What Retail Investors Actually Click, Read and Share (And What They Scroll Past)

An earnings release carries months of work, and the same material can reach a far wider retail audience with a change of format. IR content usually starts with the press release and the PDF deck, the formats built for disclosure and review. Retail investors engage most with a different set, and engagement data shows clearly which ones. Knowing that ranking lets a small IR team put its time where this audience already pays attention.

#What We Measured

The program data here comes from a single retail investor campaign run for a North American listed issuer. Its content reached 879,960 investors and logged 28,072 website engagement actions. Click-through rate ran at 6.17%, more than double the 2.91% industry benchmark, and the conversion rate finished more than five times its benchmark.

Over the six-month campaign, daily trades in the company's shares averaged 3.2 times the level of the preceding six months. Each campaign month saw more trades than any previous month.

The campaign layered multiple content types. These were a research report with its own landing page, analysis and commentary articles, news-driven updates and FAQs, YouTube videos, newsletter placements, and macro and sector data stories. One program is a single case, and results shift with sector, timing, and how much news a company has to share, so the sections below pair the program data with independent research.

#What Retail Investors Actually Engage With

Across the available research on retail investor behavior, a few formats show up again and again as what this audience actually looks for.

1. Data stories. One chart and one plain-English takeaway, readable in seconds on a phone or in a feed.

2. Short explainer video. YouTube is the most popular social channel for investing information in FINRA Foundation research, used by 30% of investors overall and 61% of those under 35 [1].

3. FAQs built around real investor questions. Paired with news-driven updates, they give investors the context behind each announcement alongside the announcement itself.

4. Plain-language analysis of company news. Plain-language analysis turns an announcement into something a non-specialist can follow. Investors already show strong interest in this subject matter, with 63% ranking quarterly earnings updates among the content they value most in a Fyllo-KCSA survey of nearly 7,200 US investors [2]. Format is what decides whether that interest turns into engagement.

The common thread is substance. Retail investors want the earnings story, and they engage with it most when it arrives shorter, visual, and written for a non-specialist. This builds on the idea in Retail Investors Need a Translator, Not More Disclosures, where the same facts, restated in plain language, present a filing to readers without a finance background.

#What They Scroll Past

The formats that reach retail investors least often share one trait. They were designed for disclosure and institutional readers, so a retail reader has to work harder to find the point.

1. Dense PDF decks. Built primarily for analysts and institutional investors, they ask retail readers to piece the story together across many slides.

2. Jargon-heavy press releases. Written first for disclosure, they carry the facts and leave the interpretation to the reader. 

3. Earnings calls and the IR website. 68% of retail investors rarely or never listen to an earnings call, and 67% rarely or never visit the IR website, according to IR Impact [3]. The same investors say they would welcome more and better engagement.

4. Generic corporate update posts. Without a specific number, change, or question to anchor them, they give a retail reader little reason to stop.

Each of these formats does its original job well. The opportunity lies in pairing them with a shorter, plain-language version for the retail reader, so the same story reaches both audiences.

Format is one driver among several, alongside timing, news flow, and distribution. It is also the one an IR team can adjust fastest, often using material it already has.

Reaching retail investors starts with material you already produce. A plain-language summary, a short video, and an FAQ built from real investor questions can each be drawn from the same release and deck. That makes the shift a reallocation of existing effort, and one whose results a CFO or board can track.