Ep #83:How to Get Found Online, Attract Consumers and Win More Deals With Local Search

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Go check it out right now, visit LOKestudy.com and download your free copy today. Hey listeners, Jeff Zimper, welcome to this episode of mortgage marketing radio. How are you doing? I hope you are on track. By the time you're listening to this, we have surpassed the halfway point of 2018. Have you checked in? Are you on track heading towards your goals? What do you need to do differently moving forward for the rest of this year if you're not yet on track? If you are, if you're at at least 50% close to it, 50% or more of your target number of units and funded volume for 2018, congratulations. You've been doing some right things. You'll take your foot off the gas. What you do now shows up 60 days, 90 days from now. Make sure you invest now. Make sure you plant those seeds now. Let's talk about planting seeds. Let's talk about investing for the future with my special guest, Shane Cosser. Shane is head of industry and general manager for financial services at YXT. YXT.com. YXT. He leads all financial service-related activities at YXT. He's a published author, award-winning speaker, and his research has been featured by leading advisory firms such as Forester and Gartner, 18 years experience in financial services in high tech. Let me tell you, the guy knows his stuff. Shane and I have a wonderful conversation, probably one of the most thought-provoking and organic and instructive conversations when it comes to the digital landscape. What do I mean by that? Look at, let's face it, the digital landscape is changing. Yes, it's always moving, but many of us are not necessarily adapting to the changes. In this conversation, we talk about the new buyer journey, as he calls it, the next generation customer journey and how the loan officer experience integrates into that. What are the keys to success for today in surviving the digital landscape, the new customer demographics, specifically in talking about millennials or first-time home buyers, digitally savvy buyers? Have we pivoted? Have we adjusted? Is our presence online set up and optimized for this new customer journey? Specifically in this conversation, what we're really getting into is local search, local search and reviews. Let me ask you something. If you Googled your name, what comes up? Because what you'll find out in this interview, that is important how you show up and that when people are searching, we're going to talk about the search terms, people are actually typing into Google to look for you, such as like loan officer, near, me or whatever. We're going to talk about how you can actually compete and win against the big boys when it comes to showing up in Google search. Google has these things called knowledge cards. It's basically an online business card. How are you showing up? When you Google your name, is it professional? On the right hand side, do you have that picture of you and your image with a bio and links over to your website and so forth? If not, is your competition? So we're really going to unpack this topic of local search, some best practices on how you keep your information up to date, what are the things to look for and showing up professionally in local search. We're going to talk about the steps to really adopt and embrace a digital business and ultimately, how do you get chosen? Really, that's why it's all about local search. We're going to unpack that and show you some examples. We're going to talk through all the different best practices for owning the page, so to speak, when people search for your name, search for loan officer in your area, et cetera. We're going to talk about the three steps to having that professional presence online. This is a great episode. It's a great education on digital, such as reviews, digital listings. We're going to talk a little bit about some of the solutions that YX is involved in that you can take advantage of, like Google My Business, listing management, local pages, et cetera, local SEO, which again is really where the game at is for us as local mortgage professionals. I'm really hoping you're going to enjoy this episode. We provide some links in the show notes for you to check out more about YX, but it's YX.com, Y-E-X-T, and just get ready for a learning lesson on becoming a digital savvy mortgage originator and mapping out this next generation customer journey and getting chosen, getting chosen in today's digital age. What are the keys to success in that? Without further ado, let us get into this week's show. Hey, Shane, welcome to the show. Hey, Jeff. Thanks a lot. Glad to be here. Okay. So give us the listeners who the heck is YX, what do you do, what are you all about? Perfect. Yeah, YX isn't a pioneer in digital knowledge management, that really means managing your online presence, everything that customers are searching and trying to discover about you. Ultimately, the big takeaways people should think about, you know, if I'm walking down my discovery, that translates into high quality leads that drive business. Okay. And tell us a little bit about some of the work you're doing in the financial sector, perhaps specifically with mortgage companies. Yeah, so within mortgage, so right now we are in, you know, 50% of all the financial services, top financial services organizations in North America, which means, you know, we're in the top big banks, you know, Wells Fargo, others, we are in the regionals, we are in correspondence lenders, we're in broker dealers and we're kind of an individual. So we really go up and down market and really focused on kind of, you know, managing online online presence and starting to arm mortgage organizations as well as, you know, mortgage loan officers, home lenders, you know, with the right kind of tools to compete today. Okay. Thank you for that. Okay. So when we last talked in preparing for this, this session today, we talked about the mortgage buyer's journey, how would you describe that? What is that today? How is it different than it's been? Yeah. It's a great question. So I think it's all about where consumers are and what we've seen is we've seen a big shift and there's these shifts have happened in a few different areas, but it's important to know for a mortgage loan officer because it'll help you figure out where you need to make investments into kind of that digital presence. So one is what we've seen is 73% of all high intent traffic is moving to what's called online publisher. So those are things like Google and Facebook and even Yelp today. So a lot of mortgage loan officers are really maximizing the presence on Yelp because consumers go to those sources to find the answers that they're looking for and it's much simpler than navigating all these websites that exist out there and they see them as much more credible. So that's kind of the foundational piece as far as thinking about where to start that journey and some of the shifts that's happening is picking those places that consumers are to maximize your presence and maximize information about you. Phone numbers, addresses, links to your website, etc. Okay, so let's kind of connect the dots there. So what you're saying is the buyer journey and people are going to these destination sites who Google you mentioned Yelp. So what does that look like? I'm a potential home buyer. I'm interested in entering the market and buying a home. What am I going to do? Enter some search terms into Google or Yelp? Yeah, so right now, you know, national association of realtors published some research on this and we also have some of our own research. So 90% of home buyers are going online, 42% of them, that's the first step. So when I'm deciding if I want to purchase a mortgage, that's the first place I'm starting and we're seeing that trend only increase. The other thing that's really interesting is not that they're not making phone calls, right? So that's kind of a fallacy. But what we do see is that they are doing more online. So as a consumer, the statistics that I've read, so Google has come out with some research and they've stated that people are going to typically 11.8 places and some of the research that we've done with our own benchmarking. We're seeing a similar trend, so a little bit less around 8.9 different places that consumers are going to determine who that first call will be to. So that's an important, I think, takeaway for your viewers to think about. Well, that's very interesting. Anywhere between 8.9 to 11.8 places, consumers are going at the start of their journey of buying a home. Is that what I'm hearing? Yeah, that's exactly right. And you know, they're looking for information. So what's happening also with Google is right now there's this kind of new channel called local. What does local mean? So what that means is all of the online publishers, the Facebooks, the Googles, the yelps, everyone out there, they're really, when you search for applying a mortgage loan officer or find a mortgage, what's happening is it knows your zip code, right? From a mobile phone, it can determine your address. So it's using three things, locations. So it'll serve areas around you. So as a mortgage loan officer right now, it's really important to update your address information into that branch, into that office that you work with, just to make sure that you show up in those local listings, too, this is about relevancy. So as I'm searching for things, I might search for warm, tail information. Let me describe that in a nonmarketers vocabulary. So what that really means is they're searching for deep information. So I might search for language spoken. I might search for products that you cover. I might search for professional associations that your members have. So consumers are more informed I would argue today than they've ever been. And they're researching a lot of things online to shape, you know, what they're looking for. And so managing, you know, if there's three things you take away from this call, it's manage your NAPH information. So that's name, address, phone number, and hours, right? Those are the three, four things that you want to manage in all these online places that consumers are looking, which we'll translate to those leads for you. Okay. So there's a lot in there. We can spend the whole call talking about that. And you mentioned the long term. So and that's an interesting topic of discussion right there because I'm always trying to get a sense of, well, look, loan officers listening to this, right, they get the fact that people are searching online and they want to come up in the Google search rankings. Can you help me better understand, I don't know if you guys have any data on the actual, you know, long-tailed search terms that people are entering. For example, what I mean by that is, you know, if I'm here in Vegas and I'm looking at buy in a house, you tell me, I mean, are people typing in something like just 30-year mortgage rates or is it more so, you know, because the old adage is people don't want a mortgage. They want a home, right? So are they really typing more so the home-related terms in than the mortgage or what are you seeing on that? Yeah, you know, I would say it's a mix, right? So they initially are looking for a place that they can go near them. And that's usually what they're creating is a short list. The second thing that they're looking for is reviews. So, you know, reviews, there's citations that you're actually a good person to work with that you follow up. And that's really important because if we look at some of these, you know, these broad economic dynamics that, you know, are facing mortgage right now, you know, we are seeing that, you know, refinances down, you know, home inventory is the lowest it's been in 20 years, people are buying homes faster than they have in seven years. So it's kind of a foot race, right? And so you want to make sure that as soon as they look at those reviews, if they have information to be able to contact you with, and then therefore you can start to kind of follow up and, you know, make sure you kind of outrun your competitors around. What do you mean people are buying homes faster than they have in seven years? I think it's really has to do with inventory and the scarcity of inventory on the market. So they're getting active much more quickly because of lack of inventory? Yeah, they're, they're, they're becoming more prepared because they realize these, these, you know, homes are just coming up and they're off the market and sometimes hours, and, and certain, uh, geographies. So just like San Jose, Dallas, it's those of the, we're seeing a lot faster turnaround in those markets. Oh, yeah. No, yeah, yeah, yeah. You've got to be prepared in today's market if you're expected to win that house you want. Um, alright, so I'm sorry, but I got to hang out here for a second because I really want to understand this. And I think the listeners to do as well, I'm messing around with search terms while we're talking right here. As for instance, I typed in buying a house in Las Vegas. Yeah. Would that would be an example of a, of a type of a search term, the shopper would put in? Yeah. That certainly would be. And so that would be like the first kind of step in a journey is to inform these, these research questions like what, what is a checklist of what I need to do, um, when buying a house, what are the things and considerations? What should I be prepared for or what are the different types of loans that are available out there? Um, so all of that educational material, then secondly, it starts to shift to, okay, I have a sense of what I'm looking for now, who do I go to? Mm-hmm. And that's where they start doing what we would say, initially what we're discussing is unbranded search terms, right? So it doesn't have company or your individual name in it. Right. So they're not really, they're kind of going through this discovery process in this research process. When they're done with that, now, which is over to these branded terms, which is like, I want to find a mortgage loan officer near me. Mm-hmm. I want to find somebody who speaks Spanish and you should, everybody I would encourage you to type that right now, um, and see who shows up. And what you'll see is you'll see kind of two things. One is, as, as you do these unbranded search, is you'll see kind of, if you go to Google and do this, you'll see like a map, right, and you'll see several different organizations listed. And that, you know, again, that's local, right? So they're looking at things, relevant, local, open, that, managing their information and keeping it up to date, otherwise you won't show up in there. And then as you start to go to maybe a branded search, movement mortgage, or, you know, a map with movement mortgage, and you type that in, you should be coming up with what's called a knowledge card, and just think of a knowledge card that's a technical term for what Google calls an online business card. So it has a picture of your face, it has, you know, the reviews, it has your phone number right there, and what, it's like structured answer within Google. So it's no longer these like ten blue links that you've seen in the, the results it's all about, it's all moving to structured answers. And so then with that knowledge card or the online business card, what does a loan officer need to do to ensure they show up and have that professional representation? Yeah, there's, so there's a few things you can do. So one, the first is to go to a Google My Business account and, you know, create and claim your listings. And, you know, these online sources use as a signal for, wow, somebody's actually managing their information, therefore it's probably going to be a lot better than those that aren't managing it. You know, and go to Google, go to, you know, Microsoft, go to Yelp, go to Bing, go to all these different kind of online publishers that are relevant and, and make sure your information's update and correct. Now, one of the challenges, so we've done this scan and we did a scan of, you know, just five thousand eight hundred and thirty four more at Google's loan officers and organizations. And we found over almost sixty percent, fifty eight percent of all their information was, you know, it was just missing. They weren't even showing up. Yeah. And then another, you know, thirty, forty percent of it was, was wrong, like wrong phone number, wrong name. So, those are, those are just, you know, you put all this work into developing your brand in the market, you built this amazing network, you know, with realtors, you know, with insurance agents, with lawyers that are actually referring to you. And, and that's what we refer to as that hindsight intent traffic. And then they go to these online publishers and they don't find you or you have a negative star, those are going to be a massive drop in your business. It's just, you can literally fix this within 48 hours. Okay, I love that. And I've been playing around while you're talking here. So, and I'm going to put links to all this in the show notes. But for those people that are listening and, and want to set up your, your knowledge card as Google calls it, you can go to google.com forward slash business. And that's, you know, one way to get started. So I'll put a link to that in the show notes. But I think I'm glad you brought that up because, you know, we talked about being a modern mortgage originator and in today's world, what you're saying is if you don't have that online presence, look, that's, that's, it's really interesting to say you, you know, people are going to up to almost 12 places online as they're evaluating, deciding who they're going to contact as a service provider. So, so what we're saying then is the more places you can have a professional presence online, the more likely as you're going to win. Yes, exactly. And, you know, and the most amazing thing about this, Jeff, is, it's free, right? I'm telling you right now, when, when most of the loan offers I'm talking to are used to paying five to $50 to try to get a lead. And the problem with those leads is like, these distribution lists that everybody gets. So it's like, it's like dialing for dollars. It's like our race to pound the phone. And there's so many people calling it that the quality of those leads, I would argue, inferior compared to what we're talking about right now. Sure. Rebusiness. I intend traffic coming to you. Then, you know, once you start to fix this, there's other things that you can do to continually optimize your presence online. And that next step I would definitely recommend would be reviews and managing reviews. Well, yeah, let's talk about that in a second. I want to close out that loop on those local search terms because I did type in mortgage loan officer near me and to your point, right? What first comes up is, and this is, this is what's cool is not at the top three are the usual suspects like, you know, lending tree and Zillow and all that stuff, and quick, and they're not on that list. So when I type in mortgage loan officer near me, I'm getting individual mortgage loan officers. And as you pointed out, I'm also getting that map, which shows the loan officers near me, which is, you know, as you said, local search, and then there's links to their website, etc. But on the, and then next I'm getting Yelp, the best 10 mortgage brokers in Las Vegas is what's showing up next. So let's then talk about that. What are some advice tip strategies for, you know, optimizing our online reviews? Yeah, so, you know, if I was to kind of create the three steps, yes, right? So, you know, first, you know, create that listing, play me listing, manage your information. Two, you're going to want to link that to your website profile, right? So, and you could work with your IT teams to kind of make sure that, that page, that web page, with IT is really optimized. You know, there's some simple things that needs to be very fast, like having a picture there, having mobile friendly, mobile friendly, 100% secure, right? Like security is actually a really important thing, HTPS. So, it's just these little things. And then, you know, then we start to now look at first party reviews. And so, what happens is if you're not managing reviews, you're only going to be getting the negative ones out there. And, you know, we have an expression in Yaks, which is called hug your haters. And that means, you know, being able to respond to those reviews. I'm sorry, you had that experience that, you know, I'd like to figure out a way to correct that. It's surprising how many people will actually go back and change their route, their response, just because you're listening to them, and you're acting to them. You know, secondly, you have to kind of do this. You can't cherry pick just good reviews. It's actually against a lot of terms of service for these online publishers. But what you can do is, through a process, it's just a really appreciate if you leave a review for me, right? And make that a standard kind of process. So, the result of that is, I would argue that, you know, you're doing your job right. Like, most people have an fantastic experience, and we're willing to leave those reviews, which by the way, in a lot of research that we've recently done, reviews, it was interesting for the first time in some of the research. So, this was for another industry, this is for sure, it's but still financial services. And I think the correlation would be the same, is that online reviews was the most authoritative source. It was more authoritative than the website, and it was just slightly more authoritative than an actual person, referring to you, which was really interesting, right? So, this is some of the first time we've seen that shift. And I think it's because reviews are also being used to determine prominence, which is one of the ranking factors for, you know, if you show up in the order that you show up. So, reviews are being to determine prominence, where you show up on Google, you mean? Yeah, so there's three factors for Google, right? So, one is location, like, are you, you know, are you in that consumer that is searching for it? You know, two is relevant, like, are you actually a mortgage loan officer? Like, do you work in this business? You have all that kind of content that we've discussed, and you've been upkeeping your profile. And the third is prominence. And prominence, all, you know, this changes a lot of times, right? So, they're constantly tweaking these algorithms, but prominence is really your online reviews. What are people saying about you? And so, that's becoming a increasingly important signal because today, we talk about these online publishers tomorrow, we'll be talking about voice, right? And when somebody says, hey, Alexa, Siri, find me the best mortgage loan officer. How are they going to determine best? Well, they're going to use, you know, stars in this prominence thing that I'm talking about. So, get ahead of that. It's a, you know, really important factor now. It's going to be even more important for being able to compete and all of these kind of online experiences to drive leads to you. And then the other thing that you raised is a point, which I'm really glad you did, is you didn't actually see the usual digital suspects, right? Right. Why? Because they can't compete with, they don't have a physical location, right? So, this is, this is actually the best thing that you can start doing to really drive your portfolio of business because imagine all of those online competitors, mortgages like a top five most expensive term in all of these paid media models. I think it's over, it's close to 50 bucks per CPC, right? Really, really expensive and most people cannot afford to continue to do that. So, you're seeing more competition in that channel as you're getting more digital competitors, which is just fine because you've got this thing called local that will really help differentiate you. And, you know, if you can be digitally savvy within that local arena, then you have the ability to really start doing some magnificent things with your portfolio of business. Absolutely. Okay, question about prominence. It's the rankings, it's the stars, it's, it's, I assume, you know, what percentage of your stars are, right, four and five, the quantity of those, right? That's right. To what degree does, in terms of prominence ranking on Google, for example, and overall search, what degree does content come into play? And specifically, what I mean is, you know, I'm a big advocate for, as I'm sure you're familiar with like Gary Vaynerchuk talking about, you know, you're now a media company and your backend is real estate or mortgage. And so, produce content to be relevant. What, what degree is, is content impacting prominence? So content, content is important. And so the one thing I will say is, anybody that, you know, is acting like they know per facts of what all of these algorithms are doing. They're constantly changing and they're constantly testing things. I think Google stated, in some research that they have 5,000 updates a year, right? Now there's probably only 20, that really matter. And there have been a lot of these observations that have, you know, passed the test of time. And content is definitely one of those. Why? Because think of it, it's like, it's filling in blind spots in this customer journey. And it's making sure that you're relevant to the conversation by, you know, sitting down with pen and paper and thinking about, what are all these questions that a customer would want to ask? And then start to develop content that you link to your profiles and you start to become the authority on in that marketplace. So, you know, that's the perfect way to think about that is, how do I create this content that will ultimately drive that journey to me, not online journey and experience? Yeah. Yeah. And I'm actually, you know, doing kind of a live test of this, for instance, I'm on Yelp like we've been doing and I, you know, see these individual mortgage broker loan officer reviews. And so, what am I going to do? I'm going to be a consumer, like, I'm going to click on this guy's reviews. And obviously, if he's smart, he's got a link to his website, which he does. And I've clicked on it and I go to his website. And I guess this gets back to our, the buyer journey is, this guy's actually done a really good job. Like, on his review, my gosh, he's got like 50 of them on the destination page. That's pretty amazing. So, what I'm looking for though is content, you know, and I mean, how, because what I'm getting at is this, the buyer journey. So, okay, great. This is how it starts, right? Local search, I try and find loan officer near me. Okay, cool. There's the Yelp comes up, some reviews, or maybe I go to their website first. But the real point is, you know, where's that engagement happening? Because, as you know, the worst thing to do is have a disconnect, right? If you've got them to a destination page and you don't have that means of engagement, which content would be an example of that, then you're losing. You're right. Yeah, I think the one thing that's really interesting is what we've seen is it's almost becoming best in class to be one click away from, you know, from that online publisher from Google, from Yelp, et cetera, where, you know, you're starting to be the authority of all these different answers. You come up in Google and you get that like knowledge card, that business card online. And then right there, I can either call you, I can get driving directions to you, or I can click to the website with a call to action on it to, you know, say, hey, I'd like to set up an appointment, contact me. So, so that's, you know, it's really about removing friction and, you know, friction is kind of two things. One is removing the steps and removing the time it takes for, you know, consumers to find and interact with, they want with you. So, yeah, well, what's the best practice then for a loan officer's listening who maybe up till now haven't really maximized online reviews? You know, you mentioned earlier about asking people to do that, but you know, what would you suggest and how that should integrate into the overall customer process? Yeah, so I think, I think first of all, just look at what people are saying about you. Just go do some research and just like, what if they don't have any? Well, if they don't have any, then another thing that you want to do is you kind of want to do some competitive research, initially, I'd recommend. And, you know, just, you know, type certain things like home lending near me, mortgage loan officer, near me, see who's showing up, you know, see what people are saying about? Do they have one review? Do they have 50 reviews? The reason I state that is every single zip code will have a different competitive footprint to it and it'll help you understand what you need to do to win, right? So, look, if a lot of other mortgage loan officers have like 3.5 stars, which is not bad, then, you know, that's what you need to get, right? What do you mean that's not bad? That sucks in terms of perception. Well, you would be amazed. I mean, again, we're dealing with a arena where, you know, 16% practically at MLOs aren't showing up. That's true. 46% have wrong names, wrong addresses, phone number is even like the phone number is wrong. Like, oh my god, like, that's the easiest thing to fix, right? So, isn't it getting to a point though? Because I know this is like in terms of me, or I do a lot of door dash and, you know, Uber Eats and all that, or other services, but isn't it getting to the point where, I mean, if you don't have that, it's 4.5 stars, man, or more, you're not getting picked. You know, I kind of, yeah, it's really interesting. There's been a lot of discussions around this and of course, you would get a lot of point of view. So, should you want the Holy Grail 5 stars? Yes, absolutely. Go for it. But the thing I would equate with reviews is with the ranking, what you start to see is people are going to pick the highest stars in their area. And so, it's kind of like two people being chased by bear. You just need to run faster or have more stars than your competition. And quite frankly, then you will get chosen to be at least on that short list of people that they call on the interact with. Especially if they're looking at those reviews on their, you know, quality reviews. So, like, this person was really professional. They were very timely. You know, I was really racing to closest, you know, jumbo loan. For this dream house that I had and, you know, ex-personal is amazing. It just kind of handhold of me through those experience. Those kind of reviews will just make your business. They're better than any marketing content that you can ever create. Right. People will trust them more as a signal, all of those different dimensions. So, what would you advise at the end of the transaction and how people secure those online reviews? I mean, one idea I've suggested, obviously, is make that part of your post-closing process and email with links. But I know there's some considerations with Yelp in particular. If you're linking over versus organic. Yeah, I think you nailed it. It's just be consistent. Have it be part of your process. A lot of times you can work with your organization and they will set that up within the infrastructure of, you know, setting out that email to say, hey, how did I do? I mean, they're already doing a lot of that information anyways with surveys to measure customer satisfaction and this become a process on that. So, there's a few extra steps around that, but we do have a blog on our website around that with a lot more detailed information that people can go to. Does Yelp have a service which helps to facilitate this process of gathering and posting on the interviews? Yeah. So, what we really solve is, you know, we've talked about, you know, digital knowledge management. And so, you can manually go to, you know, 150 different publishers out there and update your information. Or you could use a product like Yaks where you update it once in it, updates it for you and all those different publishers. Secondly, we do manage, you know, that webpage experience, right? So, what that perfect experience for when I go to Google and I see my business card in there and I click it and it goes to that optimized page. So, we do manage that website presence and then we also manage a lot of the reviews. So, if you think about it, we are, our focus is just to make sure that you show up everywhere and that that experience is perfect everywhere. Whether it's your website, a mobile device, a chatbot, a lot of times we're moving to, you know, assisted voice devices, which is, you know, Amazon, the connected car, the connected home. So, even things that quite haven't hit yet, we're actively building those integrations so that you, it could automate that experience, which is the other thing that we've heard from top producers, you know, from mortgage loan officers, is the number one ask that they've had of the organizations and businesses that they work for is army with these digital tools that I can be successful and I can focus my time on, you know, managing that customer relationship versus doing all these manual tasks because they can be quite burdensome over time. Okay, so let's talk about voice because it's hot, it's sexy, people are curious, and then of course there's some people that probably need to connect the dots, bridge the gap for how voice is going to, you know, be part of this customer journey specific to the mortgage space. So, and then of course there's some fear and trepidation behind that as well, right? About just the big players being able to win with voice because the perception is it's going to take money to, you know, win with that voice strategy. Any initial comments to that? Yeah, so one thing, you'll hear the statistic a lot in both the comm score and gardener have come out with research and stated, you know, by 2020, 50% of all searches will be done over voice and specifically that was the comm score, what gardeners very close to that. And so what you will see is as consumers start adapting new technology channels, obviously they're going to spend less time in these other ones. Now, it doesn't mean you should stop managing your website or even print email and everything that you're doing. It just means that it's going to become a predominant channel where consumers are and where they're going to do that research. You want to make sure you're showing up. The same tips that I've told you around managing all these micro experiences in these online publishers are the same exact tips, you know, by line that will help you compete in those voice arena. And so it's important just to manage your online presence, you know, really make sure you get that map, age, information, name, address, you know, phone numbers, hours, making sure that you people can reach you and they can get a hold of you and they can interact with you. And then, you know, following up on those communications are kind of like, you know, it's the one, two, three punch. So, so what does that look like in the real world? So I have Alexa in my kitchen. Sometimes, you know, she needs to shut up. But if I say, hey, Alexa, find a mortgage loan officer near me. Yeah. I could just imagine all the people listening to this channel right now and going off in their house, finding their competitors. So what does Alexa then go to Google and all these other destinations to pull that info? So there's there's two things to think about specifically as we approach voice. So when we're looking at voice, there's, you know, what's called skills and skills are things that like I'm curating these experiences, you know, with these online publishers to kind of manage my information. And then there's voice search. And voice search is just, you know, claiming your data and putting it out there for them. So in 2012, Google created what was called a knowledge graph and started to identify, look, people are asking Google all these questions. I need to understand the relationships of these things. So, you know, I have this concept of a mortgage loan officer who belongs to a branch who's in a region who has these different products. So even as of July of last year, they came out and they came out with a standard that's actually published on their website where they started to say, we are going to start looking at financial professionals. And again, it's really about managing your information around there. So the voice search, those things, those structured answers that you're seeing, that's a voice search. And then the skills is something that you would more work with your kind of corporate IT team on to kind of be branded searches where, hey, you know, movement mortgage, I'd like to find somebody so you're kind of triggering it and it's developing a skill. And then you're kind of creating those answers to those questions. But for this group's benefit, I would I would encourage them to focus on the voice search stuff, which is all those tips that we've been giving you throughout this session. Okay, so what you're saying is still move forward with all the tips we talked about and when voice continues to evolve and become prominent back to that original question. So Alexa, for example, is going to hit the power listings network, if you will, right? To pull that data of local voice search. Yeah, that's correct. Okay. Interesting. Interesting. There's a lot of emotions that come up with this stuff as I'm sure you know. Yeah, it's a lot of things to need to manage. And ultimately, that's why, you know, technology is becoming a key element of empowering mortgage loan officers to be able to compete by removing some of the complexity out of that. So it's also why I must, you know, top performing mortgage loan officers, it's almost the number one requirement, you know, of a business that they kind of help them with these technologies to be able to compete in these local environments. So yeah. Yeah, because it's, you know, obviously, I hear a lot of the discussion about displacement technology disruption kind of, you know, getting rid of the loan officer automation, taking over because, right, let's face it, computers can do loan apps faster, praises, all that kind of jazz. I guess in closing it out then, what advice would you have for the loan officers listening on how they stay relevant and not be displaced knowing that technology is, you know, kind of tipping away? Yeah, that's a great question. My answer to that would be focus on locals, a channel, right? So things in your local environment, because it's still a referral business. Yeah, right. You know, mortgage loan officers, big book of their business is coming from those referrals from, you know, those one to two realtors that they develop relationships with. They are developing their brand in that local community by sponsoring Jimmy's baseball event or Pete tonight at the school or, you know, networking in that community. So that technology will never be able to compete with in the near future. So you have to think about strategically knowing that and knowing that local is the biggest place for me to differentiate in this crowded arena. And more and more of these online publishers are starting to, you know, to focus on that channel. If you go to a mobile device, you don't see all the blue links. You actually just get those structured answers. So it's even more pronounced on a mobile device. And as a desktop, then we're seeing 60 to 80% of all the kind of careers are being done on mobile today. Right. So that's only going to continue. So I would leave the team with just really think about leveraging local and managing their information on those channels to generate high quality leads. Okay. Got it. It's funny when I, when I teach classes to agents, you know, I talk about this perception versus reality concept and I post them a question. I'm like, well, let's let's take Susie over here realtor. If I see her everywhere, so to speak, right, online, she's got content, she's got reviews. If I see her listing signs in the neighborhood, if she's out and about the community, right, my perception is she's successful. Yeah. Do I know if she's successful or not? No, but my perception is and that's really kind of the first step is in this perception. Yeah. No, I agree. Okay. So in closing out, I know you've got some options for people listening that want to learn more about YXT.com. We'll put a link in there, but you know, we've got loan officers at various levels. We got your individual individual person. We got teams. We got some executives listening. There are packages and plans and programs if people want to learn more over on the website, right? Yeah, even for the individual, you can go out and sign up, create your account and, you know, you're off to the races. There's lots of material out there around, you know, managing reviews, you know, steps around updating your information. Some of this research that we are presenting around, you know, how to win in local. So definitely use, you know, get go to YXT. I have a blog out there and then also my LinkedIn account, I post a lot of this information on there. Yeah. You've got a lot of, I'm going to put a link to your LinkedIn profile in the show notes as well because you're right. You got a lot of content. And I think that's another big takeaway from today's session. Hopefully this has been educational. It's been educational for me. So for those listeners, educate yourself, right? Immerse yourself. This is, it's here. It's coming and you can either adapt and pivot and ride the wave or be left behind. So yeah. I nailed it. Yeah, awesome. All right. Well, look, I know you're busy as you're getting ready to head off for the weekend and unplug, which is awesome, disconnect. We all need to do that. So I appreciate you being here so much, man. This has been fantastic. Yeah. Thank you for the opportunity and, you know, look forward to conversations and follow-ups. Take care. Yeah. You bet. And listeners, as always, thank you for tuning in. If you like this episode or any of the others, hey, leave us a link of rating, a review, wherever you're listening, iTunes, Stitcher. Who knows on the inner webs? But look for the resources and the show notes for everything we talk about here today. And as always, we appreciate you. So see you on the next one. Bye for now. Thanks for listening to Mortgage Marketing Radio. One more truth in mortgage marketing. 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