Educated retail investors invest more and are half as likely to churn. So for investment platforms, understanding how to effectively educate them is essential to attract, engage and retain business.

That means both understanding what content investors engage with and the content routes they take on their way to making an investment decision. Given only 20% of retail investors believe their investing platforms provide them with all the information they need to make those decisions, there’s a clear competitive advantage and increased market share on offer for the platforms that can nail it.  

We’ve studied how modern retail investors interact with over 5,000 pieces of financial news, analysis and guides, so we understand what they consume, when, and why – meaning we’ve got maps through the garden maze of engaging investors. 

Some of those maps are here, along with some advice on how they can be used. But if you can’t see what you’re looking for, get in touch and we’ll be happy to guide you through your target customer’s investment journey. 

Follow the content

The best way to educate modern retail investors is with regular, digestible and engaging content that builds a robust educational foundation and then situational education that builds confidence on specific themes. For us, that looks like this:

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From there, it’s all about specificity. After all, there’s no archetypal modern retail investor. Look at something as reductive as age, for example: of the millions of folks that started investing in 2020, 66% of them were aged between 18 and 45. Within that range, you’ve got investors who have never lived in an iPhone-less world and investors who were born a year after the first Apple computer went on sale; investors who have seen interest rates over 14%, and some who have never seen them top 6% (in the UK, at least). That's going to impact everything from their risk appetite to their approach to portfolio diversification – and that’s before you take in personal circumstances like salary, savings, and investment goals. 

But there are patterns in investor behavior: they lie in their content consumption. And these patterns provide much more meaningful indicators of what a current or prospective investor will do with their money next than just looking at age or salary. 

For example, 15% of US stock market investors say they started investing in 2020. So to help those new starters out, our Zero To Invested collection of nine educational guides offers investors a solid foundation to begin their investing journey. The routes these investors take vary, but patterns emerge. Not only is it clear that rookie investors are engaged enough to dig deeper into the fundamentals, but we can see that when someone read or listened to our guide on robo-advisors, 65% went on to learn about exchange-traded funds (ETFs). Once they’d gotten to grips with that, 58% explored portfolio construction. 

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A key challenge investment platforms face is knowing if customers are ready for more complex and sophisticated investment products – whether that’s volatile crypto which may require a high risk appetite or illiquid private equity which necessitates being an accredited investor. 

Take our Advanced Investor series. Of everyone who studied picking stocks, for example, 15% went on to learn about valuing stocks. From there, 16% read or listened to our guide on analyzing financial statements. By studying these journeys, we can see which areas certain subgroups of more sophisticated investors are choosing to upskill themselves on.

Free ICP (Ideal Customer Profile) audit?

As well as studying how retail investors interact with our 5,000-plus pieces of content, we also conduct a quarterly survey of around 3,000 investors via our Modern Investor Pulse. 

Using that data, we’d love to chat to you about the content your ICPs consume and how they like to invest. So get in touch.  

Whatever the investor type, this content-acquired knowledge can be used to map entire content journeys, predicting which investment products certain investors will engage with at certain times and positioning them accordingly, whether via in-article ad placements, links to appropriate follow-up content, personalized emails, or push notifications. This targeted approach drives engagement and is one of the reasons Finimize educational content sees 70% more engagement than any other retail-centric financial information platform.

This isn’t just useful for content, but for investment platforms to build a deeper understanding of their customers and, when paired with investment behavior data, provide a whole new meaning to KYC.

How Finimize helped WealthyHood create its content journey

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By thinking about the typical questions that Wealthyhood’s target customers (i.e. new investors) ask and comparing them to the findings from our own content maps, we were able to structure an entire content route for the Learn section of its website. As well as educating investors in a way we know works, as investors go further into their investment journey, Wealthyhood can begin to insert relevant calls to action for different products or pieces of content.

Find out more about our work with Wealthyhood here.

Driving engagement through Finimize content journeys 

We know from our experience developing a millions-strong community of active retail investors that it takes time to create enough content to start mapping these journeys. 

With Finimize Promote, platforms can become part of the Finimize learning experience and leverage our daily reach into a community of over a million investors, taking advantage of all our research to reach your target audience when they’re at their most engaged. 

You can mix and match channels to build a customer journey that’s tailored to your goal – whether you want to build top-of-funnel awareness, drive bottom-of-funnel conversion, or feed an end-to-end content strategy. We surface your brand content across our social media and newsletters, so you can build awareness and trust with retail investors. 

With highly engaged audiences across multiple channels, Finimize Promote can help you achieve a multiplier effect unmatched by other advertising platforms.