Ep 155: How this Loan Officer Gets a 5X Return on Google Pay-per-Click Leads

In today's highly competitive mortgage industry, building profitable relationships with real estate agents is essential for success. However, finding effective ways to secure agent relationships can be a challenge. With so many mortgage loan originators vying for the attention of real estate agents, it can be difficult to stand out and establish meaningful connections. Our new case study featuring loan officer Chris Cogill is a must-read. This has closed a remarkable 36 million in funded loans from agent referrals. And in this case study, he shares his proven strategies for building strong relationships with real estate agents and leveraging those relationships to drive more business. To get your hands on this resource, head over to LOKestudy.com and download your free copy of the case study today. You'll find actionable insights and practical tips that Chris used to close 36 million in funded loans from agent referrals and how you can, too. Don't miss out. Go check it out right now, visit LOKestudy.com and download your free copy today. Welcome to Mortgage Marketing Radio. Brought to you by the Mortgage Marketing Institute, your number one source for truth in Mortgage Marketing. Hey, Listers, what's up? This is Jeff Zimfer. Welcome to this episode of Mortgage Marketing Radio Podcast. So glad you've tuned in. Happy New Year. If you've not heard the sound of my voice in the month of January 2020, but welcome to a new year, a new decade. And if you're back, I'm glad you're back. If you're here for the first time and you're liking what you're hearing, hey, would you do us a favor, leave us a review wherever you're listening to this podcast. It always helps us get feedback and tell us what you're learning. What's the benefit you're getting from listening to the podcast? Here's the latest podcast shout out from Brittany Gag. Hey, Brittany, what's up? Brittany, I appreciate you leaving a podcast. Here's what she says. Best loan officer podcast, Jeff never fails at delivering great content interviewing the best loan officers and branch managers in the business. This podcast is unmatched, wow, thank you. Every single episode has a takeaway that can be implemented in anyone's business plan. I've connected with a handful of top producers through the show that have become good friends now. This is my number one go to podcast and it should be yours too. Thank you, Jeff, for pouring your heart into helping others succeed and connect. Thank you, Brittany. As you know, I'm a fan of yours. And if you haven't gotten your podcast swag yet, hit me up on the Facebook message me. Let me know your t-shirt size mailing address and we'll get you off the podcast swag box. New t-shirts, new logo coming for 2020. And by the way, as it heads up, case you guys didn't know, be on the lookout for a couple of things I've got coming that I'm really excited about. Number one is I'm launching a new weekly live show. We're changing the title of the podcast. It is going to now be mortgage marketing live. And if you're watching, you can see my little mic flag that I've got here, this big square that's now taken up residence over my microphone. We'll see how this thing plays out. But I'm changing up the format of the show a little bit. We're still going to be interviewing obviously successful producers, but also we're going to be diving deep into some other relevant topics that you, the audience, the listener have told me you want to learn more about around the umbrella under the umbrella of marketing, digital marketing, online off marketing and that kind of stuff. But going Facebook live once a week, also streaming that over to YouTube. And then once I get the approval from LinkedIn, that'll be streaming on LinkedIn as well. I don't know what's taking so long, but I know some people that are huge players with huge video presence that still haven't gotten approved for LinkedIn live video. I think it's completely random. Anyways, look for that to come. More announcements about that to come as well. And look for coming soon, the release of the new book Disrupt or Die. How to Survive and Thrive the digital real estate shift for both real estate agents and mortgage professionals and a great opportunity for you to team up. And maybe if you're down for it, do some co-branding together with the book. So that'll be coming your way soon. And then lastly, before I forget, as always, our episode is sponsored by the mortgage marketing pro membership where you can go deep and wide, reach more agents and less time, have more success, get more referrals through teaching agent classes and lots of other self-paced modules, tutorials and learning modules in there for you to become a modern mortgage originator. Mortgage Marketing.Pro is where you can check it out soon to be released here in 2020. And you can go there to learn more. So all right, without further ado, let's talk about this week's episode, the show we recorded this before the holidays. So it's, you know, I'm glad I'm able to finally release it. We did have a few technical difficulties with the audio. So we kind of just jump right into the conversation. You'll hear me jumping right into the conversation with two guests. Number one is Michael McHallister, who is the founder of Empower Funnels. And what they specialize in is generating leads for you, the mortgage loan originator, using Google PaperClick ads. So I wanted to do this episode for some time because I think it's important for, if you're talking about Legion, Facebook gets a lot of the love. We've got to make sure we look at Google PaperClick ads. And we're going to talk about differences and why you might want to consider one over the other. So and Michael, by the way, is a former mortgage originator who struggled with Legion's first hand and has created this company Empower Funnels that is helping loan officers create high intent-based qualified leads to grow their mortgage business. And I wanted to have Michael on because I've heard about Michael over gosh, the past year now. And I know he's worked with multiple companies that include like Caliber, movement, fairway, Geneva, shout out to Emmett. Thanks for giving me some insights into Michael and his company. And then of course, our special guest that we have on, I brought a loan officer on that is a client of Michael so you can hear directly from the loan officer how he's leveraging Google PaperClick to generate leads and not only like, you know, originate loans but also utilize to those leads to then partner with real estate agents. And our special loan officer guest is Brett Brent Vandergrind, so that comes loans out of Sioux Falls, South Dakota. So I think you'll enjoy the conversation, you'll learn a lot about Legion, what Google PaperClick ads are, how they differ from Facebook and do they have a potential place for you in your business? Well, that's for you to decide. But without further ado, let's get into this week's show. I was able to do that by simply asking for some connections of some real estate agents, had my list of, you know, those I wanted to talk to. Michael's system got me a bunch of leads in Minnesota, which is another state where license in. And we started handing these out and, you know, when you hand them a lead and it's pre-approved and they just have to go show them homes and close it, you start getting that, you know, reciprocated business right back to you. So it was huge. I don't know how to quantify that necessarily without really diving into some more of our numbers, but when you can hand an agent, you know, a loan, it doesn't matter where you're located, you hand them a loan, they're probably going to want to keep that relationship going. So it's really, you know, kind of flip the scripts for what we've always done and how easy it was to get in with some of these agents in different markets. Okay. All right, so we didn't really prep you for this in terms of numbers or whatnot. And again, you don't have to share anything, you're not comfortable sharing, but I'm naturally curious then because you just kind of articulated how you can, you're leveraging the paper, paper click to generate opportunities for real estate agents. That's awesome. It helps solidify relationships there, create new conversations. Can you give us a sense of like ROI, return on ads, spend, whatever, you know, in terms of like the average investment you're making. And just because that's the big curiosity factor, people want to know like, you know what I'm saying? Well, yeah, and I had this, you know, some other systems I had tried look back at the end of the year. And it's, you know, I spent X amount of dollars, which is outrageous. And we closed just enough to make it break even. Well, when you calculate your time that you're spending on that, you're, you're really losing quite a bit of money. So for us, and I know Michael will hit on this as well, our ROI, we've got a lot of room for improvement just because we've scaled it up relatively quickly. And I think we're leaving a lot on the table there. But for rough numbers, Jeff, we're looking at anywhere from between maybe 500 to $1,000 that we spend on, you know, empower the ad spend itself, our follow-up systems, for every thousand, we'll even say $1,000. For every thousand dollars, we spend if we're bringing in $5,000 in revenue, which is roughly our, you know, our income per loan. If we've got a way to have that kind of automated, and we've got the people in place, if it makes total sense for us. Now, that's not our goal. We would like to see that number down to about $500. For every 500 we spend, we have a loan, you know, spit out at the end. There's things where we're doing to kind of improve that. But it's, it's definitely a good starting point. And it's, it's profitable. So. Okay. Nice. I like that. Now, Michael, don't, I appreciate your patience, right? We'll get to you in a second or whenever you feel it's right for you to jump in. But, um, and this might be the time because people listening to this, right? As I'm sure you're well aware, Michael, um, you know, Facebook gets all the love, uh, or this, you know, I mean, the attention, at least in our industry. Um, there's a lot more noise, if you will, about running Facebook ads and all that kind of stuff. Um, and it sounds like, uh, Brent, you might have spent some time in money on Facebook ads before, before coming to Michael. Definitely spent my fair share. What, what's a couple of things that are very apparent about the differences, either about the types of leads generated or the ROI or whatever, what really stands out about key differences? So I think a lot of the, uh, and I'm not going to, you know, say every Facebook ad or course is bad. But what I experienced was it's easy to get people to click on a link and you can talk about, hey, we'll get you a thousand leads for, you know, pennies per lead. But, um, with Michael's system, they're a lot more intent driven. So they're filling out a long form. They've googled, you know, key phrases regarding buying a home or needing a mortgage, where a lot of the Facebook stuff, at least in my experience was, you know, they happened to click on something before they knew it, they had gotten on our list. And a lot of them were, uh, probably poorly qualified, I guess, I would say, you know, they might have been intrigued by work, credit, okay, or no-down payment available. Those aren't really, you know, the loans we're looking for. The stuff we're seeing on Michael's side, they're a lot more, uh, ready to buy a home, they're farther down, you know, the process, maybe farther down in the funnel, you might say. And, uh, what we're running into is maybe they've already talked to their local bank or another mortgage company and we're competing for that, which is okay. Um, they're still exclusive leads to us. So that's great. But they're definitely interested in buying a home, they, for the most part, know why they're, they're being contacted. Okay. So Michael, you want to expand on that? Because I understand the, you know, the concept of higher intent. Yeah, yeah. And, uh, I've, I've always deferred, uh, to Brent, obviously, and I think it's great that, uh, you've got him on here, answering some of these questions. But, um, when it comes to Facebook versus Google, um, that's like one word, right? A one word summary of the difference is going to be that word of intent. I mean, at the end of the day, the problem that you face on Facebook is that buying a home is the American dream. Everybody wants to buy a home at some point. Now, whether or not somebody has positioned themselves to be able to legitimately inquire and see what's required next to like what the next steps are to buying a home, that's the question that's going to determine their level of intent. So on Facebook, you run into this challenge where you can target, you can try and target people that are within, um, within their buying window, but Facebook makes that harder and harder constantly. Facebook has made it pretty clear that they don't like mortgage advertising and more like, um, and, and the reason why is because if mortgage advertising, advertising fair lending laws, that's really where a lot of the hot water that they've landed in, um, aside from obviously your Cambridge Analytica scandal or whatever, but that's where a lot of their hot water, uh, has come from in their advertising space, which is why you'll find it's getting harder and harder and they're constantly removing your targeting metrics. You used to be able to target likely to move. You can't do that anymore. You kind of have to create your own audience and stuff. Um, so anyways, as good as you can get with targeting, it's never going to replace finding somebody who is searching for that for questions, their answers to their questions right here and right now. So how much house can I qualify for? How much down payment do I need on a $400,000 house or what's the minimum credit, credit score requirement for a conventional loan because they heard from their buddy that FHA loans are bad for whatever reason. Like there are hundreds and hundreds of thousands of people that are searching for this stuff every single day and yet we've got a lot of marketers on Facebook trying to trying to stimulate engagement or trying to manufacture intent with buzzwords or flashy graphics and stuff like that. Um, and it's the problem that you run into with Facebook is that you have, um, if your ads are too enticing, you're going to have low quality leads. If your ads aren't enticing enough, you're not going to get enough speed conversion. So it's a tough game to play for sure when you're not setting up camp where people that are in your target market are searching. Do you think the path to, um, you know, loan app in our case mortgage or path to actually transacting on purchasing, purchasing a home is, uh, it's a longer path to get there on Facebook versus somebody doing a Google search or is it similar? Uh, no, I think it's definitely longer. I, I've talked to a lot of people. I mean, I've been doing this for a couple of years now and as a loan officer previously, I was generating Facebook leads and Google leads myself, um, but pretty much consensus from when I talked to somebody that's, that's converting on Facebook. It's really hard for them to quantify an average purchase window because the intent wasn't there in the first place. So on the, by, you know, on an off chance, you generate somebody that's highly qualified. There's typically a reason that they haven't been searching for it, which is why they clicked on your ad and weren't searching on Google. Um, and so for that reason, yeah, we, we qualify our conversions with our customers within a four month window only. So anything outside of a four month window is gravy. That's awesome. We'd love to see our customers convert that, but that's usually more a testament to their follow-up abilities than it is to our lead gen. And so when we're looking at conversions, we are only interested in how many of these leads are converting inside that four month window from when the lead was generated. Okay. And, and what is, I know it varies quite a lot, but is there an average conversion ratio on a Google versus Facebook? Yeah, I mean, the variations are going to be, are going to be wild. And so what I would say is that somebody who's bought into the, to the system that, that we implement because we control so many variables through automated follow-up and conversion coaching and stuff like that. I think Brett can, can speak to what his numbers are like, but two to four percent is what we would expect to see. We have some customers that have seen upwards of five percent for an extended period of time, but those guys are typically spending the minimum recommended ad spend and just going all in on it to get those, five deals, three to five deals that they're looking to get versus somebody who wants to scale it up a little bit and use it as just a supplement in their business is going to see more like that two to three percent range. And, and some of our customers have even seen less than that. I think Brett, when we first, when we first talked about increasing his ad spend, probably a year ago, he was looking at like one and a half to two percent. And, and when we talked, there was a lot more interest in how do I scale this up than how do I get a higher percentage of conversion because that's just what made sense to his business model. So different loan officers are going to have different ideas for that. Some loan officers are all about scale. How big can I blow this up and those guys are going to be more comfortable with a lower conversion rate, which will lead to them focusing their activities on things that are lower conversion higher scale, whereas some loan officers want to squeeze every last, last penny that they can out of their marketing dollars, they've invested and are going to focus their activities that way and see a higher conversion rate. I should jump in there too quick Jeff on the conversion part of it because we spent a lot of time before we had talked to Michael and implemented some automation where I had a, a loan partner on my team. He was physically calling every one of these leads every single night before he left. He would hit the phones and it was, it was definitely a burnout type of a situation. So my recommendation is you need to 100 percent need to automate the initial follow-up and I know Michael would set that up for for anyone listening, but you automate the initial follow-up and then when they engage with you, that's where you customize and spend your time trying to convert them from asking questions to take an application to obviously closing their loan. So we've done a lot of the automated follow-up on our end. You know, Michael's hit on that too, our pull-through rate could be higher, but we don't want to spend man hours working internet leads, you know, that's really not what we're about. So only talking to people that want to talk to us has been huge. We've implemented some videos where we've had some kind of evergreen or can type responses based on the parameters they fill out on the lead form. That goes out to them, you know, the appearances that we've spent a lot of time analyzing their form when in reality, we recorded, you know, maybe 30 videos one time and the system just kind of reads what to send out. So videos have been huge, you know, put in video in there, customizing what we can, knowing your numbers on that and then just automating what you can. So what's again, back to I guess the timeline question, right? I know we've kind of touched on this with a Facebook thing in that it's, you know, Facebook is an intent base. Nobody really goes on Facebook to search for homes. It just happens to show up in their feed or somebody buys a home, their friend or whatever, you know, and I mean all that stuff. What is the kind of average timeline you see on somebody, right, clicking on your Google PPC ad, getting into your funnel? And again, I know for things very, but in general, right? I mean, we're looking at like 90 days, four months, is that where you have that window there? I was going to say right at about 90 days, if I had to guess and I don't have the numbers in front of me, but we'll get the ones that are, they found a property, they need to get pre-approved, you know, they're going right away. We've got others that are, you know, four to six months, we end up closing them, but really that 90 days, correct me if I'm wrong, Michael, but that's kind of how you measure a lot of that too, or maybe 120 days, but it's on 90, I would say it would be the average for what we're seeing. Yeah, and I ask that because from what I hear from people I've talked to on the Facebook side is, and we kind of talked about this, but it's quite a bit longer on the face, and I don't know, does it all come back to intent? I personally, I think that's exactly what it boils down to. I mean, like, some of it's going to be intent and then some of it's going to be quality of the leads. I mean, at the end of the day, and what I mean by that is like their qualifications, right? So which also can be kind of tied into intent as well. I mean, it all kind of ties together, but on Facebook, like I said, if you generate somebody that does qualify, well, the intent wasn't there in the first place, versus if you generate that lead on Google and they do qualify, they're hot, they're ready to go. I think Brett can speak to us to this. Like he said, I mean, you're never going to get a lead on Facebook where they've identified a property, and they're looking to get pre-approved. That's never going to happen on Facebook, because that's not because, and I mean, I shouldn't say never, maybe one in a million chances that happening because they run across the right out at the right time. Whereas what we see on the Google side, we see Facebook situations all the time where somebody will, somebody is renting a home from their landlord and their landlord told them that they're going to put it on the market, but that they want to give them first dibs. And so the first thing they're doing is going to Google to find out how much house they can qualify for to see if they can buy it. They click on our ad, the loan officer responds, they figure out they can't get approved, and they're submitting an offer two days later. That's just not something, those kind of scenarios, while they're not extremely common, they're going to bring down that average close time quite a bit. And those are the types of scenarios that, like I said, I mean, barring some crazy statistical anomaly, you're just not going to see on Facebook. What are the types of ads that you're seeing that are working on Google or Andor? Are you choosing the ad copy based on the type of client you want to attract? To be honest with you, we go pretty generic with the ads. We're not, I mean, we will run some experiments where, for example, we have a client that claims to be a VA loan specialist, right? And so he'll close any loan, but he really likes VA loans. I think there's a lot of loan officers out there that would say the same thing. So we'll run some VA-related ads in his account to supplement or even to prioritize over the existing ads that we're running. But the thing is, is what we've been able to identify is that even companies like Veterans United, who market 100% of veterans, and I don't even know if they write loans aside from VA loans, if we type in how much house can I afford? On Google, Veterans United will typically show up in the top four with an ad that has nothing to do with VA loans whatsoever. And so when we look and we see stuff like that, we see that the more general approach of just positioning ourselves to answer whatever question that they asked on Google is the most effective way to generate the lead. So again, that question almost always is going to revolve around specific qualification questions or general qualification questions. So specific would be down payment, credit score, income, etc. And people are literally typing in to Google, I make $90,000 a year and have a $670 credit score. How much house can I qualify for? We see those types of searches all the time. In fact, 95% of the leads that we generate are one in done as far as search firms go, meaning they're unique searches that have never been searched before and come through our lead funnel. And so for example, that one off, I make $90,000 a year and have a $674 credit score or whatever, how much do I qualify for? Well, we may have one lead that search that specifically and nobody will ever search that exact search term ever again, they'll just search some other variation of it. And so when we see that that's the trend and when we see that that's the case, we know that our best bet is to position our ads as, hey, here's a resource for you to get your mortgage questions answered or here's a resource for you to see how much house you can qualify for or how much house you can comfortably afford. Yeah, so are you deciding who to serve your ad up to based on the key words, the search terms that they punch in? Yeah, so more so, more so the opposite actually, what we're doing is we're casting a pretty broad, a pretty wide net, but what we do is every month we're, well, more often than that up to this point, but now we've got it dialed in pretty good to where we're doing it once a month or so. We're going back and we're reviewing the search terms that led to leads and we're making sure that we use what Google calls negative keywords to identify keywords that we absolutely do not want to show up in our searches. So that way is what allows, that doing it that way is what allows us to capture all of those one off like crazy search terms that you would never be able to identify. Specifically, I want somebody who searches for this by casting a broader net and then just making sure that we kick out, for example, we have a negative keyword for every credit score under 580. So we literally, we literally went from 300 to 579 and included every single number in that range as a negative keyword. So if somebody searches, I have a 560 credits for how much house can I qualify for? Our clients ads aren't showing up for that. So, so negative keyword management. I mean, we have a list of over a thousand negative keywords where we've said if the keyword, if the search includes this, even if it pertains to what we're bidding on, we don't want to be in contention for it. And I think that's a big part of what allows us to be super competitive on the Google search side is that actively managed strategy where we're identifying the words that we absolutely do not want to include, instead of trying to guess and poke and stab at the words that people are searching for. Sure, plus those are lower cost to get those as well, right? Yes. Because they're less competitive. Like if you said earlier, like if I'm going to search for how much house can I afford, that's one of the most competitive search turns there are. So the odds of us winning that as an average Joe L.O. We're not going to beat the veterans United of the world or the others. Well, yes and no. I mean, we definitely see a lot of volume coming through there. We just have to pay more for that volume, which means if our average lead cost is 750 to 10 bucks a lead, that might be a keyword that is a good high intent keyword, but we're paying 12 to 13 bucks a lead for it. Instead Google, there's a really common misconception when it comes to Google that Google is just selling ads to the highest bidder, but that's really it's not the case. Google has become the number one search engine in the world, not by pandering to the highest bidder, but by being obsessed with user search experience. And so part of that is rotating ads, getting local ads in when you've got national companies like Quick and Loans and Lending Tree bidding on a national campaign. If we can manage an individual campaign at the South Dakota level, well, we're automatically going to be more competitive for that than a Quick and Loans or a Veterans United all else equal. So there's a lot of factors that go into that. I wouldn't say, I mean, you're really common, like you're really common high cost keywords are going to be like mortgage rates today or something like that. But a lot of that comes from a misunderstanding of what user search experience is and not because there's so many people bidding on those keywords that more has to do with restricted search volume, meaning lower people less people searching for those keywords, than it does more people bidding for those keywords. If that makes sense. Yeah, I'm curious how much of your targeting is based on local. Like, you know, what I'm reading is that the growth of near me, people adding that to search terms is really exploding. And I'm wondering, like, if it's a near like Sioux Falls or whatever, are you guys incorporating that in your strategy? So the way that we the way that we limit locality, it doesn't necessarily have to do with the user's search so much as it has to do with their actual location. So at the moment, they're searching based on an address or geo locating. Yep, yep, exactly. And the reason why is because like the near me thing, for example, well, yeah, if somebody is looking to, if somebody is looking to start working out at a gym and sign up for a new gym membership, well, they're going to add near me to their search, obviously, right? Well, 10 to 15 years ago, if somebody had mortgage-related questions, they might search best mortgage lenders near me or best mortgage lenders in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. They might search for something like that. Whereas nowadays, we live in an age, I call it the age of WebMD, where people are more interested in having their symptoms diagnosed online than they are actually talking to a doctor, which is why those keywords like mortgage lenders or best mortgage companies in Sioux Falls, those keywords aren't the way to generate leads online and aren't the keywords that the best companies are bidding on is because that's not what people actually search for anymore. What they're actually searching for is again, those qualification-related questions. And so nobody's going to search how much house can I qualify for in Sioux Falls, right? Or maybe they maybe they do, and if they do, we'll be in contention for that. That's fine, but typically when they're asking those kind of questions, they're asking them from a standpoint of mortgage, like trying to understand better, like the qualifications for getting a mortgage and not necessarily wanting to talk to a loan officer that's directly in their locale. Hmm. Interesting. Do you think that changes for a real estate agent? For example, like real estate agent near me? Yeah, I do. I don't fit. And honestly, your your PVC campaigns for real estate are not typically going to be oriented around real estate agent near me. A lot of the times, that's going to stem from people homes for sale near me, and then inquiring through an IDXI or a Zillow or something like that and ultimately becoming a lead for that reason. I think that the search, the trend in search is exists on the real estate side as it does on the mortgage side where people don't necessarily search for a real estate agent to talk to. They search for real estate related searches and then get intercepted and a quality salesperson converts them into ultimately being a deal for them. All right, so this is here's a self-serving question. I like to occasionally play around with these keyword research tools. Yeah, I know the Google got one and all that kind of stuff, but one that I like, I think lately anyways, is Neil Patel's Uber Suggest. I don't know if you've seen that, but so I just happened to type in right here like homes for sale near me. And so this is obviously got surge volume for I think the last 30 days or something. But how can my, you know, me as a listener as a loan officer, if I want to even if I'm producing content, right? I want to maybe get some, you know, show up in, you know, local content or whatever. How can I better understand how to the search term thing? How can I better understand the types of content or things that people are looking for so that I can let's just say produce content around those things that are searched more often? Yeah, I think, I mean, I think your keyword research tools are going to be solid, but but what they're not going to encompass is those one-off searches that we talked about. So really, I mean, this for it's tough for us to say because they're tough for me to say because we found it like we figured this out almost on accident, right? What happened was I like I didn't necessarily understand when I first built my first Google ads campaign as a loan officer three years ago, I didn't necessarily understand the difference between broad match phrase match and exact match, which we won't necessarily dive into, but basically it determines the level at which the search has to match what you're bidding on. I didn't understand that. So all of my keywords were broad match. Well, it wasn't until a couple months down the road that I realized holy crap, the keywords that I'm bidding on are not necessarily what they're searching for. They're just categorizations of the searches. So I found this function within Google called search terms, and then that's where it told me exactly what people are searching for. And the only reason that we know so much about search behavior is three years of data pouring in, pouring over those results. Like I said, I tried the keyword search tools. I tried specifically Google's keyword planner. I don't know. Three years ago, I didn't know if Neil Patel, so I didn't try that, but there's another, I think word stream has one or something. There were a couple of the couple keyword research tools that I use. And those keyword research tools didn't really help me help us help me and help our company arrive at the conclusions that we've arrived at through three years of data. I would say more than anything, just understand, understanding the age we're in. I think that this conversation alone for a long after that's interested in this. If you really take this conversation to heart and don't brush it off, it's just a podcast conversation. If you're interested in targeting through SEO or PPC, and you really listen to what we're saying here, and how people search on Google and the fact that if somebody wakes up in the morning and they're bleeding from the ears, they no longer search for the closest doctor to talk to. They type their symptom in the WebMV and try and get WebMV to tell them what's wrong with them. If you truly internalize that, then you'll start to understand what it is, the kind of content that you should be producing or the kind of ads that you should be running. How do you address the perception? Maybe it's my perception. Maybe it's based on just kind of general noise out there that succeeding with Google PPC is expensive. That's the only way we've been able to do it up to this point. We can show we typically on a demonstration, if we've got somebody that says, hey, I was told that you can't do this unless you have this much to invest. I mean, there was a book that was released a couple years ago that was really popular among people that were marketing and mortgage that said specifically like outright, if you don't have at least $3,000 a month in Google PPC, don't bother. I mean, the best thing that we can do, I mean, I started this system on 700 bucks a month and our minimum recommended ad spent for our clients is 750 a month and for that, they expect to receive 75 to 100 leads. So the best thing that I could say is results. I mean, as far as understanding why behind the results, I would just backped a little bit to some of the things that we've talked about earlier in the call, the fact that Google doesn't necessarily want a painter to the highest bidder, search volume and not the number of bidders for a keyword is going to drive the cost more. So I just did a demonstration when the couple of loan officers out of a major mortgage company that you're very familiar with just had a call with them and they showed me their Google ad to count and they were paying an average of like $6.50 to $7 bucks a click. We've got loan officers that have been with us for four or five months that have never have never had a 30 day period where they paid more than that per lead. So our average cost per click is going to set somewhere around the $50 bucks 60 category and Google does not have like a minimum threshold as far as how much you have to spend to be able to get those kind of results. So that's the best that I could do other than showing the results because it's lip services lip service. I would add to that too guys. I've always heard the expression from a famous mortgage coach that we're not selling pencils here. If we close a mortgage loan and we've got $5,000 that we've netted for revenue and you look at what we spent to drive that business in the door. I mean you can take some time and kind of find two things but after 90 days I mean with Michael it was hey we've closed X we spent Y we should keep doing this and that's you know ultimately I think it's hard to want to invest money you know especially going into maybe the perceived slower time of year or you're already too busy you don't have time to do you know this much more but if you look at what you can spend and what what it could net you at the end and those numbers make sense and I go back to knowing your numbers because I'm guilty of this as well we spent you know a ton of of of funds on other avenues and at the end of the day we broke even well nobody wins in that scenario so just echoing I guess what Michael said if you look at what you spend what you close say 90 days in us it was a no-brainer but it's going to be a little different for everyone every market's going to be a little different so tracking that I can't emphasize that enough is a big key to it. Can you tell us a little bit about the process I mean I'm pretty familiar with how it works on Facebook in terms of somebody clicking on an ad right the channels or the funnel they go through on that does it differ at all on using Google? Not much to be honest with you I mean it's going to like you the big difference is going to be that your ads are going to look like native search results so when you search on Google you're going to see you know typically you'll see three to five at the top of the page that have a little the only identifiers that they say the word ad next to it. So those are what we would call native ads that's that's going to be the key difference in my opinion is that they're native within those are results that they're already pouring through. Outside of that you're going to click on you know just like anything or just the other channel they're going to click on that ad and then they're going to go to a landing page and then from that landing page we're going to pull them through a lead form redirect and do a thank you page and dump the dump the lead into an automated follow-up system. So I think it's pretty similar other than on Facebook you do have that lead ad functionality and Google is starting to roll this out too I'm not sure how effective it's going to be I honestly won't dabble with it until we see some bigger players dabbling with it but on Facebook you have that option where if somebody clicks on the call to action instead of taking them to a landing page it like pre-filled their information name email address phone number whatever which again it sounds great as far as driving your cost per lead down but it just removes an extra layer of intent that we kind of want those leads to have in order to in order to quantify it as a good lead. So speaking of that are you then purposely driving people through you know kind of that question air lead lead funnel process where you ask them several questions which is kind of like an intent qualifier process for you. Yes yeah exactly and I mean there's a couple different reasons that we do that but the number one reason is going to be because we've identified that all of the companies that are really good at this on a high level are doing it and so we're just going to do our best to model what they're doing. Yeah it's what the big boys are doing. Exactly. So then the post opt in if you will add click process it involves the multiple mediums like it would on Facebook right you're going to be texting people putting a call in the cycle at some point emailing and then you know most of that's going to be automated but obviously some of the outbound might might be just what pick it up the phone or if you automate it all that. We've automated it all I know talking to Michael there's clients of his that have you know pounded the phones and they're they're probably getting a higher pull-through rate for us and what we're doing we wanted to automate as much of it as we can so we are really not corresponding with these leads unless they're reached out and talking to us so I would say the majority of them probably 90% if I had to guess would respond via text I get quite a few emails as well that's probably 80% text 10% email 10% phone call as far as response. You mentioned video earlier how are you delivering those videos in that touch process. So I use bomb bomb and a lot of it goes out automatically via text. Okay so it's a text bomb I'm not an email. Right and then if I need to customize something for them a little bit rather than exchanging emails I'll do a quick video and just walk them through basically what they spelled out on their form hey you're looking to buy a you know $300,000 home your first time home buyer that's great it's like you've got 5% to put down you know credit scores look great and you know just giving them a little bit of a personalized attention which takes me maybe a minute and then you know taking the conversation from there. So obviously there's a CRM involved here right Michael and I'm just curious so you guys have your own that you use or you or maybe Brent you have your own how does that work in terms of clients can they use both you know pretty much every any CRM. Yeah so this is my only only hesitancy about bringing Brent on the show is that Brent is our leverage our the only one I promise but no it was Brent doesn't leverage the CRM that we use Brent but Brent also has been sending a lot of money on this for a long time and as a happy return of customer when he when we first started we did not have our systems dialed in to the level that we do now so it's just always made 10% for Brent to stick with what he's doing he still is doing all the channels that we're doing we just have our we just use a white label version of an agency software where it makes it really really easy for us to toggle between our clients as well as it's really really easy for our clients who have who have zero technology background to manage and view all of the leads and all the interactions within the same place so the toggling is important because the one-on-one coaching that we provide for our clients that to help them move the needle on their conversion if we have you know we have 65 loan officers across the country that are working the same system and 64 of them are all using the same CRM thanks Brent no I'm just getting 64 of them are all using the same CRM what we're able to do is we're able to identify those loan officers that are converting at a high level and look at what it is that's going on and and how they're conversing and depending on their settings we could even listen on their on listening in on some of their phone calls and and provide some coaching and feedback for the loan officers that maybe aren't converting as well or didn't have any experience coming into it so yeah we use a white label version of an agency software I won't even drop the name of the agency software just because it's only available to agencies we brand ours as Empower Contacters there's a few other agencies out there that have something very very similar or the same but the point is it just needs to be a place where not only can you manage the the initial interaction that automated follow-up but also being able to track that lead through the pipeline at the point that that lead has engaged and having a really easy place to see what all those conversations have looked like and then ultimately where they went in the pipeline and whether or not they closed well it's a pretty strong case for his CRM their brand oh that's awesome okay so what's your general we've got to wrap this up here for sake of time I know you guys are busy but for those that you know are evaluating or considering any like things that they need to be aware of and how does how does a loan officer know whether or not they're ready to test out Google ads I think I think I don't think any loan officer really should be test or should be playing with it with themselves I mean we do have a free resource on our website the three steps to Google ads it's about as black and white as you can get as far as hey here's how you could build this build this out yourself and dabble with it yourself problem is is just you can spend so much energy and time doing that and not necessarily save any money at the point that you now have to dial in those ads and you're spending 20 bucks a lead incentive seven bucks a lead up front that sort of thing so I think I think there's a monetary there's a monetary side of it you have to be prepared to spend five to eight hundred dollars per closed loan and you should probably be prepared to invest that much like time three on a monthly basis so you should probably be prepared to invest fifteen hundred to two grand a month that's not because you can't do less than that on Google ads but that's because I got I we have to make some money too obviously so it's you know combination of those two things so that would be one thing that's the monetary side of it but on the flip side of that like you just in my opinion you have to have the mindset very similar to what Brent had when he was talking about earlier where he just wanted he just wanted a system where it was money in and money out he didn't necessarily have a perfect bit like this crystal clear vision of exactly what he wanted his business to look like and exactly what mark you what percentage of his business he wanted from what marketing channels he just knew that if he that he wanted to be able to find a marketing channel where if I invest this much and this much time I can expect to see this out the end the reason that's important is because our best clients are going to be very very coachable our best clients are going to understand that a real to referral is not going to convert anywhere near the same way as an internet lead we we do things like secret shopping the biggest consumer direct mortgage companies out there to identify one of the best practices for converting leads and and if you're talking about fielding a referral from a real estate agent versus working that internet lead those two strategies are going to be entirely different so the loan officer has to be coachable and understand that the way that they've worked the business up to this point of the way that they've worked leads up to this point may not align with the best practices for converting the leads and so if you can if you're ready to let go of whatever you feel like those best practices are whatever you feel like you want your business to look like and just plug into a system that's what I would say is what ultimately determines our our best fit for us specifically on the oh god sorry you say I'll add to you know we're we're talking you know Michael saying maybe two to three percent you know close ratio of 100 leads so that means you've got to be prepared for things like you know Mickey Mouse at Yahoo dot com people telling you to get lost or you know worse than that you've got to expect that if you've got 100 leads you might only get applications on say 20 or 30 of them and maybe only two or three of them close but if you've got it where they're reaching out to you and you're just filtering through these that two or three loans at the end of the month is a lot better than zero and you know basically doing do nothing I guess is what I'm saying yeah well you said something early on that I happen to catch I didn't kind of highlight it there but if I heard you correctly this is just one of your pillars of business you obviously you still work with real estate agents really yep yep yeah I mean if you're gonna rely on this solely I never think you should put all your eggs into one you know one bucket right so having these leads to be able to hand out to agents that's huge you know we're not at a retail bank where we've got you know customers walking in the door that need a mortgage so we had to figure out other ways that we can generate business that we can refer out so that's been huge and then obviously the you know the lifetime value of a customer you could figure that out somebody way smarter than me could do that but that all plays into it and it's all you know positive ROI that you add on top of what you're seeing and Michael real quickly so you're point about the difference between a realtor lead or realtor referral and an online one I'm kind of reading between the lines there but I think what you're saying is that I'll just in simple terms it's easier to convert the referral than it is the online lead oh yeah one hundred percent I mean I like it if it's the different it's the difference honestly between being an an order taker and being a salesperson in the context of the leads obviously in order to get those realtor referrals you have to have been a salesperson with that realtor but selling to a realtor and selling to somebody you've never met that inquired on the internet that was just looking to get some questions answered online and they're just two completely different ball games and so that's why that's why we do everything we can to control as many variables as possible and provide that. It's a good point good point two different skill sets love it all right well listen gentlemen I know you're busy so let's wrap it up this way for each of you I'll start with you Brent in terms of anybody wants to connect with you where should we send them to connect with you if they choose to. Yeah definitely so we're basically relations in five states in the Midwest we're looking to grow that on the next couple of years here so if you're a loan officer and you would like to talk about the broker channel and maybe having some leads provided for you like we talked about today we'd love to have a conversation give you my input and feedback on the system I'd love to answer any questions and if it makes sense to talk further you know what we're doing we'd love to do that I'll give you my cell phone here and then feel free to hook up with me online as well but 605 400 9541 and feel free to to text your call me anytime and what about an online place you want a website email you can hit up our company website it's sodakhomelones.com there's a spot there you can connect with me as well got it sodakhomelones.com cool put that in the show notes and Michael how about for those who want to check out in power funnels and what you're doing yeah come on check out our website the call to action is going to be the schedule alive demonstration that's the best way for you to check out what we do either myself or one of our conversion specialists will walk you through exactly what we do how we do it if nothing else you'll leave much more educated than you came on hopefully that's mpowerfunnels.com you can always email me directly at Michael at mpowerfunnels.com if you have any questions best phone number reach me at my cell 2082782630 make sure is your book in these demos that you're that you're mentioning Jeff's podcast though we've got a special treat for you so cool yeah it is the season exactly exactly awesome all right well listen I appreciate you guys educating us today and I learned a lot in terms of like Google and you know took some of the mystery out of it and I think it definitely to your point about look at it if it's the right time for you in your business you've got like the you know budget to invest and I do mean invest and put at least minimum 90 days into that it's worthy to to test it out is another pillar of your business so appreciate you guys both being here thank you so you bet and listeners as always you know what to do if you like this episode or any of the others hey leave us a little love give us a review on the podcast and we'll see you on the next one bye for now thanks for listening to mortgage marketing radio one more truth in mortgage marketing get more free training and resources at mortgagemarketinginstitute.com hey guys what's up real quick you've heard about the mortgage marketing pro membership before and I just want to quickly remind you if that you're in a place in your business where you simply need more purchased loans you need to fill your pipeline with purchase business let's just face it agents are still a solid pillar of business and sources of purchase business for you well good news our mortgage marketing pro membership helps loan officers like you close more loans without the hassle of chasing agents or cold calling done for you agent classes expert training videos a marketing automation platform that automates the entire process for you everything you need to build your personal brand in your local market attract and convert agents into referral partners plus done for you proven marketing materials and plug and play content to make promoting your class getting agents butts and seeds partnering with affiliates real easy but that's not all you'll also get access to our weekly mastermind calls with top elbows authors speakers and coaches to learn the best strategies to grow your business right now in today's market and as an extra bonus for limited time for all new members you'll get access to a database of 200 agents in your local market that have closed anywhere to from eight to 50 transactions in the last 12 months and we'll provide that list uploaded to our platform for you so you can get off to a fast start in reaching actually productive agents so what are you waiting for you can check out more at mortgage marketing.pro see more of the success stories there and if you feel compelled to do so book a call we'll have a chat we'll see if it's a fit don't miss out on this opportunity to take your mortgage business to the next level right now head over to mortgage marketing.pro