Ep #24: How to Get More Customers from Google

In today's highly competitive mortgage industry, building profitable relationships with the 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. Chris 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. And brought to you by the Mortgage Marketing Institute, your number one source for truth in mortgage marketing. Hey listeners, Jeff Zimfer, your host of Mortgage Marketing Radio. Thanks for being here and tuning in for another episode. So today my special guest is somebody who I've admired for some time. And the reason why I've admired him is because I value authenticity and truth in mortgage marketing. As you know, that's kind of like my saying, right, it's truth in mortgage marketing. And that couldn't be said better for this individual. I don't think because Chris Johnstone is somebody who for years has been helping mortgage companies, mortgage professionals make sense of the ever changing world of digital marketing. So when you, when I say digital marketing, what do you think of it encompasses quite a lot, doesn't it? And there's always something changing. Always the rules are being mixed up and different algorithms or this or that. And while that is challenging and frustrating, the digital platforms today, we know we simply can't ignore the problem is oftentimes we need somebody to help us navigate and better understand how to really maximize the return on our effort and return on our investment in those various platforms, which includes things like social media marketing, right? Facebook, for example, ads, Google search engine optimization, search marketing, Google paid ads and so on and so forth. And what Chris does is really simplify everything and give you very specific research and facts with real world case studies and examples to support what he's talking about. So whether you want customers from your social marketing, you want customers from search, from paid traffic, you want to get better at referral targeting and marketing online. Chris has got answers and that's why I wanted to invite him here today. So he even actually has a special free website analysis that he's going to offer just for listing and tuning into this show and we've put a link to that in the show notes down below. So I took a ton of notes during this podcast and I encourage you to do the same thing as well because Chris will help you better understand how to make a sense of where you should put, depending on where you're at in your mortgage career and what your goals are, help you make sense of where you should put your focus and your dollars on the various digital marketing platforms. So he is the founder, CEO of Johnstone Digital Marketing. He's been a speaker and trainer at many different mortgage companies. I featured a published author in Scottsman's Guide and I think you'll really, really enjoy today's session. So without further ado, let's transition over to this week's show. Chris, welcome to the show. Thanks Jeff. It's great to be here. You know, it's great to have you. So I've been following you, watching you, consuming your content for some time and I'm really glad and thrilled to share you with our listeners because I think in this space of, you know, online digital marketing, things like that, there are, as you know, a lot of people that may not have the best intentions and may have some, how can I say it, maybe the source of the information is questionable. And what I've seen from you is, is that A, you do your research and you're very current and very, you know, relevant with what's going on right now. But even better than that is you specialize in the mortgage lending industry. So before we kind of unpack this whole digital marketing, you know, topic, I wanted if you would take a moment and share with our listeners, you know, there's obviously lots of markets you could be serving out there in terms of helping them with, with their search engine marketing, social marketing. How did you come to specialize or choose the lending industry? So great question. And so it certainly wasn't my background. So I'm, I'm a nerd, kind of by nature, it was kind of how I grew up. Hey, that sounds like a band from the 80s, nerds by nature. That's right. That's actually a good band for the future. There you go. So my background was initially in construction and, you know, working long hours and really kind of going through the manual labor process in building what I was doing. Long story short, my dad is a mortgage broker. So I got injured on the job and had to move back into basically my parents' house during that process. And I kind of had this epiphany moment that my dad was actually a really smart guy. You know, here he was. It is nice warm office with fresh coffee and great clients and having fun all day. And I was like, man, this is a complete opposite of what I do every day. And here he is, you know, living this beautiful life. So I thought, well, if he can do it, I can do it. And you know, being off the top of my head, it escapes me. But I was close to 21, maybe 22 years old when I went through that process. And I was like, okay, well, being young and somewhat naive, if he can do it, I can do it. I'm going to become entrepreneur and hang my shingle and business is just going to appear, right? Well, after the first two weeks, when my first paycheck didn't show up, I had this realization that, oh, man, there's this thing called sales. And if I'm going to be able to provide for myself, I'm going to have to vote and sell. So that led to months and months, close to years of just agonizing hard work on the rate sheets and donuts circuit driving around town, getting laughed at by real estate agents and all of the things that go along with that. You know, being, I didn't even shave at the time. So I would show up at a real estate office and, you know, give my pitch on, you know, you can trust your clients with me and basically, you know, come back in 10 years, kid. That's great. So, so the one thing that I had going for me at that point in my life was that I am an incredibly determined individual when I sent myself on something and with the support of my dad, I would not give up. And I find myself late at night on the computer using Google to research how to build a mortgage or real estate business. And I discovered an ebook by a guy named Jim Cochrome and changed my life. I still owe Jim to this day. He's, I recommend him to anybody that I get the opportunity to. He's just, he's got an incredible soul. He's an incredible man and he's very giving to the people that follow him. So I recommend that you look him up. What's the ebook, by the way? Do you remember the name? Oh, it escapes me now, but it was something along the lines of, you know, did you know you can sell things to people on Google or something? You know, I'm obviously that's not the real title, but it was something along those lines. And I downloaded it. It was at the very birth of Google AdWords, kind of when that was the Wild West. And the ebook was literally, hey, you can run an ad on the front page of Google. People will click on it and you pay Google per click. And so, well, again, long story short, we learned how to run Google ads, drive people to real estate based squeeze pages and basically buyers that were looking to purchase a home would input what it is that they were looking for along with all of their contact information hit submit. And that would be my lead. So we turned on our first paper click system and generated over 300 leads in our first month. And that was my first experience with online marketing. So way back then, I was carrying a blackberry, like 8820, one of like the first original brick blackberries. And by the end of the month, the side of my hip was sore because every time we would get a lead, it would buzz. And most of the time I was in my car, so I ended up with those little brews on my hip. But anyways, that changed my career going from the guy that was getting laughed out of offices to the guy that had an on-demand lead generation source that I could leverage for relationships and that I could direct market to. And I never look back. And so that's why I'm still in the mortgage industry and providing services because this industry has helped me grow a career. And in today, obviously, as I've gone through the evolutions and seasons of life, I have a family. I have two beautiful young children. My son just turned two. My daughter Emily is four months, I should say. And working together, we found this really nice position that we're in where I'm able to use my skill set to go into a mortgage business and solve a problem that most loan officers or mortgage professionals have in the fact that internet marketing is daunting. It changes really quick and it's hard to keep up with what's going on. And I'm lucky enough to have a decade of experience behind me where I can go in and make an impact. And they make more revenue than I charge them in fees and it's a win-win-win for everybody involved. So that's the story of how the evolution got us to this point. Yeah, yeah. Thank you for sharing that. And on that, I'm curious. Do you recall what the ads were that you ran on Google, meaning was it refi-focused and you recall any of kind of what the call to action there was? Oh, yeah. So straight purchase leads. So our top keywords were area name, home for sale, area name property for sale. And then area name, real estate area name property. So if we had like four keywords that performed the best out of all of the campaigns that we launched and we launched hundreds of them, those were kind of the top four key phrases. And the offer was custom list of all homes in your market. And then it was like BRBA price. I think it said at the end of it was our top performing advertisement. And literally people would land on a very ugly squeeze page. Just to clarify, BRBA means bedroom bath. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. And so obviously we would shorten them to fit them into these. And this is Google AdWords, right? Yeah. And so to bring everybody up to speed, Google AdWords is a giant in itself. The opportunities that we have inside Google AdWords right now in the agency side of the business that manages that is dealing with changes on a weekly basis. And certainly those funnels don't work today like they used to back then. You really do need a fully developed site user experience and content is very important. It's not as direct as it used to. And the keywords are much more expensive today than they were back then. You know, you'd be surprised. Google has this thing in the paper click market that gives you a score as an advertiser. And that score to put it into a nutshell is essentially calculated based on user experience. So as you drive traffic through a funnel, if you can show Google that a large portion of people click on your advertisements and you're writing good ads, they're staying on the website that you're driving them to and then converting on the offer that you're giving them. Google sees that as a high quality user experience. They enjoyed your advertisement. They stuck on the content that you showed them after they clicked on the ad and then ultimately converted on your offer, which tells Google that that person found the information that they were looking for through the advertisement. So when you achieve those things in a paid advertising campaign, Google wants to show you a head of other competitors that aren't writing advertisements that are as well performing as yours and giving a bad user experience. So you can actually get the number one paid spot on AdWords and pay less per click than the advertisers that are buying the traffic below you by being a good advertiser and maintaining your account properly and getting a good quality score as an advertiser with Google. Okay. Yeah, so there's a lot involved there and that's some of the work that you do at your company to help people do that and figure that out because that sounds a bit complex. Yeah, but we always educate our clients on the process as well so that they're learning of not just doing. Sure. Yeah, great. All right, so I had a big question for you and I told you this is kind of how I wanted to open up the conversation about digital marketing and this comes right off your website, which is cwjstone.com. And so when, you know, so there's a loan officer listening to this and we've got to put ourselves in their shoes as I know you do every single day because those are your clients. And so, you know, they, we've got so much time, right, personal bandwidth and money to allocate our resources. And so of the various digital places online, right, let's talk about kind of the big ones. We've got social marketing. I've got search engine marketing. I've got paid traffic marketing similar to what you just described. And then of course there's referral marketing, which is not, you know, could be a little bit of a lateral dotted line category, but where in your experience because you're working with these companies every day of those choices. If I'm a loan officer and it's like, look, man, I need to make some business happen in the next 90 days, where can I get my biggest? I know there's short-term and long-term focus, but you know, you know, you know where I'm heading. It's like where would you advise the loan officer to invest their time and money today? You know, if they're in the situation that I'm sure you see a lot of loan officers where they, hey, I don't have a lot of experience and how to do this be. I don't have a lot of time. Where do you direct people? So all right, great question, Jeff, and that speaks to the market definitely. So if it's okay, I'll break that answer down into two parts. And you mentioned it, short-term and long-term. So if you need deals in 60 days, the structure of that is a paid advertising campaign. The quality of lead generation that you are going to produce really does maintain on the network and how you're putting your message in front of the marketplace. So when you look at ads from social advertising, that is interruption marketing, in my opinion, at its finest. So Facebook feed, sponsored, type staff, right? Exactly. You're targeting people demographically and based on the interests that they have, the little bit of their browsing history and that kind of stuff, but you have to interrupt them while they're on a social network, doing something other than actively thinking about buying real estate or getting a loan or getting a refinance or whatever it is. So your ad needs to pop that person, interrupt them from what they're doing and be so compelling that you move them through your funnel as opposed to them watching, you know, funny social videos on a network where you take user experience and shift it over to search on a Google search engine. If you have somebody that sits down in front of a computer and does a search for loan officer in city name, you're not interrupting that person. That person is actively seeking for you and your products and services. So at that point, what you have to do is elevate yourself above the noise in the marketplace to be able to call that person to you. So the first part of the answer is if you've only got 60 days and you have to make money now, it's a paid advertising campaign. My first option would be Google AdWords or AdWords Express ads using your Google My Business page and we can talk about that if you'd like and then the secondary option would be social media advertising, but I would stay focused mainly on that paid search. If you're building a career and you're looking at this as how you're going to feed your family and your children and put them through school and, you know, then retire in a lifestyle that you deserve, paid is not the first option that you should go at. So think of, you know, we've all heard of the marketing funnel in our business. I'm very much focused on the maximum amount of results for the minimum amount of effort, right? Something that I've learned from Tim Ferris. So I've done a lot of really hard work in my career and now my main focus is spending time with my kids while also achieving my goals in business. So this whole, you know, maximum results, minimum effort thing has become very important to me. So if you look at your business that way, you say, okay, I'm going to go out and I'm going to get the most profitable low hanging fruit that I can get and then work my way down the funnel until I achieve my income goal. And the way that that funnel works at the very top is search marketing. So showing up organically on the front page of Google. So when that person sits down and searches for area name loan officer, you show up on the front page of Google, not with a paid advertisement, but with an organic placement that shows up on the front page. Now there is a caveat to this, search has changed in the last, well, six to seven months, but overall in the last two years because Google has gotten hyper focused on local search and showing local businesses and their ratings and reviews to the people that are looking for loan officers in that local marketplace. So Google My Business is a tool where you can get listed on the map tool on Google. Those listings show up on the front page of search when people put search phrases that have purchase intent. They used to show seven businesses in that map ranking. And now in today's marketplace, they only show three businesses that show up in that listing. And the ratings and reviews that are on those Google My Business places or pages show up in those rankings. And if you want the highest quality lead from online marketing with the highest closing ratio and the best quality leads as far as their credit score, their ability to get credit and close as a customer, that three pack ranking will bring you the most amount of results for the minimum amount of effort. So it takes an optimization campaign, which includes your website, monthly optimization online, and you going out and engaging your past client database and your current customer base to leave you those ratings and reviews. But in the marketplaces where we have clients that have become not only the top ranked option in that three pack, but the top rated option as far as having the most amount of ratings and reviews, it is a significant driver of business that changes the dynamics of how that loan business operates. And if there's one area to go after, that's the one. Now what that does is that fills up your funnel with high quality closings, those people become customers, that's when your social marketing comes into play. So when you look at Facebook marketing specifically, think of that source of leads as a referral mechanism and you're using Facebook not to just go cold into the marketplace and try and pull people that are interested in loans, but use it as a tool to make sure that you don't just get one referral from your past clients, use it as a tool so that you get two, three, four referrals from the people that are coming through your funnel. So search marketing and paid marketing exist at the top of the funnel to drive the customers to closing because that's where you're going to get your highest return on investment. After that, your social marketing campaign generates referrals so that the lifetime customer value of those customers goes up and becomes more profitable for you. And that's how I would structure every campaign. If somebody came to me with a clean slate and said, build the whole thing, that's exactly how I would roll it out. And just a moment while this is on my mind here, in terms of past database marketing, are you seeing that as kind of separate in what you're doing over EML and newsletters or whatnot or are you somehow tying that into your Facebook strategy? So we use Facebook ads specifically to target the database of past clients. So Facebook has a tool called Custom Audiences. And you can upload a list of names, phone numbers, and e-mail addresses to Facebook and show ads to just those people. So we write advertisements that are reminders of quality service. They include customer testimonials and a call to action on, don't forget our business that depends on your referrals, don't forget to refer us business. So at least once a month, each of your past clients is being reminded when they log into Facebook that you're in the business of referrals. So let me ask you this, why would one do that versus the traditional picking up the phone kind of thing, and doing the more traditional kind of past database marketing, which is usually those types of activities, e-mail, phone, that kind of jazz? So I'm very big on, there's no one way to do anything, but I do truly believe that the more irons you have in the fire, the better result that you will get. And the only true way to scale your business is to measure what you're doing. So it's my belief that you should call your database at least once a quarter. You should have a monthly newsletter that goes out, whether that's print or digital, that's kind of up to you. And you should have some form of referral mechanism that happens at closing where everybody's compliance is going to be different. We're talking to people from all over North America here, everybody has different compliance guidelines. But within your compliance, you should have some type of offer that you can then refer to back over time to get every single customer that you close to send you more business. You just add the Facebook marketing on top of it because it just brings you back to top of mind and helps what you've already done. Well, better. So a question on the Facebook custom audience is you're uploading a list of your past database. And Facebook is then able to serve those relevant ads to those specific people. Do you advise including people who like those pages of those past database clients of yours so that you can get additional exposure to people that already know those people essentially? So it doesn't work exactly like that. You can do friends of friends, but what I would recommend doing rather than that is I would use Facebook as another tool that's called a look-alike audience. Yeah. So it's good. Yeah. So you can upload that database and say, okay, Facebook, target the 1% of people on Facebook that match who the average user is in this database. Now those look-alike audiences, I would use a direct-to-market approach. So I would use an actual mortgage-based advertisement to advertise to those people to bring them into the business because you technically can't advertise a referral offer to somebody that hasn't done it. Okay. Think of that out loud. I was thinking, hey, if I'm already serving these ads up to my past database clients, is there any way to serve that ad up to people that they're friends with on Facebook is what I ultimately would be the goal? Yeah. Exactly. And that's a great idea. All right. So let me go back to something you talked about earlier, which is somebody types in Denver Loan Officer, Irvine Loan Officer, and the intent is to come up there. And I asked you this before, I think, and I'm sure hopefully I'm thinking some of the listeners are wondering, well, how many people are actually sitting down in front of a computer typing and like Denver Loan Officer, especially knowing that traditionally we're somewhere in the middle of that funnel when that prospective home buyer is ready to engage with the Loan Officer? So forgive me if I don't get these numbers bang on, but there was a study done by Accenture, which is the big consulting agency. And in 2015, they found that 23%, I think it was, I'm within a couple of percent of you. I'm reading your article on Scotsman's Guide that you just published, which is a nice tie-in here, rank high to be found online. That's exactly what it says, published just a few days ago on Scotsman. So yeah, you're right. 23%. Go ahead. Okay. Awesome. Thank you. So 23% of U.S. consumers who applied for a mortgage in the previous year, so 2014, did so through the internet. So if you look at any given marketplace, I mean, that has a population base of over 100,000 people, over 20% probably closer to 30% now, because that studies over a year old, of those loans are happening online, almost 100% digitally. They're going online to do all of their research. They're finding the professional that they're going to use through that research. And statistically speaking, over 80% of those people are going to choose who they're going to give the first shot at that business, but by reading online ratings and reviews. So look at, and just a very quick way to determine that, just Google how many homes were sold in your marketplace in the last year, figure out what 23% of that total is, and that will give you a rough estimate of how much volume you have to take a shot at by being on the front page of Google with more ratings and reviews than your competitors. It's a staggering number. Right. So I've been doing a little test while we're walking through this, and I've noticed some different results come up, for instance, so I'm in Southern California here, and it's it may be a matter of just semantics and using the right words. For instance, if I type in Irvine loan officer, I pretty much get the usual stuff, meaning loan officer jobs. Actually, there is a yellow link here to best loan officers in Irvine, so I don't know if that's relevant. But then I change it, and I type in Irvine home loans, and then I'm getting some more specific kind of like what you talked about earlier, showing actual companies with the Google map, et cetera. Any comments on that? Oh, yeah, so this is amazing, and I mentioned that there's been some pretty significant changes in the last six to seven months. So the way that the Google search engine works right now is unbelievable, and hopefully this is new information for your listeners, because in my experience, a lot of people don't know this, but Google has started using artificial intelligence to return search results to people. And through all of the data that they've been able to capture over the years, and watching that data flow convert on websites, Google is now able to figure out what purchase intent is. And what I mean by that is they can tell when somebody is looking for news, and they can tell when somebody is looking to get a loan today. So if you take the example, so Irvine loan officer, that may be somebody that's looking for a job as a loan officer in that city, right? So Google is going to take information that would be relevant to that specific person, and try and show as many search results to give that person what they want. Now when you do a search that has actual purchase intent, where Google has statistically seen that those are leading to leads and leading to purchase, they'll show the map to that person that's doing searches with the ratings and reviews and testimonials from those people that are in the local marketplace. So if you think about that from our perspective, it's made online marketing so much easier because this artificial intelligence robot is essentially out there picking through the customers for you. All you've got to do is show Google that you're the top professional in your marketplace that deserves that business. And they'll literally weed through the pool of online searchers and bring the highest quality leads and people that are ready to convert right now to your funnel and get them to call you. It's an incredible advancement. They've done a phenomenal job with it and the results that we're seeing by putting loan officers in front of that traffic is just tremendous. I mean, and please excuse me, I get excited about this stuff. I've got, I got a mortgage broker in in Burlington, Ontario here. He was ranked in the top 50 mortgage brokers in the country before we started working with him and we helped him drive almost 100 mortgage transactions in a year through this specific funnel. So it's it's equating to volume and we know that. Yeah. It's interesting. I'm playing around with the terms a little bit. Home loans and Irvine. What's interesting is that I'm definitely seeing the intent that Google is recognizing and showing this map when my words that I type in is more clearly the intent is me obtaining a home loan versus what appears to be loan officer in Irvine. They're perceiving that as more of a job hunt, like you said. Now what's interesting is with my little experiment that I'm doing here, the same three companies with the maps, you know, have always come up out of like the last three or four searches that I've done. So somehow they're dominating, you know, showing up there. Yes. Yeah, absolutely. And that is that is what I call local search optimization. So in Google's advancement, they are trying to figure out who the most reputable businesses are in each local marketplace. And if you think about it, it's a herculean task because they're doing this for every single industry. It's not just the loan industry. It's people that are buying every single product under the sun. Now what's interesting is, so me as just a consumer, putting my consumer hat on. So I see these guys, they're towards the top of the page, and they've got the map there, which is cool, and it gives a nice visual experience. And then further down, there's well, there's Zillow on there, but there's a couple others. There's a Yelp. There's like a monster-loan Pacific homeless. But what I'm getting at is I feel more inclined to naturally pick those that are a little bit more higher up on the page, but the fact about that showing that local map for me, it just makes me feel more compelled to just focus there versus anywhere else. I'm assuming you find that to be true. Oh, absolutely. And the ratings and reviews are what are going to catch somebody's eye. So Google will also feature other online review sites like Zillow, for example. But that person has to go to a secondary network to go read ratings and reviews, and let's face it. They're crunched for time, and the majority of them are going to take those reviews that are showing up already on the front page of Google, call those companies first. If they don't like the user experience, they go back to the search and keep working down the list. So again, it's like taking that low-hanging fruit or cherry picking, as long as you have your systems in place, and you're able to effectively manage the volume that comes from it, it's Google's done a great job. So speaking of ratings and reviews, how can we, let's talk about, I know those are important to you. A couple of questions in that. Number one is, how do we get those ratings and reviews to show up in that Google local search ranking that we just kind of talked about, right, Google my business? And then secondly, are there any particular platforms you like when it comes to social reviews and rankings? So more great questions. Thank you. Well, thank you, Jeff. So you need to Google my business page, and you go to business.google.com. You can sign up. It's a free tool. And that's what shows up on that map listing, and that's where you get the ratings and reviews. So once you get your profile, they'll either verify your location via postcard or over the phone. For some accounts, you register it, optimize it by making sure that you got your photos on there, and they give you a little bar that shows you when you get to 100% when it's optimized properly. And then you drive people to that specific page in order to leave you a rating and review. One thing that all of our listeners should know is that people need a Google account, so they need a Gmail account in order to be able to leave a rating and review on that platform. So there are people out there that think that it's difficult to get Google my business reviews because people need a Gmail account. But I can tell you, even if only 10% of your happy customers make it to that channel to leave you an online rating and review, it is certainly worth the time and the effort because it's a long-term business asset that you're building that just continues to work for you once you've got it set up. So that's the process behind it. Now, as far as systems and software and that sort of thing, I still like hard work. I believe that you should do that. There's that construction background. Right? So you need to call people, follow up with them, make sure that they do leave you that rating and review. One thing that I've seen some people in our done for you package do is work it in at the very beginning of the loan process. So when you're sitting down with them and saying, here's what I'm going to do for you and setting the expectation of the transaction, they're saying, I'm agreeing that I'm going to get you the best rate, the best terms, I'm going to be professional, you're going to know what's going on the entire time. And can you agree that if I do all of those things and we provide a successful transaction for you that at the end of the process, you'll go on my Google My Business page and leave me a five-star review? Making them make the commitment to you up front that they'll do something in the future, we have seen pretty much every time that we've launched that, that the actual compliance at the end, there's a lot more people that will leave those reviews because they've already committed to doing it at the beginning of the process. Now I have seen one piece of software out there, it's called Social Survey and they are doing a great job of integrating with databases. So when a loan closes, they automatically send out a survey and if the survey results are positive, then they send the follow-up to the client to leave the five-star rating and review on that service. So I really like the workflow the company has been fantastic to work with. So all good things. But again, if you get into the nitty-gritty of Google's terms and conditions, they state that you are not allowed to actively promote getting ratings and reviews on your profile. So the Social Survey works great. Oh, Google, still trying to control the world. I know, right? That Facebook does it too and it's a known, I mean, come on, we're business builders, right? There's always a half-medium. Yeah, it's interesting. So speaking of Social Survey, I had them on the podcast several weeks back and yeah, so no Craig, no Scott over there. So if anybody missed that episode, you want to check it out. It's mortgagemarketinginstitute.com forward slash 16, that was episode 16. So that's it, it was a great talk we had with Scott and Craig over there about Social Survey. So very interesting. Okay, so we're getting a little bit close to the end of our time. I want to make sure that I take a moment to talk about referral marketing. When I say referral marketing, I mean to, you know, how can I capture more real estate agents? And so let me set this up. What I mean by that is I, what are your thoughts or do you have any experience on how a loan officer could would or should use Facebook to target and perhaps create a funnel for realtors, right? To be able to begin those referral relationships to add value, build trust, all that kind of stuff. Anything you see there? So from a referral marketing perspective, again, Facebook ads give you an incredible opportunity to put the right message in front of the right market at the right time. So you can run a Facebook ad and in the settings, when it says interest and you're plugging those in, you just type in real estate and a number of different options under real estate will come up and one of them will say jobs or something along those lines. And when you select that category, you are advertising only to people that have listed that their job is real estate inside Facebook. So you can run a campaign that just shows advertisements to real estate professionals and show an advertisement that talks about your standards of service, your happy past customers, and your ability to answer their questions quickly easily when they're in a crunch. So we normally cycle four or five different advertisements through a campaign like that that talk about four or five different unique value propositions that you bring to the marketplace. And what it allows you to do is build this very big brand presence with a very small targeted campaign on Facebook. Yeah. In your local geo, whatever you set in the face, yeah, so Irvine, for example, if I wanted to target all the real estate agents in Irvine, I could do that and start generating some campaigns where I'm sharing content, maybe reports, videos, right, all that stuff to kind of build my platform. Exactly. And one thing that we've seen gain really good traction is sponsoring content or advertising content that the real estate professional can then share out to their community of clients. So if you kind of put your hat on and think, okay, if I was the content director for a real estate company, what would a real estate agent really want to share? So great news about what's happening in the marketplace, statistics, stuff that has recency, this happened in the last couple of days, you'll end up positioning yourself as the expert that they can then use further on down the road because it helps you open up that relationship. Yeah, that's interesting because now, if you're talking about, let's say, an educational video, for example, or even an e-book or checklist, just tips, right, that again, in the context of shareable for the agent that they would want to share with their sphere of influence of buyers and sellers, now you get that kind of, you know, pay it forward viral type marketing, right? Because if they share that across their followers, you're going to get that additional exposure. Exactly. So there could be links back to you, to your page or site or whatever, just that you have to have, let's be smart about it, right, put kind of a subtle call to action in there. This isn't where it's the time to be salesy and over the head, right? This is the time to be all about giving value and building that presence and the attracting people to you instead of chasing them. Well said, yeah. Well, you know, I've been there, I've been there done that, very interesting. So what else just in the last few minutes we've got? Anything else really stand out for you that, you know, if there were parting words that you'd want to share with listeners, we dug in a lot on search here, which is great, obviously on social as well. This is a topic we can talk about for a long time. We're going to tell listeners how to contact you before we wrap up, but, you know, any last words of advice? Certainly, I think the theme of the most amount of results for the least amount of effort. And there are so few people, even with how advanced and powerful it is, there are so few companies in the local space doing a good job of being top ranked and top rated. And with the changes that have happened, it is, in my opinion, the number one opportunity that the loan officer community that we have to go to our marketplace and make a significant impact in volume. So we've talked about a lot of really interesting topics. And I know just as much as the next person who runs and operates a business, it's easy to get distracted with all of the shiny objects. But if you haven't nailed down a search campaign and a process in your business to make sure that you're top ranked and top rated, that should be your primary focus until you achieve that goal. And then you move further down the funnel with the other marketing campaigns that are going to provide you additional results on top of doing that. And yeah. A quick question, because I know some people listening to this are thinking, you know, well, I can't do search because it's too expensive. What would you say to them? So it's very important to calculate return on investment. So I consult with a lot of companies that have an advertising budget and that have volume targets and they look at how much they're spending and how much they're bringing in as long as the stuff coming in is more than what they're spending on advertising. They're happy. Normally in instances where I go into an organization like that, I'm able to break down the marketing and say, okay, you're doing these seven things, which of them are actually working and what's your return on investment per focus? And normally it's the 80-20 rule where 80% of the results are coming from 20% of the effort. And when you look at search marketing, it's almost always in that category where you see the highest return on investment for what you put into the campaign to what you get out at the end. Because, and again, I won't take too much time, but the beautiful thing about a search campaign, especially with the ratings and reviews, is once you do the optimization to the website and you do the monthly optimization and content creation in the marketplace and you get to the front page, you're not paying per click, you're not paying per lead, you've done the hard work up front, and then that big boulder is already running down the hill. It's got momentum, you're very hard to catch, you're very hard to knock out of that position once you achieve it. So all of the leads that come through that system provide a very high return on investment once you actually get the company ranked on the page. So if you're disciplined enough to calculate return on investment by lead source, search marketing becomes almost something that you did you can't ignore. Well, yeah, unless you've got some source for study flow of business from elsewhere, you know, you definitely got to be in the mix, especially if you're looking to generate purchase business. Okay, cool. So I know there's a lot of different things and services you do from, you know, monthly masterminds done for your social media, help people get local search rankings. Where do you want to direct listeners to learn more about your company? So go to connectionincorporated.com, that's all one word, connectionincorporated.com. And then I've put up a special link, it's forward slash analysis. And what we're offering is a free analysis of your website and your online marketing campaign. So one of my technicians in the agency will actually be ahead of the call, sit down and look at your website, look at the code and look at how essentially the search engines view your website and give you a list of all the things that are broken and how to fix them. And then we'll get on the phone with you for free for half an hour to map out, okay, who are the competitors in your space? How are they ranked? How many backlinks do they have? How long is it going to take to catch them and how many online reviews do they have? And when you capture that space on average, how much traffic is available in your marketplace so that you can roughly calculate out what the results from a search marketing campaign will be. And then at the end, if you decide to ask about engaging with our services, we have a service where we'll do it all for you. Overhaul the website, do the monthly optimization and help you put a process in place in the business to get ratings and reviews. But you have to ask us for information where our team is there to help you on that 30-minute call. And it's my gift. You know, we appreciate that a lot and I can definitely tell you are coming from the right place, right from the heart. And you're a, I always like to reference my, my friend Bob Berg, you're a go-giver, not a go-taker. Nice. And that shows up in all you do. So thank you for that. By the way, the link to that will be in the show notes, the connectionincorporated.com forward slash analysis. So everybody will be able to go there directly and take advantage of it. Well, hey, listen, Chris, I can't thank you enough. I've learned a ton. Took a bunch of notes here and I'm actually, well, you know, it's funny. I know for me to go through that analysis will be kind of a painful process, but the no pain, no gain, right? All right, that's it. Absolutely. Exactly. Because we all know there's things about our site we can improve. So anyway, thanks again for chiming in today and helping us out with our digital marketing strategy. And for those that are listening, if you haven't yet subscribed, please do so. Leave us a ranking and make sure you check the show notes for some of those resources. And once again, I appreciate you and we'll look forward to seeing 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 of 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. Anything you need to build your personal brand in your local market, attract and conferred 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. 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