Summary:
Financial advice is often presented through charts, models, and data, but most clients don’t make decisions in a purely rational way. In this episode, Mark Mersman argues that the most effective advisor marketing meets clients where they are—human, emotional, and influenced by predictable behavioral shortcuts. When messaging speaks directly to how people feel, think, and evaluate risk, prospects not only understand the information better, they feel understood first. That order matters. People choose an advisor emotionally and then justify the decision logically. With that as the premise, the episode builds a practical framework around five behavioral biases that consistently shape personal finance decisions and offers concrete ways to translate them into compliant marketing.
Loss aversion is the starting point because it’s the strongest motivator for most investors. Losses typically hurt more than equivalent gains feel good, which helps explain why clients may sit in cash during uncertainty or delay decisions they fear they’ll regret. Advisors often lead with returns or efficiency, but the average consumer is trying to avoid pain, not chase gains. Effective messaging therefore aligns with that instinct: speak to what clients want to avoid—avoidable taxes, retiring too early and needing to return to work, derailing mistakes—alongside what they want to achieve. The point isn’t fearmongering; it’s acknowledging a common decision lens and offering a structured way to mitigate the risk that matters to them.
Status quo bias compounds the challenge. Doing nothing feels safer than changing—even when “nothing” may not be serving the client’s goals. When a prospect weighs switching advisors, rolling over accounts, or starting a plan, the familiar often wins because the path to change looks uncertain or heavy. To counter this, advisors should lower activation energy and make transitions intentionally simple. Demonstrate support, sequence steps, and visualize the process so prospects can see the path from A to B. When the perceived friction drops, the likelihood of action rises. That experience also feeds referrals: once a client has seen that a change was simpler than expected, they’re more comfortable telling peers to upgrade.
Anchoring is a bias many advisors recognize because it shows up in comparisons and expectations. The first number, idea, or experience often frames the decision that follows—fees, returns, withdrawal rates, and even guarantees from prior meetings can become the benchmark in a prospect’s mind. Rather than fight invisible anchors, advisors should set deliberate ones. Frame the relationship with a clear starting point—e.g., a no-cost clarity meeting that defines goals and priorities—or re-center the benchmark around the client’s personal objectives instead of a market index. The aim is to create fair, transparent expectations that are difficult to misinterpret, and to avoid leading with any figure that could lock a prospect into unhelpful comparisons later.
Choice overload is another silent drag on conversions. More options feel empowering in theory but create stress in practice, resulting in slower—or no—decisions. Financial contexts are especially vulnerable: investment menus, Medicare choices, pension payout structures, and Social Security timing provide abundant complexity. The episode recommends structuring choices as paths rather than presenting sprawling menus. Most clients tend to fall into a few decision patterns, so guide them toward the two or three most relevant paths, explain the trade-offs in plain language, and make next steps explicit. This reduces cognitive load, keeps the focus on outcomes, and helps clients act with confidence instead of deferring decisions indefinitely.
Finally, social proof addresses the human tendency to look sideways before moving forward. People trust what other people trust, which is why authentic testimonials, transformation stories, and credible third-party features have more influence than a list of statistics. The point isn’t to flood your materials with only perfect reviews; believable social proof includes realistic nuance while highlighting outcomes clients care about—greater clarity, lower stress, and a defined plan. The more a prospect sees people “like them” taking informed action and benefiting from the relationship, the easier it is to step forward themselves.
With these five biases as foundations, the episode then turns to execution. Make emotion visible in your messaging by addressing confidence, clarity, and stress reduction—not only portfolio mechanics. Reduce cognitive load by using shorter sentences, plain language, and fewer steps, and by assigning a single next action rather than a long list of tasks. Eliminate friction by simplifying scheduling, clearly defining expectations on both sides of the relationship, and articulating the “rules of engagement” so prospects are never guessing how the process works. The consistent theme is to create an experience that is easier to start, simpler to understand, and designed to help clients feel secure in their choices.
Mark also offers channel-specific tips to translate the framework into practice. In website copy, lead with outcomes and pair them with your process so visitors understand both what your method is and why it matters for their goals. In email, curiosity and emotional resonance often outperform purely logical appeals; subject lines that hint at a specific but unnamed risk or tax outcome can earn the click if the message inside is clear and compliant. In seminars, open with stories, not charts, and end with simple, actionable next steps. In first meetings, validate emotions before layering in facts. Prospects want to be heard; addressing the concern that creates the most stress unlocks the conversation, and the plan’s details can then support the solution.
The episode closes with three quick experiments any advisor can run: rewrite one headline to lean into loss aversion, replace one data point with a transformation story, and ask three prospects what single money issue creates the most stress—then listen closely. Each action builds messaging that aligns with how people actually choose, rather than how we wish they would choose. In short, the most effective marketing isn’t necessarily smarter; it’s more human. When your message validates emotions first and backs them up with clear process and transparent facts, your value becomes easier to recognize and easier to act on.
Transcript:
Mark Mersman, Chief Marketing Officer at USA Financial - Welcome back to the playbook today. I want to talk about behavioral finance and exactly why and where it belongs in your marketing. So everybody is heard of behavioral finance. At the core, here's the real, the base of it. People don't make financial decisions rationally. They use emotion, instinct, and oftentimes mental shortcuts. And the problem with that is that most financial advisors tend to communicate logically. We use charts, data, facts, we focus on efficiencies. The challenge is clients decide emotionally. They use fear, regret, optimism, comparison, belonging. Those are the things that clients are using to make their decisions. And so when messaging speaks to human behavior, prospects in your existing clients will feel understood and while education is important, they want to feel understood first. And so the most important takeaway here is that people choose advisors emotionally and justify them logically. So let's dive into five of the behavioral biases that tend to shape almost every personal finance decision that we encounter. And the first is in each of these, it's important to understand each of these biases represents a different marketing opportunity or something to think about as you frame your messaging. The first is, and we've all heard these, so most, you know, the vast majority of these you're going to be very familiar with. You just may not have taken that next step to try to work it into your marketing message. So the first is loss aversion, which in short simply means avoiding pain matters more than chasing gain. And so a lot of times advisors will point to great returns. The reality is, for most consumers, losses hurt roughly twice as much as gains feel good. And so we have to remember that when we're leveraging our marketing and thinking about our messaging. Here's the thing, investors dread losing what they have more than they desire winning more. And we've all seen that play out as markets kind of do what they do. They love the euphoria of the markets doing really well, but boy, that turning down in that market or seeing their accounts down, that hurts a lot. So where this shows up, mean, this doesn't just show up in their portfolio. So that's a piece of it. In the portfolio side of things, a lot of times you'll see clients or prospective clients staying in cash so that nothing bad happens, right? And we've seen that play out countlessly with all of your clients, I'm sure. The other one that comes in is fear of retiring too early. You know, I think that one of the things that an advisor can do to help create a transformation for their client is to show them that they can in fact retire and retire maybe earlier than they thought because they have the vast majority of the clients and prospective clients that you work with have this fear that if I retire too early, my goodness, I'm gonna have to go back to work later in life when I certainly don't want to be doing that. The other thing is that they'll delay decisions to avoid regret. So what's the marketing angle with loss aversion? Well, the first is, you have to think about and begin to speak to what it is that your prospective clients want to avoid, not just what they want to achieve. Avoiding loss, avoiding pain is gonna be a much greater motivator than gain is perhaps. So be very cognizant of that. Some messaging examples that you might wanna consider, something like don't lose your retirement income to taxes you could avoid or, you know, stop the worry of retiring too early. Let us show you how or avoid the cost of mistakes that could derail your retirement and force you back into the workforce later on. Let us show you how. So just some things there to be cognizant of loss aversion and understanding that your clients and prospective clients are going to make decisions about avoiding pain. And that's going to be more motivating than chasing gain.
The next one is status quo bias. And this happens in our personal lives. It happens in our financial lives where doing nothing actually feels safer than changing anything. Humans tend to prefer the familiar. Even when familiar isn't that good, they tend to feel like, I know this. I know the bad here and I can navigate this bad. I don't know what this change represents. Inaction actually feels riskier than taking action. Now where this shows up? Well, it shows up all the time in if you're trying to get a prospective client to change from their current advisor to you. It shows up in perhaps avoiding a rollover. You know what? I know what's going on in my account over here. I'm kind of loosely familiar with the investments. I don't know what I don't know about what you have to offer. And so it's easier for me to stay here. Same thing with just purely skipping planning because what I've been doing is working well enough. The marketing angle that we need to think about here is lowering the activation energy. You want to make that transition simple, seamless, painless. And demonstrating to them that, you know, staying with the status quo might actually be hurting you. Emphasize ease, emphasize the simplicity, emphasize the support that they're going to have. And I can assure you, if you do that well, and you create that incredible experience, it is the thing that once they've made that change and they realize the benefits and the value of working with you, all of a sudden they become more inclined to talk about you because they just took that plunge and it wasn't nearly as bad as what they thought. And so you know what? They want to tell their friend down the street, hey, you know what? Don't stay with the status quo. Time for you to upgrade. Some messaging examples here, know, keep that transition simple. So something like, hey, let's just start with one question that you're unsure about. Or language like, hey, we do the heavy lifting.
You just simply have to decide and we'll coach you through what decisions need to be made as we walk through this process step by step. Another really important thing is if you don't have something that helps your prospective clients visualize what that process is to make that change over to you or to make, to change investments, that sort of thing, you're doing yourself a disservice because all you're doing is leaning into their status quo bias help them understand it very simply that this change is not going to be difficult. The third one that I want to talk about is probably one of my favorites because I find myself guilty of it all the time and that is anchoring. The first bit of information that your prospective client receives frames every decision or frames the basis for your decision. What it really means is the first number, the first idea, or the first experience becomes the benchmark. Think about this, if your clients or prospective clients had a bad experience with a financial professional, they're anchored to that. And so you are gonna have to do everything you can to demonstrate that you are different. If you're talking about fees, or if you're talking about performance, or worse yet, and this is one that happens all the time, they've met with another financial advisor who may have shared some numbers with them, whether it's return numbers, whether it's guarantees, whatever that might be. And now that prospective client is anchored to that number and it is a challenge to get them to budge off of it, right? We see it showing up with comparing advisory fees, market return expectations, withdrawal strategies, right? That's an idea that gets shared first and that thing tends to get anchored in. A lot of times advisors will always say, you know what, I don't necessarily need to be the first one to meet with a prospect, but I want to be the last. That might be true, but I will tell you there is very much an added benefit to being first in line to be the first one to share your ideas, to share that discussion because that's what they can anchor to. And this is also, sometimes if you've lost prospective clients because you anchored them to a certain fee or to certain numbers. Then they went down the street and that advisor down the street was able to anchor them away because you kind of set the bar there. So the marketing angle here is to set the anchor deliberately. So you might put something in your messaging that says, you know, every client relationship starts with a 90 minute clarity meeting at zero cost. Or we believe the right benchmark is not the S &P 500, it's your own personal index or your own personal goals. And now you're starting to anchor a new idea that perhaps we're trying to re-anchor them away from something that they've been held to, to get them to buy into what it is, the ideas that you're sharing. So it's a really big deal and something that I think goes, unnoticed, even though we all, we're all guilty of it. The same thing happens when you're in any negotiations. That's part of why when they, know, strong negotiators will tell you, you better not be the first one to give a number because that's the number that we anchor everything off of. So be cognizant of that bias as you're thinking about your messaging. In a little bit, we'll talk about different applications for this messaging in different ways. So
The fourth bias I want to touch on is choice overload. I think a lot of times we're inclined because we want to empower our clients and prospective clients to make the choice and we want to give them lots of options. The reality is that the human brain prefers simplicity. More options simply means more stress and less action because now I'm gonna deliberate over, these are the eight options that were given me. It's the perfect excuse for them to say, you know something you've given me a lot to think about, let me go back and talk with my spouse, talk with my accountant and whatever it might be, because I have to make sense of all these different options. This shows up all the time with, you know, investment menus, you know, the long, long list of investment menus, or if they have a 401k and they've got hundreds of options. It creates that inaction and kind of comes back to that status quo bias that we talked about earlier that says, feels like a lot, therefore I'm gonna stay where I'm at. We see it a lot with Medicare decisions, right? If you are representing and work with in the Medicare space and you give them too many options, their brain is gonna shut down happens with lump sum versus annuity payments, whether it's pensions and that sort of thing. It happens with social security timing for those of you that work with your clients on that decision. The marketing angle here is to structure these decisions into paths rather than options. And really helping them understand that most of my clients, and this is some messaging you could use, most clients fall into one of three paths. And then you start to steer them towards the decisions that, you know, and help them with information that will steer them towards the one or two paths or decisions that probably are in their best interest. Another messaging example here is, you know, we'll eliminate the noise and give you clear direction because that's really what they want. They want help tuning out the noise. If you look at simply just the amount of investment options that are available out there in the universe, it is staggering. mean, the number of mutual funds, ETFs, investment strategies, it certainly exceeds a million. And so the average consumer who doesn't have a good guide to point them in down the right path is gonna sit there and freeze. So don't force yourself or force your prospective clients into choice overload.
The last bias here, and this is one that we've harped on and I've harped on in prior episodes, is social proof. The reality is, people trust what other people trust. As silly as this might be, it's the reason why, when you see, if you purchase products online, whether it's Amazon or other retailers, the most popular products and where people tend to lean are those that have a high volume of reviews and the reviews seem legitimate. Sometimes you'll see reviews that are stacked with just five stars and there isn't a single four star or lower review and that's gonna plant some seeds of doubt. You almost with that social proof want to have some of that, I'll call it negativity, but because that's gonna be more real. Part of what happens in the decision making that the brain does, humans tend to look sideways before moving forward. And so before I'm going to make this decision for myself and take that step solo, I'm gonna look to my side to see, well, do I have somebody else that has already made this step for me or before me? And what was their take on that experience? So that's a big deal. When we see others succeed, because seeing others succeed reduces fear. This just emphasizes the importance of testimonials, transformative stories, not statistics. Tap into that emotion piece and tap into the social proof. We see social proof taking place in third party credibility, whether you've been published in. You know, newspapers, magazines, online director, whatever it might be, or featured in different places. That's a form of social proof because what that, that person is doing, they're looking at whatever third party it was and saying, wow, that place must have vetted this advisor. Therefore, yeah, I can, I can move forward and step forward with more confidence because that advisor has been vetted. So this shows up when it comes to referrals, it comes to peer comparisons, testimonials, obviously. So make sure that you're telling transformation stories, you're leveraging testimonials. Language to kind of think about. Here's how we helped a couple just like you, or many of our clients actually started right where you are today. And here was the path that we took them down. Again, just work that language into your marketing and you'll start to see that some of that social proof bias starts to kind of take hold. So let's talk about, know, we touched on those five biases. Let's talk about how to turn them into messaging strategies. The first is we have to make emotion visible. You know, in our industry, we're so used to driving home points with logic and facts and statistics, but we wanna speak to confidence, to clarity, to reducing stress, because that's really what they're looking for first, because that's gonna tap into their emotions, the emotional side, which is going to drive the decision. Reduce the cognitive load. When you're in meetings, and this happens a lot, we see, over the years, I've seen incredibly intelligent financial professionals that frankly, are way smarter and me knowing the inside baseball part of it, I would trust them in a heartbeat because I know they do their homework, they're extremely intelligent, they make incredible financial plans, but they can't convert a client and the reason is very simple. They failed to reduce the cognitive load that is required for somebody to confidently make a decision. So think about using shorter sentences.
Simple language, this is a big one in our industry, right? We have so much jargon. So simplify your language, fewer steps in the process, and then very clear, precise next actions so that they aren't walking away from that meeting with eight things to do and they're not sure which one to do next. Give them one thing that is their homework. Simplify that next step. The other thing is we need to eliminate friction. Eliminate friction in that decision, make booking an appointment easy, make scheduling, reviews easy, remove complexity from the process, and be very clear in define expectations. Define expectations that you have of them and what they should expect from you because when you start to create that playing field and set the levels of expectation on both sides of the equation, they'll then understand the rules of the game and how to move forward. know, there's nothing like playing a card game or a sport or what have you. And you don't know the rules of engagement and you sit there feeling like a fish out of water. There's no enjoyment and your brain just shuts down. When I sit down to play a new game that I've never learned before, I'm going to ask questions. I want to know the rules before we jump in. We have to do the same thing in our marketing message and as you're working with prospective clients. So let them know what the rules of engagement are, set those expectations. And obviously this is, this goes without saying, but make sure to live up to the expectations that you set. Let's talk real quickly about some messaging examples by different marketing channels. So the first that comes to mind is website copy. I would encourage you, know, tap into the emotions, lead with outcomes, not just the process. Because at the end of the day, the process is super important. We're big advocates of explaining and conveying to them that you have a process. And maybe it's a proprietary process that's very unique, one that they haven't experienced before, but they need to know what the outcome of that process is going to be because that's what's gonna get them to be excited about going through your process. So start to paint the picture for what the outcome is gonna look like and you leverage that inside of your website copy alongside some of the social proof and those pieces. When it comes to emails, you know, curiosity and emotional resonance really starts to outperform logic. So, but a subject line like the retirement mistake, nobody talks about that creates curiosity and it kind of then sets the stage for an emotional play or some emotional messaging inside of that email or something like this could save you thousands in taxes. The curiosity part is we're referencing this, but they don't know what this is, but they wanna click and they wanna dive a little bit deeper into that messaging to see is this, whatever this is something that I could engage with. At seminars or event marketing, open with stories, not charts, and then end with very simple clear, concise next steps and actions that they need to take. When you're in your first meetings, and this is very much rudimentary, your first meetings, make sure that you are validating emotions first. The importance of knowing that you are understood as a prospective client cannot be overstated.
You know, the reality is we want to feel like we're heard, like we're understood. So as you're asking questions, make sure that you are asking questions that are gonna elicit some of the emotion from them that they're feeling, because that is the component that is going to drive them. If you can address those emotions, usually it's fear, sometimes it's greed, but if you can address the fear and help them overcome some of those concerns that they have, they're gonna be much more inclined to move forward and bring facts later. Facts are important, the stats, the data, of course that's important. Validate the emotions first. That's really it. I would encourage you, if you wanna try a few things to get started that you could do right away, rewrite one marketing headline using loss aversion instead of logic. Look at your website, look at emails that you've used, rewrite one of the headlines just to lean into the loss aversion piece rather than the logic. Replace one data point in your website or presentations, replace one of them with a transformation story, just to see what kind of response you get from it, because I think that you'll see a much better response using social proof than just, hey, here's a really cool fact or data point. Sure, it's important, but it's not gonna be motivating. And then I would encourage you ask three prospective clients or even existing clients, but what's the one thing about money that creates the most stress for you? And just shut up and listen. You are gonna learn more from that answer and asking that question. Number one, you're gonna learn a ton for your own future messaging. But number two, simply asking that question then leaning into it a bit more, is gonna tell you more often than not the biggest problem that you need to help solve. Because if you can address that, if you can eliminate or reduce that stress for that prospective client, the data, the stats, the return, none of that stuff even matters. That becomes, yeah, that's great later on. But if you're showing them a plan or a path or a couple of paths, not too many, that can show them how to eliminate that stress or reduce that stress, that's a win. In conclusion, here's the deal. The most effective marketing isn't necessarily smarter, it's just more human. And I think it's really important to understand that when your message aligns with how people truly think, how they feel and behave, your value as a financial professional, becomes undeniable and you will definitely land more clients. Hope this was helpful. Take care, have a good one.
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The Financial Advisor Marketing Playbook is a podcast/video series for high-performing financial planning professionals that are committed to improving their craft, helping their clients, and growing their business. Hosted by Mark Mersman, Chief Marketing Officer at USA Financial, this series contains a wide variety of content – from quick win ideas to long-form interviews, each episode provides actionable marketing ideas and insights that can be implemented easily into your practice. From digital marketing to traditional direct-response marketing, each episode delivers straight-forward and engaging content that any financial professional can use to improve their bottom line and grow their practice.
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