Investment trust marketing tends to focus on the moment just before a transaction.
That is the wrong place to focus.
By the time a retail investor reaches a factsheet, engages with a platform, or requests more information, the substantive work of trust formation has largely already happened. They’ve searched. They’ve read what the financial press has written about the fund. They’ve asked an AI tool whether investment trusts are worth considering as a category. They’ve formed a provisional judgement about whether the fund in front of them is credible, visible, and worth their time.
Most of that happened without the trust having any role in it at all.
Blueprint Session #3, held on 31 March, examined what this means for how investment trusts should think about marketing in 2026. Three areas came under scrutiny: the retail investor journey and where trusts are losing momentum; the role of earned media and expert commentary in building credibility across that journey; and the growing importance of AI search visibility for a sector whose audience is rapidly moving to AI tools as their first stop for financial research.
The Journey Already Exists
Hub’s opening session began with a point that is easy to agree with but harder to act on: the retail investor journey is not something a trust creates. It already exists. Every retail investor passes through a series of stages before they invest, and long after. The question is whether the trust has been designed to serve them at each stage, or only at the moment of conversion.
The session mapped five stages. Curious: something catches the investor’s eye and the loop opens. Considering: they lean in, research begins, comparisons start. Convinced: they believe the product could be right for them and trust is forming. Committed: they invest and the relationship begins. Champion: they stay, reinvest, and tell others.
Most investment trust marketing concentrates on the transition between Considering and Committed. The stages before and after receive far less attention and far less budget. That is where the losses are happening.
At the Curious stage, generic brand advertising that looks like every other financial product closes the loop before it opens. Content that leads with structure and mechanics rather than purpose, that assumes prior knowledge, that gives investors no clear reason to take the next step: this is the norm across the sector. The fix is not complicated. Lead with the why. Open a loop rather than closing one. Use language that travels.
At the Considering stage, investors are doing active research and making comparisons. Jargon-heavy explanations, performance data without narrative context, and no clear point of differentiation lose people here. The fund manager needs to be a human being, not a credential. Strategy needs to be explained in plain English. FAQ content should address the doubts investors actually have, not the ones the compliance team anticipated.
At the Convinced stage, the investor thinks the product could be right for them but isn’t confident enough to act. Over-polished communications can work against trust here. So can the absence of honest acknowledgement of difficulty. The session referenced the Pratfall Effect: the willingness to address a difficult period builds more confidence than a communication that reports only strengths. Chair’s letters that acknowledge challenges rather than sidestep them, long-term shareholder perspectives as social proof, and clear pathways to invest via platforms or advisers all move investors across the gap between interest and action.
At the Committed stage, most trusts go quiet. The investor has put money in and needs reassurance that the decision was right. Annual reports locked in PDFs and no regular portfolio manager updates are common. This silence is where the Advocacy Gap opens. The session used Finisterre, the Cornish surf brand, as a reference point: a business with a modest advertising budget that has one of the most loyal customer communities in British retail, because it designed every stage of the journey deliberately. Investment trusts don’t need to behave like surf brands. But they need to ask the same question: what does this feel like at each stage, and what happens in the gaps?
Credibility Is Formed Before the First Conversation
Quill’s session took the investor journey as its foundation and examined what role PR and earned media play across it.
The dynamic has shifted. Investors no longer rely on a single source. Search, platforms, and AI summaries now shape first impressions. Trust is formed before an investor engages with a trust or an adviser directly. That means the validation ecosystem investors consult before taking any action, the coverage they find, the commentary they read, the sources an AI tool surfaces when they ask about a fund or a category, is now doing the work that direct communication used to do, and doing it earlier in the journey.
The practical consequences are specific.
Awareness gets you considered. Consistent presence in relevant financial media ensures a trust appears when investors first start researching. Absence at that stage means no consideration at all. Exploration defines your narrative: investors are researching across multiple sources, and consistent messaging across media, platforms, and commentary is what prevents doubt forming in the gap between first impression and decision. Validation builds trust through credibility signals accumulated over time: not a single piece of coverage, however prominent, but consistent expert presence across quality outlets.
AI has made consistency more important, not less. AI tools aggregate and summarise multiple sources instantly. Authority signals outweigh volume: coverage in high-quality outlets carries more weight than a large number of lower-authority mentions. Fund managers who regularly provide market perspective become more visible and more influential in AI outputs. Mixed messaging creates confusion that AI surfaces, not suppresses.
The common pitfalls, over-reliance on announcements, inconsistent messaging, no clear expert voice, short-term campaign thinking, are the behaviours that produce isolated bursts of coverage with no compounding effect. What good looks like is a consistent long-term narrative, regular proactive commentary, a recognisable spokesperson profile, and presence across multiple trusted outlets. The credibility gap between trusts that do this and those that don’t is widening.
AI Search Is Already Here
Hub’s second session put numbers behind a shift that investment trust marketing teams have noted but not fully acted on.
Over half of UK adults used AI in the past year to support financial decision-making, according to Lloyds Bank’s 2025 Consumer Digital Index. 39% specifically used it to help plan for pensions and retirement goals. These are not early adopters. They are the retail investor audience.
Traditional search volume is expected to drop 25% by the end of 2026. Click-through rates for top-ranking pages have already fallen 34.5% when AI Overviews appear in results. 60% of Google searches now end without a click. Only 9% of users scroll to the bottom of page one when AI summaries are present.
The conversion argument is the one that should concentrate attention. AI search traffic converts at 14.2%, compared with Google’s 2.8% average: a fivefold improvement in conversion efficiency. The channel delivers smaller volumes with dramatically higher intent.
The response has two layers. The foundation, strong technical SEO, fast page speed, clear information architecture, no broken links, is still necessary but no longer sufficient. The layer on top is Generative Engine Optimisation: structuring content so that AI tools can understand, cite, and serve it in response to the conversational and long-form questions retail investors are already asking. Heavily structured content is three times more likely to be cited by AI. Direct answers, question-and-answer formats, and schema markup are the content choices that build visibility in AI search results. Brands not optimised for AI citation risk becoming invisible to a growing portion of their audience, not in the future, but now.
Three Questions Worth Asking
The session closed with a practical framing that holds across all three areas.
Is the investor journey deliberately designed at each of the five stages? Not just at the point of conversion, but from first curiosity through to long-term advocacy? Where are the gaps, and who is responsible for closing them?
Is the PR strategy building consistent, expert-led credibility over time, across quality outlets, with a recognisable spokesperson? Or is it reactive, announcement-led, and producing isolated activity with no cumulative effect?
Is content structured for AI visibility? Not just optimised for traditional search, but organised so that AI tools can find it, understand it, and cite it in response to the questions investors are already asking?
The investment trust sector is early enough in this shift that the trusts who act now will build advantage that compounds. The ones that don’t will find the distance between themselves and the trusts that did increasingly difficult to close.
This session follows on from Session #1’s case for storytelling, Investment Trust Storytelling: Why the Sector Needs a Better Narrative, and Session #2’s behavioural science grounding, Why Investment Trust Marketing Is Aimed at the Wrong Brain. Building recall once an investor is paying attention is Session #4’s focus: Attention Is the Investment Trust Sector’s Most Undervalued Asset.
The Blueprint Sessions bring together investment trust marketing and communications professionals to work through these questions properly.
If you’d like to be considered for an invitation to the next session, please contact us.
