Forward Event Recap: Personal Branding

Hey, what's up my friend? Welcome to a solo episode of Mortgage Marketing Radio podcast. Thank you for tuning in. I'm going to be doing more of these on an ongoing basis. So if you have any special topics, questions you wanted to talk through, have me feature topics, challenges, issues you're struggling with, social media related, marketing related business strategies and challenges wise. Here's what you can do. You can go to our Facebook group over on Facebook, type in in search mortgage marketing radio. And if you're not already part of the community there, jump in and join us and post your question or challenge your biggest frustration in the current market. And I'll hopefully answer them. Today, what I want to do is finally get to my recap of my attendance for the third time in a row of the recent forward event put on by my buddy, Neil Dingra and his partner Trevor York business partner. And this is the fourth year they've been doing it. Third year that I've attended. And I'm going to say every year keeps getting better. There'll be a link in the show notes if you want to learn more forward event.com. But they've got, you know, just 10 plus world class speakers, the thousand attendees. And it's definitely an event if you haven't attended as you consider going. So what I'm going to do is do a debrief of some of the highlights from the speakers that stood out for me and some of the topics I wanted to bring to you in case you didn't get a chance to attend or secondly, if you did attend, maybe you forgot or life got busy, right? So I'm going to start with the first speaker, Rory Vaden, who runs an organization called Brand Builders Group. I've actually had his wife, AJ, on the podcast. And they're really smart when it comes to personal branding. And all that goes into that, they work with some of the top author speakers coaches out there, including at my let, Lewis Hous, Trent Shelton, a bunch of others as well. But Rory being all about personal brand and people often ask, what is a personal brand? So if you ever asked yourself, what is a personal brand? And I love the definition that Rory gave the personal brand, especially in today's market, today's world, is the digitization of your reputation. That's it. Personal brand today is the digitization of your reputation. And so when people look you up online, whether you're going to referral, right, however this source of business comes to you, let's just face today, we're in this world where people are looking you up. And the question is, what do they find? And the higher the requirement for trust, the more important a personal brand is. And if you think about the business we're in, right, financing homes, purchasing real estate, there is a high degree of trust required for that transaction, comparatively to let's say you grabbing your phone, hitting your Uber or lift app, inhaling, shared ride, not a ton of personal branding required for that, right? Like, you don't necessarily go deep on the person's background, who's gonna be nice because I've had some really bad Uber rides, right? As I'm sure you have to, but you pretty much it's a low friction transaction. It's a low risk transaction transaction. Let me say that. So the higher the requirement for trust, the more important a personal brand. What are you doing to help convey trust in your personal brand, in your content with what you communicate? Let's go a step further. We talked about a personal brand being the digitization of your reputation. Where do you show up online today? Can you be everywhere all at once? For most people, probably not, because you don't have the bandwidth, you don't have a team, and when you have diluted focus, you get diluted results. So my takeaway that I share with you is what one to three maximum platforms, social media platforms, can you focus on? Where do you already hang out? Where do you already engage? And stop trying to be everywhere to everyone all the time, and get clear on what problem you solve. And Rory, when he talks about what problem you solve, and I remember I was actually a client of brand builder's group for some time, and we worked on this together, and in a one word, can you come up with the one problem that you solve in one word? And for the time that I was working with them, the word we came up with was confidence. And if you think about what I do when I help mortgage regulators do is I help them attract versus chase real estate agents and help move them from being seen as a solicitor and vendor to a partner and peer. So no more chasing, no more like disadvantaged positioning when it comes to approaching real estate agents, you attract versus chase. And to do that, for some, takes a certain level of confidence. I remember when I first started, I was not confident in approaching real estate agents. And that's a process to become confident. And one of the things they say, and I was shared at this event is that you're most equipped to help the person you once were. So at one time, I was not confident in approaching real estate agents. Now I'm confident. Now I could walk into any room, any meeting anywhere and meet any real estate agent and feel totally 100% confident about providing a value proposition. And if you're hearing this and that's not yet you, well, that's what we do. And if you want to learn more, you can go over to mortgagemarketing.pro and book a call with me to find out how we do that. But back to the one problem you solve, this is something that's going to take a little bit of you thinking about working through, you know, like who is your ideal client. Sometimes, by the way, with first-time home buyers, that might be it for you as well, might be confidence. A lot of first-time home buyers are lacking confidence, right? And so think about that. Continue to work on it. And get clear on one of the solutions to the problems you solve. If you aren't clear, your clients won't be clear either. By the way, same true for real estate agents. One of the problems you solve for referral partners, right? Certainty of transaction, right? Less friction in the transaction. Confidence to close, right? Those are examples. And then here's a key point. Become an ambassador of the problem. Sell the problem as much as the solution. See, people are looking to solve problems more so than they are perhaps to gain a solution, right? People want to get out of pain more than they want to get into pleasure. And so if you just tried leading with you being an ambassador to solve the problem, to talk about, to promote the problem that your target client, referral partners having in this market, and you move that to the surface and you talked about the problems, you agitated, you stirred up the problems, and then you demonstrated, provided proof that you can solve those problems. That will help differentiate yourself, you, your personal brand, and what you do, right? And it'll help create trust. How do you help create trust? Stories, results, do stuff, get things done, and then talk about things you've done. And then when possible, have other people talk about what you did for them. And in today's world, what does that look like? It looks like online reviews, testimonials, success stories. Research that was done by Rory's company brand builders group found that the number one purchase factor for people decided to make a significant purchase was testimonials about them and their work. How proactive are you at capturing past client testimonials, referral partner and testimonials at every single possibility? Do you have a process for capturing past client reviews and testimonials? If not, you're missing the mark. I was preparing for a real estate agent interview here today, and I looked him up on Google, and he has 388 Google reviews. Pretty much five-star across the board. But let me ask you, if you were considering transacting with a real estate agent, moving to the city, where this agent actually operates, and you looked them up and you found that they had 388 reviews, would you feel more confident? Would you have more trust as compared to the other four or five agents that show up on your search? That would have significantly less than 20, 30. So to build trust in today's world, your personal brand, remember what did we say at the top, is the digitization of your reputation. What does this mean? It means I have to see you, I have to know you, and I have to learn from you. See you repeatedly over time, get to know you, engage with you. That's called content. That's why social media platforms work so well, so that I can learn from you because that's going to build trust. And if you show up repetitively with that, you're going to break through the wall of noise, you're going to gain my trust, you're going to gain my engagement, which ultimately at some point is going to lead to some type of an interaction. The direct message, your phone call, a meeting, a zoom, whatever it is. Remember, a great personal brand is service-centered, not self-centered. So to recap, personal brand is the digitization of your representation. I'm sorry, the digitization of your reputation, the higher the requirement for trust, the more important having a personal brand is because that's the only thing I have to go on is how do I trust you? Other ways to build trust, as you know, help people solve problems, talk about the problems, you've helped people solve, and have other people talk about how you've helped them solve problems. Visa V, success stories, testimonials, online reviews, and then promote the problem as much as you do the solution, and align yourself with how you, your system, your process, your experience, your team, solves that problem, and then prove it. Okay, so that's recap, number one, from the forward event, shout out to Neil and Trev for putting that on, banging an event, linking the show notes if you haven't yet registered for the next year's event in 2025, go check it out, appreciate you guys tuning in, and we'll see you on the next one, bye for now.