The older techniques hedge funds and asset managers used to hook investors have been called into question, as found in a new research report.
Today, institutional investors that manage over $6 trillion in assets are judging firms by the quality of their fewer, well-targeted interactions designed to suit their own sectors or regions.
This veers further away from an enduring habit that’s governed many an IR and marketer in the past: that a corporate access programmes’ success is determined by how many meetings they have stacked in the calendar. Largely as a result of flooding conference floors, hosting investor days, roadshows and meeting for coffees one-to-one.
It signals a wholly different way to set up not just what makes up LP-facing materials, yet also how they are scheduled. Buy-side investors will not want recycled pitch decks but substantial follow up meetings pertaining to their individual interests, simplicity in how subsequent meetings are scheduled and run, and the option of virtual or hybrid formats for these sessions. A hugely long-term effect of the pandemic, perhaps.
This sits perfectly in line with Irwin’s broader 2026 State of IR report that around 50% of mid-cap companies’ top priority is narrative and differentiation, and an increasing focus on in-person investor meetings rather than fleeting, generic outreach.
So, what does this mean for fund marketers?
Roadshows played a large role in communicating with investors face-to-face. However, the success metric of gaining or handing out as many business cards to fill a meeting calendar is not considered favourable by the allocators sitting on the other side of the table.
More and more sporadic outreach will no longer cut it, where IRs and marketers must turn their attention to the backend operations side. Segmenting contacts by investor type and region in a CRM helps set up future communications that contain relevant post-meeting content per group.
Beyond that content being more greatly personalised, this process determines a trackable process to schedule follow-up sequences that appear considerate, all according to LPs’ appetites for investment education themes and formats, rather than merely being a tacked-on afterthought.
It grants fund marketers this idea of a ‘relevance-based scorecard’: more likely to guide an interested investor toward a second meeting based on how closely a fund manager has heeded their preferences.
Source
Irwin, “What the Buy-Side Really Wants From Corporate Access in 2026″ and “The State of Investor Relations in 2026”
