websites, clearly shows that retail investors frequently want to conduct rounded research when they visit your corporate site, on topics beyond pure financial performance.
This means that it’s vital that investor relations teams work closely with their corporate digital communications colleagues, to ensure that the entire digital presence, not just the Investors section, serves the evolving needs of an increasingly large, influential, and demographically shifting stakeholder group.
We’ll be providing more analysis on this topic in the coming months.