Many financial advisors join the “credential choir”—singing about their experience and qualifications, rather than speaking directly to prospective clients.
But your marketing can no longer afford to blend in. Competition for organic growth has intensified, and only firms that can build connections quickly will acquire enough clients to make meaningful gains in AUM.
This article explores why storyselling can help you achieve that goal. Based on decades of collective experience, our team has developed a clear, comprehensive guide to leverage stories across all your marketing—and become the firm your ideal clients are drawn to.
What is Storyselling—and Why Should Advisors Care?
Storyselling is a technique where advisors use “simple illustrations, anecdotes, and metaphors [to] bring [complex] ideas into the mental grasp of every client.” Rather than presenting dry facts—performance stats, technical details—these advisors bring concepts alive through story.
What does that mean in practice?
Imagine a prospective client wants to know about alternative investments. The average advisor might share the numbers: this fund performed 1.5x better than another fund and could deliver XYZ returns over a one-year period.
Sounds great, right?
Well, no; not really. Sure, there might be a small cabal of Spock-like investors who walk and talk like animated calculators. But for most clients, the dry facts are rarely exciting—and almost never elicit an emotional response.
The “dry” approach, therefore, presents a few different problems:
- Limited Client Buy-In: You’ll struggle to get clients motivated about positive opportunities, which will reduce your influence and ultimately your ability to deliver value.
- Reduced Clarity: Your clients will rarely fully “grasp” complicated concepts and might feel you’re not doing enough to inform them—which is one of the main reasons they hire you.
- Lack of Connection: You reduce your service to a talking computer which will impact long-term loyalty. Why would clients stick with an advisor who offers the same dry, inhuman info as a roboadvisor?
Maybe this sounds harsh, and there is definitely a place for numbers and technical stuff, but the reality is competition for clients is getting tougher—and firms that tell the best story will have an enormous advantage.
3 Ways Storyselling Helps Advisors Grow
Reorienting your marketing to focus on story will help you:
1. Differentiate Your Firm
Open five advisors’ websites at random, and you will find some combination of:
- Sunsoaked retirees walking barefoot on a beach
- Navigational metaphors—roadmaps to build, paths to be charted
- Photographs of suit-clad advisors smiling
Now, there’s nothing wrong with these tropes. But predictability equals interchangeability; vanishingly few firms have a truly memorable and unique identity in their marketing. They might have legacy respect or size on their side, but if you took away the logos, you’d have no clue which firm was best.
Storyselling might be the best way to solve that problem. Approach your website as a story—and your services as concepts to be illustrated, rather than regurgitated—and you almost inevitably start generating more original content.
As Behavioral Financial PhD Joshua Wilson writes, “Differentiation starts by uncovering what’s already present–but usually buried–in the personalities that drive the brand.” The stories you already have from clients, experience, and your personal life could be the key to finally making your firm and advisors stand out.
2. Build Emotional Connection
The key to growing your book of business is emotional resonance. Clients often research multiple firms, using numerous channels to research—from referrals to Google. But they choose the advisor to whom they were instinctively drawn.
Every piece of marketing should make you more magnetic to your target audience. Whether they saw you at an event, scrolled through your LinkedIn profile, or read your blog, prospects should get a powerful sense of who you are.
What does that have to do with storyselling?
Stories are cognitive shortcuts. They clarify novel concepts by tying them to familiar ones; they make ideas memorable by evoking images, rather than information. But most importantly, they generate powerful emotions.
Advisors who use narrative throughout their marketing—from personal anecdotes to client success stories—showcase their personality. They create a strong emotional pull. And they give prospects a reason to care.
3. Prompt Action
Growth requires action—and action requires motivation. Dry, fact-based marketing of the kind advisory firms excel at often takes motivation for granted; “surely the audience wants to grow their wealth—and that’s exactly what we’re offering.”
The problem is that latent motivation is not enough. Yes, advisory clients want help with investments, retirement savings, and the rest. But those ideas are abstract; they’re hard to feel. What prompts actual action is emotion—and that usually requires narrative.
Your prospective clients will only act if they can imagine how you will improve their lives. Everyone wants to see another zero added to their savings account, but what really fires people up? Paying for their kids' education. Retiring before they’re fifty-five. Not having to look at the price on a dinner menu.
Those are the kinds of outcomes that get clients motivated—and stories demonstrate exactly how you’ll get them there.
Becoming a Storyseller: The Basic Components of Your Marketing Narrative
We’ve established that stories are powerful for advisors. But how do you actually tell them?
The reality is that most stories share a common structure. This is not universal, but it’s close enough to serve as a blueprint for your marketing.
Every story consists of:
- A Hero
- A Goal
- A Problem
- A Guide
With just those four elements, you can construct a pretty clear narrative that immediately beats 90% of advisory marketing.
Let’s imagine you want to promote your firm. You can use these four elements to reverse engineer a story:
1. Your Hero is Your Ideal Client
You need to know exactly who they are. This isn’t just about demographics or net worth; it’s about their personalities, priorities, and approach to financial advice.
How to Identify Your Hero
- Consider your top 5-10 clients: Select the ones you’d love to replicate and consider what unites them
- Review your meeting notes: What do you notice about their behavior, psychology, and attitudes to money?
2. Their Goal is What Financial Advice Will Help Them Achieve
They don’t just want to “grow their wealth”; they have a vision for what that wealth will let them achieve. A lifestyle, a legacy; something specific and meaningful that lights them up.
How to Identify Your Hero’s Goal
- Think about the questions your clients ask: What are the most common aspirations and aims? What seems to make them most excited?
- Map your plans onto real-life outcomes: What is revealed during the planning process? What do your clients really want from the advisory process?
3. Their Problem is the Reason They’re Looking for Advisors
This should be a persistent and very painful challenge. Maybe they feel most advice is too generic; maybe they are frustrated by slow progress or a lack of transparency.
How to Identify Your Hero’s Problem
- Consider your client’s complaints: What did they tell you when you first onboarded them about previous advisory experience?
- Review the market for competitive advantage: Explore how your direct competitors market their services—and how you could offer something meaningfully different
Note: While we use the “problem” here, it’s important never to use the term when talking to prospective clients. They might not think about themselves as having a “problem”—and you don’t want to alienate them.
4. The Guide Needs to Have a Clear “Plan” for the Hero
You exist to help your hero achieve their goal. This is not about your credentials or experience; it’s about the kind of person or firm you are. Everything you do—from social posts to initial meetings—should be about serving and supporting the client.
How to Position Yourself as the Guide
- Frame your services around the hero’s problem: From retirement planning to tax strategy, your services should appear to be built to solve the exact problem your audience has.
Now Let’s Put That Together
A simple story for an advisory firm might be:
- Your hero is a medical professional with a growing practice
- Their goal is to retire by 55 and never miss another birthday due to work commitments
- Their problem is that investing feels misaligned with their values. They aren’t sure how to get stronger returns without excessive risk or getting involved in morally questionable investments
- Their guide promises to help them find financial strategies to simultaneously grow their wealth and satisfy their conscience
This forms the basis of all aspects of your marketing—from website copy to emails and social posts.
Expert Tip:
- Be specific: Your stories will come alive when you plug in concrete details, rather than generic placeholders. Don’t be afraid to alienate your audience; even if some prospects don’t share the exact goal you present in your marketing, the specificity will be more compelling—and they can see how it relates to their goal.
The Compliance Conundrum: Does Regulation Restrict Storyselling for Advisors?
The SEC’s Marketing Rule prohibits promissory advertisements. Your stories must be compelling and emotional—but never edge into the territory of "guaranteed outcome”.
Many firms shy away from creative marketing for exactly this reason. Most prefer to keep their language dry and generic; some even avoid using testimonials. They only use storyselling in meetings, where it is used to present products and inform clients.
Avoid this fate by building your stories around the regulation. Develop a core “messaging framework” that presents your story; get it signed off by compliance; and deploy it across every marketing channel.
This can actually make marketing faster and easier. You spend less time in compliance limbo and deliver a more consistent message that sticks with people.
Conclusion: Clarity is Power for Advisors
Your core story and message must be clear and resonate strongly. Some marketers see “storytelling” as an opportunity to be vague or avoid nailing down a single clear narrative.
At ProperExpression, we believe this is one of the quickest ways to waste your marketing budget. Storyselling is a powerful tool, but it must be built to scale. Establish exactly what message you’re conveying—then deliver it consistently across multiple channels.
This approach helped us generate $2B+ AUM in new pipeline for a leading RIA platform.
Want to explore how we could do the same for your firm?
