You built something that solves real, expensive problems—so why does it still feel like advisors don’t get it? You’re not just frustrated—you’re confused. These are smart professionals. The logic is airtight. The benefits are clear.
The problem? Advisors don’t act because they understand the tool. They act because something feels urgent, important, or personal. They’re not ignoring your product–they’re not feeling it. While they certainly scrutinize your product’s features when they’re inching toward a sale, the root of most unsuccessful WealthTech marketing is simple: advisors do not purchase tech exclusively based on rational deliberation. Early on, their brains aren’t analyzing—they’re scanning for relevance. And stories are how we decide what deserves attention.
Why? Because they are driven by emotional forces and a range of unconscious desires that cannot be fulfilled by a spreadsheet or a list of features.
This article breaks down why most WealthTech messaging falls flat and how to reframe your marketing so advisors feel the urgency of the problem before they care about your solution. First, let’s be clear on what’s going wrong and why advisors stall or tune you out.
How Advisors Think About Tech - And What Makes Them Buy
WealthTech companies care more about tech specs than stories - and that’s absolutely how it should be. You are building sophisticated, highly complex product, and you have to get the nuts and bolts right to deliver a great product. The problem is that focus can cloud your view of the market.
Many WealthTech leaders have made the cardinal marketing sin: they have fallen in love with their “how”. They have become obsessed with the specific technical features that separate their product from the herd. They can see how superior their system architecture is, or how much more advanced their AI has become. But they have also convinced themselves that these are the factors that will persuade advisors to make a purchase - and they are emphatically wrong.
WealthTech leaders are immersed in this world every day, geeking out over the tech and keeping a watchful eye on your competitors. But advisors occupy a completely different daily reality. Their LinkedIn feeds look very different, and most have zero interest in the latest innovations in compliance tech.
This creates a conflict where WealthTech companies heavily overestimate the average advisor’s knowledge of technology. The truth is advisors don’t care about your features; all they care about is whether or not you can solve their problems. And for many advisors, more tech seems like the furthest thing from a solution.
WealthTech Must Relieve Advisors’ Cognitive Load
Industry publications have warned that advisors are overwhelmed by their tech stacks for nearly a decade, and most firms are more likely to consolidate than add to their list of solutions. As a result, the only reason an advisor will purchase a new WealthTech solution is if they believe - and more importantly, feel - that it will make their life easier.
There are many ways this can manifest:
- The ease of the product: Is the product intuitive to use? The simpler and more familiar the UI is to navigate, the easier it will be for advisors to purchase. They don’t need to worry whether their team will use the platform, and they don’t need to budget time for extra training before the tool starts to produce benefits.
- The ease of integration: Will the product fit seamlessly into their existing tech stack? Advisors always want to avoid friction and get started with a product fast. So the simpler integration - and the fewer compliance headaches involved - the more likely they will take a chance on it.
- The ease of understanding: Can the advisor quickly and easily understand how the product will help them solve a problem? The more easily they can imagine using the product - and feel the products’ benefits - the more likely they are to make a purchase.
This final point about understanding is where marketing really matters. Because it is not just that features-focused marketing is ineffective - it actually makes it difficult for advisors to make sense of what they’re being sold.
Why Stories (Not Features) Drive WealthTech Purchases
Thinking is expensive. The brain hates wasting effort, especially on things it hasn’t already decided are important. The brain uses around 20% of our metabolic energy and is constantly looking for ways to conserve that energy, which usually means avoiding unnecessary cognitive effort. People will only spend cognitive energy to consider a product if they believe it relevant to their goals. And that means they need proper context to understand why these features matter to their lives.
You’ve seen it at trade shows: advisors are fed cold facts about WealthTech features, and advisors nod politely but walk away unchanged. It’s not just boredom. They can’t pay attention. Why? Because attention is a transaction. The brain doesn’t pay for something it doesn’t emotionally value. No feeling, no payment. Without a stimulus that sparks relevance or resonance, the brain doesn’t even enter the checkout line.
This is what WealthTech marketing narratives do: they provide an immediate, tangible hook that gives proper context to the product and makes it easy for advisors to understand how the product solves their problem. Advisors don’t evaluate features and tools in isolation. They need to feel the problem first—then your product makes sense as the solution.
But this raises a complex question: how exactly can WealthTech companies create that context?
The Core Qualities of Effective Marketing Stories
The best WealthTech stories don’t ‘explain’ the product, they make advisors feel understood. That’s resonance. - the ability to grab advisors emotionally. If the problem feels real before the solution is introduced, you’ve achieved resonance. This is the root of every great marketing narrative, and it requires you to start with two things:
- Distill the advisor’s problem to its essence
- Show that the company understands the problem better than anyone else
To illustrate what this means, let’s imagine your product helps advisors automate compliance documentation. You know this is a real problem; advisors lose hours each week to this stuff. But it’s not enough to simply say you solve the problem - you need to show that you understand it. Which in practice means making the problem more specific, tangible and relatable.
You get there by pressing beyond ‘what’ the problem is. What makes it annoying? When do you think of the problem? Who is most impacted by it and how? How is it being addressed? Why hasn’t anyone fixed it? What has been tried? What’s it costing in terms of time, money, opportunity, frustration, etc? What would be different if the problem disappeared? How does it impact individual goals and company goals? The deeper you go, the more details you’ll gather - and the more accurately and powerfully you will capture the predicament your audience faces.
There are a few rules of thumb to remember here:
- Foreground the advisor: The advisor is the hero of your story, and you need to set it in their world. Use their language, describe their daily reality. This gives them a “way in” to your story. It also saves you time; they supply 99% of the context, because they know all about their own life.
- Show, don’t tell: Your job is not to impress with features. Your job is to place them in scenes that feel familiar. Scenes where the advisor says, "Yep. That’s me". Avoid the desire to overexplain - that’s where you end up obsessing over features - and trust that, if you’ve correctly identified the problem, advisors will know why your solution is so important.
So how would this change your marketing pitch? Don’t just pitch the tech. Place them in the moment of the pain. "You’re ready to dive into client calls—and then you remember the compliance pile still sitting in your inbox." That’s what sticks. The product becomes obvious after the pain feels real.
Of course, this won’t resonate with every audience; you’ll need to test and refine your message to ensure it lands. But when it does land, you’ll leave advisors with that “aha” moment they remember long after they’ve forgotten everything about your tech specs.
Finding Your Message: How WealthTech Firms Engineer Resonance
If resonance starts with the right problem, then your first job is to get brutally clear on what that problem actually is. But there are sadly no cheat codes here; your marketing narrative really must be tailored to the very specific audience and product you’re working with.
Instead, we can walk through a discovery process that can help you distill the essence of your specific problem:
1. Audience Research
The first step is to speak with your current users to understand the value they perceive in your product. There are many ways you can do this: you could email feedback surveys, ask sales or customer success to reach out, invite customers to review your product, or even offer a free gift card to customers who give you 10 minutes of their time.
The goal is to generate honest feedback that gives you insight into the advisor’s mindset. This will help you understand the real-world value your product offers, rather than the theoretical value it offers based on your features.
Expert Tip
Notice the language they use: This is your opportunity to identify the kind of emotional terms and industry jargon that resonates with your ideal buyers. There are often nuggets of gold in customer reviews; you might even be able to lift them and use them in your copy.
2. Assess Objections
Consult with your sales team to compile a comprehensive list of objections that prospects have raised. If you don’t have such data, ensure your sales team asks unsuccessful leads why they aren't moving forward and record their reasons in the future. Every objection you receive is a potential insight into how advisors think about your product - from how they categorize it to how they respond to your existing marketing messages.
For example, if you are being told your product is too expensive, it might reveal that your prospects are anchoring the price to a cheaper competitor. But maybe your product is actually significantly different from theirs, meaning you can reframe your marketing to invite more positive comparisons and ensure prospects frame your offering favorably.
Expert Tip
Lead with the objection: All you have to do is flip a common objection to create a powerful marketing message. For example, maybe you keep getting told your product will never pass compliance. Well, now you know other products in your category struggle with compliance. And yours can be “the XYZ solution that passes compliance with ease.”
3. Feature Translation
List out your features and answer the following questions:
- What problem do they solve for advisors?
- Why do advisors care about the problem?
- How does the problem manifest in their daily life?
You can’t skip the imagination stage, but you also can’t stop there. What you think they feel isn’t enough. Go verify it. But this tag will help you get into the right mindset to evaluate your product from a user’s perspective. The goal is to translate dry, feature-focused language into emotional, problem-focused copy. But this exercise will also help you understand which features advisors are likely to care about most - because you can identify how they would actually use them.
4. Buyer Mapping
Most advisory firms involve multiple stakeholders in tech purchasing decisions - and they all need to get behind your product. Your marketing messages should therefore reflect each of these personas and unify them under a single story; we call this your grand narrative.
Of course, most WealthTech sales and marketing teams won’t engage directly with a prospect’s CEOs or CFOs very often. Instead, you’ll need to rely on buyers to feed you information and help you map the various personas and their emotional needs in order to integrate them into your messaging.
There are two basic ways to do this:
- Make yourself a resource: You’re not just helping close one deal—you’re watching how ideas get passed up the chain. If your message dies at the second layer, that’s your cue: you’re not speaking to the decision-maker’s priorities. Offer to help your buyers with tasks such as writing emails or promoting your product internally. Not only will this help move the specific deal along, it will give you insight into the kinds of objections and points of friction the buyer faces.
- Address the challenge directly: Ask your buyers what they need to get a deal across the line. Your buyer is likely to be as frustrated as you when a deal stalls because of internal resistance, and may be willing to offer valuable information about the larger strategic challenges their C-suite faces - whether it’s driving more revenue or cutting costs.
From Message to Momentum: Where Strategy Meets Execution
Most WealthTech firms try to scale without ever clarifying what actually makes them resonate. They focus on channels, campaigns, and conversion—but skip the foundational question:
Why should anyone care?
That’s the work I do. I help firms uncover the emotional drivers behind advisor decision-making and translate that into a narrative that makes sense to the brain and sticks to the heart. Because without that emotional core, no campaign—no matter how polished—can create lasting traction.
Once that narrative is engineered, it’s time to scale it with precision.
That’s where ProperExpression comes in–to help WealthTech companies tell stories that connect at every digital touchpoint. They take the brand strategy, story cues, and SignalCraft we’ve already defined, and build the engine that carries it to the market with strategic precision. From standout websites to high-ROI webinars, their team executes the plan that turns connections into conversions.
Resonance first. Distribution second.
This isn’t a funnel. It’s a force. When message and medium align, you don’t chase demand. You become the one they're looking for. Because getting noticed isn’t the goal— Getting chosen is.
