Estimated reading time: 6 minutes
This article includes insights from Auddy’s recent webinar with the London Stock Exchange, InvestorHub, and Conran Design, titled “Does the Market Understand Your Business?” which you can watch here.
Executive Summary:
- Message consistency across IR, marketing, and corporate comms is a strategic imperative that protects credibility and builds long-term investor trust.
- Leadership voice matters, but it’s not the only voice. Employees, customers, and independent experts can validate and enrich the corporate narrative in ways numbers alone cannot.
- IR teams should borrow from marketing’s playbook (especially feedback loops, engagement analytics, and iterative content strategies) to move beyond static annual plans.
- Format is now a strategic decision. How you deliver context and nuance after disclosure shapes whether your narrative lands or gets lost.
- Measurable, secure audio briefings are emerging as a bridge between formal filings and the human storytelling investors increasingly demand.
The Shift from Reporting to Engaging
For decades, Investor Relations has operated on a strict, rhythmic cycle. The calendar dictates the activity: quiet periods, earnings releases, roadshows, and the Annual General Meeting. Success has traditionally been measured by a single, often volatile metric: the share price.
However, as capital markets become more crowded and the competition for capital intensifies, relying solely on share price (a questionable indicator) is no longer sufficient.
There is a fundamental tension growing between the static nature of regulatory disclosure and the dynamic demand for narrative context.
Today’s sophisticated investors require more than just the “what” found in the numbers; they demand the “why” found in the nuances of culture, leadership confidence, and market validation.
The solution, emerging from forward-thinking IR teams, is to borrow the architectural rigor of Marketing. This does not mean “spinning” the truth. It means adopting a structured approach to consistency, utilizing third-party validation, and, most importantly, moving from a broadcast model to a feedback loop where engagement data informs the strategy.
The Messaging Consistency Problem
Every public company has a story it wants to tell. The challenge is that the story is being told by different people, through different channels, to different audiences — often without a shared script.
- Investor relations teams brief analysts.
- Marketing teams court customers.
- Corporate communications teams manage reputation.
Each function operates with its own priorities, timelines, and vocabulary. And when the messages diverge – even subtly – credibility erodes.
In a market where investors scrutinise not just what you say but how consistently you say it, narrative alignment across functions isn’t a nice-to-have, but a fundamental risk management discipline.
1. Get Synced on Your Script
Before any major communications cycle begins, every team with a stake in external messaging needs to sit down together and agree on a framework, to have a message that is fundamentally consistent.
This sounds basic. It rarely happens in practice.
The typical failure mode isn’t outright contradiction, but drift.
- IR emphasises margin improvement while marketing highlights top-line growth.
- The sustainability report foregrounds ESG metrics that the earnings call barely mentions.
Investors notice. Analysts notice. And the company’s credibility takes invisible damage that only surfaces when sentiment shifts or a proxy fight begins.
The remedy is a shared framework that allows each function to dial messages up or down for their audience while maintaining a consistent foundation — not just centralised message control.
Different emphasis is fine. Different narratives are not.
2. Share the Voices Investors Can’t Get From the Numbers
One of the most underutilised levers in investor relations is the strategic deployment of voices beyond the C-suite.
Leadership remains primary — CEOs and CFOs will always own the core narrative. But as Andrew Craissati, CEO and Co-founder of Auddy, points out, there is meaningful room to enrich that narrative.
“There is a role for the employee to communicate, for the customers to communicate. Also, actually, for independent experts who can validate the narrative of the company,” Craissati notes.
He cites a client operating at the intersection of AI and healthcare that uses respected academic voices to validate its strategic thesis. “A lot of how they communicate is by the use of Professor so-and-so, who will then validate their theories.”
This isn’t to replace leadership messaging, but to layer credibility. Consider the dimensions each voice adds:
- Employees offer authentic insight into culture, values, and operational reality. As Craissati puts it: “I would never underestimate the importance of seeing a happy employee who says, ‘I love my job. I love working here.’ It’s a valid message that resonates with people.”
- Customers provide market validation that no amount of internal positioning can replicate. (Though, as Craissati notes, customer content must go through a compliance review to ensure it’s fit for purpose.)
- Independent experts bring third-party credibility that strengthens claims around innovation, market positioning, or sector trends.
For investors increasingly evaluating companies on culture, governance, and long-term strategic coherence — not just quarterly metrics — these voices matter. They fill gaps that financial disclosures structurally cannot.
Read: How an Investment Firm Turned Leadership Updates into Must-Listen Content
3. Take a Page from Marketing: Strong Analytics
Alex Stella of InvestorHub raises a point that should make every IRO uncomfortable: investor relations has historically been poor at measuring the impact of its own communications.
“In IR, it’s very difficult to measure the ROI of anything other than sort of looking at the share price, which is a bit of a coincident indicator,” Stella observes. “There is a lot we can learn from marketing functions that have very sophisticated ways of measuring — put out a podcast, how many people looked at it? What did they think? How can we use that data to inform the next bit of content rather than just sticking to the static plan we have every year?”
Most IR programmes operate on annual cycles with pre-set deliverables: the earnings calendar, the investor day, the annual report, the roadshow. These are necessary. But they’re also rigid, and they offer almost no feedback signal about whether the narrative is landing.
Marketing teams, by contrast, build iterative feedback loops into everything they produce. Content performance data informs the next piece of content. Messaging is tested, refined, and adapted based on engagement signals.
IR teams don’t need to become marketing teams. But they do need to adopt the discipline of measuring narrative engagement — not just reach — and using that data to evolve their communications strategy in real time.
To modernize, IR must adopt the “Test, Measure, Learn” loop standard in marketing.
- Publish content: like an audio briefing or interview.
- Measure consumption: Did the investor listen to the full 15 minutes, or did they drop off when the CFO started discussing margin compression?
- Iterate: Use that data to inform the Q&A strategy for the next roadshow.
4. Eliminate the Friction in Your Investor Storytelling
Here’s an uncomfortable truth about most investor communications: Traditional IR formats are structurally misaligned. They’re designed for compliance, not comprehension.
- Earnings releases are dense, legally precise, and structurally hostile to storytelling.
- Webcasts run 60–90 minutes and bury key insights inside scripted remarks and formulaic Q&A.
- Annual reports are PDF monuments that few investors read cover to cover. Investor decks are static documents that lose context the moment they leave the presenter’s hands.
None of these formats are wrong. All of them are necessary. But none of them are optimised for how institutional investors and analysts actually consume information today: on the move, between meetings, across multiple holdings, dealing with time scarcity.
The result is a structural gap between disclosure (which companies handle well) and narrative comprehension (which they largely leave to chance).
Companies file meticulously and then… hope the story lands.
5. Close the Gap with Audio Briefings
This is where a platform like Auddy’s Campfire enters the picture – not as a replacement for any regulatory channel, but as a strategic complement that sits between formal disclosure and investor understanding.
After an earnings release, filing, or material announcement has been made through proper disclosure channels, IR teams face a narrow window to shape how that information is interpreted. Campfire enables them to deliver concise, 10–20 minute audio briefings that add the context, nuance, and leadership voice that filings cannot carry.
Further reading: Extending Executive Reach Without Diluting Investor Relationships
Auddy provides end-to-end creative and operational support, meaning IR teams can launch a professional investor audio channel without adding headcount or production complexity. The platform integrates alongside existing workflows rather than disrupting them.
As Craissati emphasises, the opportunity extends beyond leadership alone – employee perspectives, customer validation, and expert commentary can all be incorporated into a broader narrative strategy, delivered through a single secure channel with full engagement visibility.
Download the roadmap to investor podcasts.
Format Is Now a Strategic Decision
The conversation captured in this discussion points to a broader shift that IR leaders can no longer afford to ignore: how you communicate is becoming as important as what you communicate.
Consistency across functions. Voices beyond the C-suite. Feedback loops that inform narrative evolution. Formats that match how investors actually consume information. These aren’t peripheral concerns — they’re the infrastructure of credible, effective investor communication.
The companies that treat format as a strategic decision — not just a delivery mechanism — will build deeper investor understanding, stronger narrative control, and more durable trust. The companies that don’t will keep filing meticulously and wondering why the market doesn’t seem to hear them.
