Future Proof Your Mortgage Marketing: Merging AI with Human Connection

Hello, my friend, and welcome to this episode of The Mortgage Marketing Radio Podcast. Before we get into my special guest today, we're going to do a little bit of math. If you're listening, you're likely a mortgage loan originator, professional or business leader in the industry. Maybe you're a real estate agent, and shout out to you if this podcast was introduced to you by a loan officer. How would you like a 62% conversion rate on prospects? Well, that's exactly what happened for one of our members of my agent class, his community, who recently hosted a class in which she had eight prospects. These are real estate agents who showed up for her class and booked five appointments to have conversations about working more closely together. But it doesn't stop there. What if you actually hosted a class, 18 agents registered and 14 showed up, and you applied that same conversion ratio of 62%. Or what if you had 18 agents attend your class and the class was filled by the local board of realtors so that you actually didn't even do most of the work with getting bus in the seats, and the same thing. You apply a proven system and strategy for converting that attention to conversations. That's what we're talking about here. The number one reason why you're probably not getting more referrals from real estate agents is you're probably not talking to enough agents. You are a secret agent. Not enough mortgage, not enough real estate agents know you exist in your town. And so the first problem to solve is to simply increase your awareness to scale your reach so you can scale your engagement to drive more conversations that drive more referrals. It is a numbers game. It is the law of large numbers. And that is the number one constraint. Most law officers are facing when they want to get more agents. They're either chasing, co-calling, and putting themselves in the position of a vendor, not a partner. And what we do in my agent classes is we flip the script, turn the tables on them. And now they're coming to you. And they are part of your tribe. They dig your vibe because guess what? I'm not talking CE classes when agents to show up to learn more about the topics that we provide in my agent classes such as AI unfair advantage, optimizing your Google business profile, how to get found in AI search, database marking, leveraging seller concessions, the cost of waiting to buy a home YouTube for real estate, and many, many others. Without you having to be a subject matter expert, but more so, the messenger because the value is not in you. The value is in the message and the content you deliver. And that's what we do at my agent classes. And that's why you can get the kind of results that you're hearing about right here today. And if you'd like to learn more, see if this is a fit for you. There's a link in the show notes or you can simply go to the website, which is go.my agent classes.com. And go watch the video. It's got testimonials, success stories, how law officers are scaling the reach in the referrals with real estate agents without co-calling, chasing, or paying for leads. And you get to see a quick behind the scenes look at the my agent classes platform. And if you decide it's for you, they'll be a link there where you can schedule a call with me. That's right. You and me, we'll have a conversation. We'll learn more about each other. We'll unpack your business. We'll have a talk about strategy. And we'll see if we're a fit for each other. And if we're not, that's cool. We'll part his friends. And hopefully you continue listening to the podcast. But if you are potentially right for our platform and program, well, YouTube could be well on your way to doubling your referrals in the next 90 days and adding an extra two or three loans a month to your business, what would that be worth to you? So once again, check the link in the show notes. Go to go.myengineclasses.com. Okay. My special guest for today is James Duncan. James is first of all an awesome dude. He's also recognized leader in the mortgage marketing industry. As a matter of fact, he was a honored by housing wire and 2022 named as marketing leader. So that says a lot. And James has quite the stellar career when it comes to building marketing strategies, running teams, and delivering growth focused marketing systems. So during our conversation with James, which is on site, well, I was in Texas for the sales mastery event. What we talk about is kind of the like the next evolution of AI here with marketing. Okay. So now to my special guest, I got a question, are you feeling the pressure to adopt AI in your market? But you're worried that it might cost you your personal brand. It might affect the personal touch that your clients value most. Look, you're not alone. We've all thought of that, but let's face it. The world is shifting fast and the real challenge isn't just keeping up with the latest tools. It's knowing how to use them without losing what makes you trusted and relatable. Hey, you're listening to the mortgage marketing radio podcast where we help mortgage professionals get more clients, close more loans through proven marketing strategies. My name is Jeff Zimfer, your host and your marketing coach. Today on the show, we're asking, how do you future proof your marketing by integrating AI without sacrificing the human connection that drives real relationships and results? And to help us dive deeper on that, we're joined by James Duncan, a marketing strategist known for helping markets executives build resilient, growth focused marketing systems to thrive in any market. As a matter of fact, that James was named marketing leader by housing wire and 2022. So in this episode, we're going to talk about how to modernize your marketing strategy with AI in a way that supports not replaces you or your team. Why human connection still drives trust and conversions in a digital first world? And how to align your tech brand and people from oh, and by the way, there's a twist you might not expect where we talk about relying too heavily on automation can actually damage your brand if you're not careful. So if you're ready to bring your marketing into the future without losing what makes it personal, stick around and listen to this episode of mortgage marketing radio. James Duncan, welcome to the show. Jeff Zimfer. Thank you for having me on, man. It's an honor. Yeah, it's great to meet with you in real person finally here in Dallas, Texas. Absolutely. We're here for the sales mastery event. Appreciate you coming up and making time from your busy schedule. Of course. So you got a lot going on in your life a little bit. Yeah, a little bit little busy. I want to talk about what you're doing now in the marketing space because a lot of people listening may be familiar with you from the role you've had in marketing in leadership for years, helping mortgage companies. But now you're doing something a little bit different. And so why don't you just first for a moment tell us what it is that you're doing now with your new venture and what what the real what's the what's the purpose behind that? What's the impact you're looking to have? What's that? Sure. Well, what I've done is for about the last seven months. I have launched out and started my own marketing consulting agency. It's called Kyloom Advisors. I used to spell advisors ERS because Kyloom Advisors within ORS was already taken. But so it is an acceptable spelling of the word. So I was very happy. The former English teacher and me. Oh, really? Former English teacher. Exactly. Oh, wow. Former high school English. Okay. But Kyloom Advisors is the name of the company. And the whole gist of why I started what I have started is because and you've been doing this for long enough, Jeff, you're this is not going to come a surprise as a surprise to you. But it's my opinion that the mortgage industry as a whole has done a notoriously horrendous job. And educating consumers on what truly matters when it comes to evaluating more mortgage strategy. And that stems from marketing. The marketing message is the outgoing comms and the way that we position ourselves and the marketplace and the things that we put on our social media graphics and the way that we just advertise our services, we've been woefully inept and delivering the right message to the consumer. And as a result, it's kind of put us in this position where we're suffering from these issues that were of our own design with competing on right and basically just competing on the wrong thing. And instead of talking about how we solve problems, talking about the benefits of loan programs when consumers really don't care about that stuff. And so the whole purpose of starting Kyloom was to help educate instead of in my previous roles where I was working with loan officers and sales teams directly. And the hundreds or thousands of loan officers that I would touch in that role and kind of inverting that funnel. And instead targeting C-suite executives, founders of mortgage companies and even real estate firms. And helping to educate them on what smart, modern marketing strategy looks like. And allowing that to kind of permeate down through the rest of the organization. So once I educate them, then they are the ones who are directing the culture and the direction and the decision making of the entire company. And the sales teams tend to fall suit. And so I thought I'd have a little bit more a little bit better success by inverting that funnel and targeting executives in C-suite. Because it starts from the top now. It really does. It really does. And that's a lot of the struggle that I had now. I benefited from working for executives who understood this, who understood these kinds of things. But I still wasn't impervious to the frustrations trying to execute on something that I knew was going to make a difference. But either couldn't find the budget or couldn't quite justify it in the right way. And really struggled to get a lot of those effective solutions implemented. Now it's a little bit different. Because when it's a voice coming from inside the organization, it tends to be viewed a certain way. But when it's an expert from outside the organization who comes in and says, you need to be doing AB&C, you know, especially when they're paying for that council, it tends to carry a little bit more gravity. Exactly. You mentioned something there. If I caught it correctly, in terms of the content, and the messaging that we've seen traditionally put out, that if I caught this correctly, correct me if I'm wrong, but that consumers don't care about loan programs. It's not that they don't care about loan programs. It's that they don't care about all the minutia that we tend to advertise or the tend that we tend to work into our messaging. Instead of truly framing it from a standpoint of this is how this program is going to solve your problem. Right. Problem solving. So what would be a traditional way you think somebody, let's say, a loan officer is trying to create video content that you've seen out there, that would be not the right messaging regarding, you know, a loan program, but it's not putting the right framework, that'd be appealing. Well, we could always dredge up the painful subject of date-to-rate marry the house. That was a good one, right? That was date-to-rate marry the house. That was, say it was an abysmal failure, but it was certainly. It was crazy how many people latched onto that thing, and it was like a MLM pyramid or something, and it's just like, boom, but just kept going and going. It's like, who's getting royalties? It was a clever, pithy statement. I get why it took off the way it did. But as a marketing director, this is the background I was running marketing for Thrive. I had numerous requests coming in from the field. My team said, hey, we're going to a lot of questions. We just go ahead and do something just to shut them up. I was like, heck, no. I might have used a choice word, but I was like, absolutely not. Our brand is not going to be associated with that comment. Oh, so you were like, no, I do not want you. No, okay, no. And just because I didn't have, I just kind of sometimes as a marketer, you just got to go with your credit. And I did not have a sense that this was going to play very well over the long term, not saying that I'm going to have a crystal ball or that my predictions always write or anything like that. But I just on its face, I was like, I don't like using that as a tagline or as any kind of slogan or statement or ad line. But I do understand why it took off. Sure. Because people like short, punchy, quick hitting lines that illustrate a point. And so I understand the kind of the fewer behind it. That's one example. But anytime that folks will try to infuse, like low low down payment options or temporary buy downs, as another really good example, where you're selling a short term solution without really having enough bandwidth or enough white space, we'll call it to really say, now this might not be the right solution for you. If this, if ABC does not happen, this is actually a bad situation for you. So we sell benefits rather than solutions. So we're selling kind of the shiny bell and whistle just to get them out of the house, you know, without really doing the full on job of saying, well, I have on my business card or on my website, I'm going to be your lender for life. Okay. One is the last time you talk to them. One is the last time you actually picked up the phone and talked to them. Now somebody listening said, well, yesterday, great. If you do have that follow-up system in place, but statistics demonstrate that the vast majority of lenders, I think it's what, 85% was the less statistic that I saw, 85% of home buyers don't go back to the last loan officer that they used. Wow. Which is pretty significant. Yeah, that's very bad. Well, it's a challenge, right? We're in this sound by world, right? It's personal social media with these little 30-second reels or whatnot. People are trying to get some hook messaging out there with hopefully the plan to move them to the next stage. Back to the whole date, the rate, the mayor, the house thing, the problem that I think you recognized and I saw with that is it's a sea of sameness. Everybody, you're just parroting the exact same message. How does that create any differentiation at all? It's the same issue they have with saying that we're better than the other guys. And this is not a reference to better.com. That's not the slogan, is it? We're better. We're better or saying we're the best. Like those are tactics that are basically saying we're effectively saying we're the same with only marginal differences. Whereas when you're able to really step back and say we're the only lender that does XYZ, that's going to be something that resonates. Really, you're the only one that can do that. Okay, then prove it. And then that's more of a conversation starter than saying we're the best. I've got kind of a funny anecdotal story about any time my wife and I see a billboard or see something where somebody's claiming to be having the best hamburger, something like that. We'll look at each other and we'll say who voted? Because we're at a restaurant marble falls, Texas. Not too long ago. Up on the very top of the menu, big bold letters. It said best best hamburger or marble falls. Waitress came over take our order and I pointed to that. I said who voted? I was just joking around. And my wife looks like she's able to be like jerk. But the waitress was kind of offended that I would challenge their assertion on their menu. And in her reaction actually got me thinking about this like, okay, who did vote? I'm sure there was legit. She didn't have an answer. She didn't have an answer. And so if you're going to make that kind of claim, it's not just a matter of backing it up. It's like, okay, the word best and better, those words are very subjective. They're at the mercy of the person reading the copy and whether or not they have any sense of what the criteria was to determine whether you were better or best, than competitor B. And the reason why those words are not great to use it from a marketing sense is that when you correlate that to or when you compare that to using the word only where the only lender that can do XYZ, that is a definitive statement. That is a factual statement. That is is it's devoid of all emotion. It's devoid of preferences or subjectivity. It is an objective statement that says you are the only one who can solve XYZ problem. Better bail it back it up. You better be able to, yeah, if you're going to make that claim, you better be able to back it up. Hey, are you tired of cold calling realtors and feeling like you're getting nowhere with my agent classes? You don't have to chase agents anymore. We hand you a done-for-you system of ready-to-teach presentations, plug-and-play marketing, and even 200 producing agents to invite so you can double your agent referrals in 90 days or less. Plus, you'll get weekly coaching and a community of loan officers sharing exactly what's working right now. Here's a quick win from one of our members. I joined it because I was tired of doing business the way that regular loan officers have been doing in my market, which is just making the the core calls every Monday and Friday, checking with real estate agents. I had done that for years and seemed like everybody was doing that. I need something different and I wanted to find a way that I could work with the agents that I want to work with. I wanted to find a way that I could have a captive audience every month, every couple weeks where I could find agents that were like-minded and that wanted to work with me as well. So it's probably brought in, I'm just guessing here, but it's probably brought on in the three years I've been back with the program. It's probably brought on. I'd probably say about $40 million in volume since then, right? And it's led us some massive relationships and I wouldn't be able to do those things without this program. The value of these Friday calls are so incredibly valuable for all of us. I get upset if I miss it on a Friday. The cost of this program is worth it just because of these Friday calls that were on where we help coach each other. We're just here to help each other add value to our real estate partners. Are you ready to stop chasing and start attracting agent referrals on demand? Book a call at mortgagemarketing.pro or hit the link in the show notes. Now back to our shop. What do you believe is the role of marketing? You said this was a 40-minute podcast. There are any number of ways that I can answer a question. I'll answer it succinctly as I can by saying that the role of marketing is effectively to inform consumers on the problems that you solve. There's an old adage about the difference between marketing and advertising. In my opinion, advertising is a subset of marketing. They're not necessarily synonyms. I compared it to a summary conversation several years ago with the CEO of a mortgage company. I said advertising is like underwriting department. Marketing is the whole company. It's just that subset within a broader scope. Marketing is your means of putting out your message of why you exist and what exactly it is that you do on a database. How do you solve your clients problems? Advertising is communicating to people who don't necessarily know you yet. I'm going a little off tangent. Do you think marketing's role is to generate business? What's defined business? Inquiries? That could be applications making the phone ring, filling out forms. Is that part of marketing's role? Absolutely. They do that through obviously various means of content or whatnot. It's how you measure those results. That will where you start to get into all the different nuances of marketing. How do you think you should measure results to determine is marketing effective? As you've heard, doing its job. It's going to depend on which priorities are. We need to grow volume. We need to grow leads. There's very, broad term leads, but there's ways to measure that. You want to see a marketer break out and hives you utter the phrase marketing attribution because as a marketing director, I could potentially put out 48 different pieces of content that all get seen by one single consumer. It's that 49th piece of content that they see just the right time where they say, I need to call that guy with a thrife or I need to call that guy with ABC lending. I've seen his stuff all over the place. Which piece of content do you attribute that transaction to? The first one, the seventh one, the 49th one? All of them. It's one of those things where it is, I'd say, I like this because I don't want to say indecisiveness, but this is amorphous entity that is marketing that drives C-suite executives just crazy is that it is very, very challenging to pinpoint a single connection point to the end transaction. I mean, unless you are measuring click-through rates on and actively, and you've got this laundry list of all these different key performance indicators or KPIs that you are tracking on a regular basis that empirically this person became a client because of X initiative. Yeah, it's never challenging. It's rare that it's one thing. Yeah, especially in the marketing or online world. It really is equal parts art and science. Let's pivot here a little bit if you don't mind. Let's get a little juicy here. What do you see as the evolution, so hang with me for this question. All right. The evolution of personal branding in an AI era, and maybe I should have started with do you think having a personal brand that's mostly loan officers are listening? Let me back up. We're building this as we're flying here. Okay. Do you think marketing executives should embrace loan officers establishing personal brands? That is a loaded question. Sure. There is. It's getting hot in here. Yeah, a little bit. Shorting us to that question is, yes, absolutely. Okay. Longer answer to that question is, we need to define what a person will be doing. You're like, hold on, time out. Let's have a meeting. This is a conversation that I've had not ad nauseam, I'll say ad infinitum. If I could use some Latin, but it is something that I have had extensive conversations with people about. Part of the problem is this. There are a lot of, we already mentioned there's a lot of great coaches in the industry, and just about every single one of them is coaching. You need to build a personal brand. Here's the problem with that. It's not necessarily that those coaches are inherently wrong on the based on the face of that statement. The words that come out of their mouth are true. The issue that I have as a marketer and as a former marketing director is the inference that is drawn from the people in the audience listening. They see, I need to build a personal brand. There we go. I need a new logo. I need a new color scheme. I need my brand guidebook. Some of the feedback you've heard from the field when they know, and that's what's frustrating is because that's what they're thinking, but that's not really at the forefront of what the initial request is. Okay, so let me give you my filter on that. These coaches, whoever, I mean myself as well, right? Obviously, they'll believe in as you do building a personal brand. I know that comes with certain considerations when you're working for a company. It's kind of like, you know, when you're an athlete for the NFL, they are your employer, and there are certain things you're allowed to do and not do, right? And you can have a quote, personal brand like many athletes do on Twitter or whatever else, right? I agree with you. Yeah, exactly. But for me, I think, at least this is what I see how I see personal brand show up in the field from L.O.s is, as you know, is content. It's like they want to control the funnel, right? They want to be the source of generating. They don't want to rely. It'd be nice if marketing did its job. Let's just face it, depending on the company that they're at, it may or may not be doing a good job. They'd be more leads, more business, whatever. So they got all the choices by leads, all that stuff, realtors or and or. I can create my own content. I can put up a video and YouTube and all this kind of stuff and I can build a personal brand and attract people to me. Where is internally for marketing executives, yourself or others you've interacted with? Where's the friction point with that? I think most of the heartburn that is generated on the marketing director's side is stems from when someone kind of goes off the reservation or goes outside. What would be an example of off the reservation? It turned not pin the right disclaimers. I mean, in Resba Tilla, those are very real things that we have to adhere to and it is as a legal consideration. There's legal considerations, there are compliance concerns. There are certain things that have to be displayed on every social media graphic. I mean, there's all these different little hoops that we go through where some marketing directors will miss it is that a lot of it is just education. Tell them. I mean, be very clear. You're in the unless you used to go here. You need to make sure you're using the right equal housing opportunity logo or equal housing lender if you had a positive. Whatever the situation, educate them on what those parameters are. But also understand that you need to relinquish perhaps a little bit of the creative control for those who have demonstrated that they can handle it. There are numerous examples where an L.O. thought that they had some design chops and completely butchered like an existing template and added some kind of font that just took things completely off off branch. So there is a design element to this. But I think one of the biggest concerns that a lot of mortgage companies have is just this because in that panel, I'm consuming too far the other direction and you get too compliant. You get too rigid in your application of what you allow your teams to do. I'll give you two examples. Back to the whole conversation of building a personal brand. Building a personal brand has absolutely, in my opinion, has absolutely nothing to do with the logo that you use, the team name that you use, the font that you use has nothing to do with that. You actually already have a personal brand. Whether you realize it or not and you have less control of it than you might think. Your consumers, your clients that you work with, the realtor partners that you work with, they are the ones who are defined that because your personal brand is basically just your reputation. That's a simple way of putting it. It is the impression people have of what it's like to work with you or to sit opposite from you in the chair. That's your personal brand. The quicker that people get to that understanding, the easier the conversation becomes from that point on. Because I had a top-producing loan officer, came and saw me several years ago, she called me up, said, I'm going to be in town. I want to see if I can get two hours on your calendar. I would love your help in developing a new personal brand. The question in Crete now, I said, great, let's have that conversation. She came in and we sat down and talked, I said, okay, what's your idea? What do you want to do? She said, I want to be known as the loan surgeon. I said, okay, why? And she said, well, that's how all my realtors refer to me, is as the loan surgeon. She went on and on. I'll let her go for about 40 minutes. I asked a couple of clarifying questions here and there. And I said, okay, let me go to the end of, I was like, all right, she's done building the case. And I was like, I'm going to have to be very gentle and have our frame this. I said, okay, let me ask you a question. In every headshot that you do, for the rest of your career, every piece of content you produce, every video that you appear in, are you willing to be featured wearing a lab coat, a stethoscope around your neck and one of those lower reflector do-hickies that old doctors used to wear? And she looked to me like I was nuts. I was like, and she said, well, no. I said, then the loan surgeon won't work for you. And she said, well, why not? I said, because that's what people expect to see. If you're going to have the word surgeon incorporated, you need to look like a surgeon. And so we kept on, I said, and I could tell she was a little crestfallen because she had put a lot of a lot of thought, which I think is great. But it was just a little misguided. And so we course corrected. And I said, OK, let's spend the next hour. And let's come up with something even better. I said, what's your area special, speciality? And she was known as the FHA or FHA 203K team, the rehab loan. She was, as a care bee, 203K or 203K. Oh, 203K, yeah. Okay. All right. I had to write the first. Yeah. All right. I'm a marketing guy now. Yeah, exactly. But anyways, she, she was acquainted with us as doing rehab loans and fixing flips. Yeah. And so we came up with a designation that was far better for her, just an easier way for her to market herself into a kind of a niche area that she wanted to be without being exclusionary. Right. Tell the loan programs. Right. And so, and so we were able to go down a different track. So that's the kind of conversation that loan officers, especially top-producing loan officers want to do. Another instance, loan officer came to me saying, basically the same thing, except they knew what they wanted to be. They said, I want to, I want to be known as the mortgage chick. I said, oh, fantastic. You and 200 other people in your same market. And so it's one of the things where if you want to call yourself a personal brand is not a nickname. Right. It's not what your buddies called you in college. It's not some, some clever cutesy thing that rhymes just because you're a mom and you're in mortgages does not mean that you have to go by the mortgage mom and everything you produce. That's not a personal brand. That's, that's a slogan. That's a tax loan. It's, it's something, if you want to use it great, but if you're expecting that it's going to get you from producing two loans a month to doing, to qualifying for presence club, you're wrong. That's not what does it? Then what does it give us a quick crash course on the difference between a slogan like you've described and personal brand. You obviously mentioned it reputation. What others say about you, but, but there's, there's a gap in between. There's the dotted line, right? I'm like, well, I'm known for this or this is what have ever other people referred to me. So I think I have it should have a slogan or a look that's relevant to that, but it's not. Am I making sense here? So then how do I help me understand if I'm listening right now? If that's not a personal brand, and I get it, it's what people say about me, but like, how do I control that? You know? Well, Ash Shantbinozian, how he did it. Okay, I mean, let's riff on him for a second. What would you say his personal brand is? I'd say his personal brand is, from, from my perspective, being an insider on the mortgage industry, I'd say his personal brand is, is that he is one of the most prolific systems guys that is, that is existed in our industry. I don't know, I've never been a client of his so I can't speak intelligently on what the experience is like going through the loan application process with him, but I can make assumptions based on the fact that that he's got, he's got a large team. It's very well dialed in. It's very well orchestrated. And he does a great job is number speak for itself. I'm going to see if I can pull up this definition of personal brand that I love while you're talking. All right. It'll be a moment here, but okay. But I think, do you think it's a little bit nebulous? This whole idea of a personal brand, meaning how do I, like, like, concretely, like, Amazon? What's Amazon's personal brand? Efficiency, speed, convenience. Yeah, I would say it's, it's all three of those things, but more, more than anything, I'd say it's convenience. Okay. All right. So, and I'm trying to come up with the real world, world examples, we'll create a parallel here in a moment. Sure. But I think there's, there's a lot of those that are stuck in that place of personal brand because I'm putting content out and back to that. I'm putting content out. So I'm developing my personal brand because I'm putting content out. Okay. I mean, you are because you're sending messaging. You're sending, right? You're putting yourself out there in a way and people are making a judgment or an ascertaination about you based on the content that you're putting out there, right? So that's part of what goes in but can you, so back to this, this, this scale is example of the 203K expert. Did she have a, like, a tagline, like a fixed and flipped specialist or something like that? Or mortgage fixture, a fixture rapper was kind of, because the one of the things that she said to me in that meeting that really stuck out was the fact that she was the, she was the person that all of her realtors would bring the deals that were hard to do. Sure. Yeah. Yeah. And tough deals. Yeah. And because she was a former underwriter. Oh, okay. For like 10, 15 years before she became a loan officer. And so there was nobody, no other loan officer that I knew of who knew guidelines forwards and backwards the way that she did. She, like, underwriters did not like getting, getting phone calls from her because they knew that she was going to be right about whatever it was as she was talking about. She knew that, because she knew the guidelines worse than that. Well, I mean, she, and she, I mean, she wouldn't petty about it or anything, but they, they just knew that she had a reputation of somebody who was going to submit some of the cleanest files you've ever seen in your life. That's awesome. And so, and so she, she kind of had that moniker of the mortgage fixture rapper. And so, and it was, and it worked brilliantly for her. Okay. So then she became, she took that messaging, the mortgage fixture upper, she became known for working the difficult deals. And were she okay with that? And that was one thing I cautioned her about. I said, if we go this direction, then that's what you're getting. You, you might run into situations where you get nothing but crap deals. And she kind of shrugged. I was like, I'm, I'm pretty proficient at knocking them out. Okay. And being able to, as long as she's good with it. Yeah. And, and so, yeah, that's, that's a decision that she had to make about it. Well, so it's, it really comes down to, I mean, the whole realm of personal branding, I think just, the waters have gotten so muddied because there's been, there's been so much conflicting advice. Yeah. And even as, and I am just as guilty of the, how pervasive it became. Yeah, because we got to the point where it was easier, it was easier to just acquiesce and to say, okay, here's your fancy new logo. Then it was to have a, have a, a discussion, a substantive discussion about what this really means. And what you are truly asking for. And it's one of this, I mean, it's honestly, it felt like, you know, the episode that every parent goes through when their little toddler is reaching for the hot stove and they, and they keep saying, no. But the toddler keeps wanting to do it and keeps wanting to do it. Eventually, I mean, that's an extreme example, but there are certain situations where eventually you kind of have to look at and say, okay, that will be done and let them make them mistakes. So I wasn't able to pull it up, but the my recollection of the definition, and this comes from Caleb Ralston, you know, who he is. Yeah. Yeah. Love his videos. Yeah. So he articulated a personal brand is the intentional pairing of, I forget exactly what he said, but the intentional pairing of like ideas, you know, emotions or thoughts or whatever, and the continual repetition of that over time, so that when people then, then they just, it just happens, right? So it's intentional pairing. Back to like the fix and that's a great definition. The fix and flip gal. So she has intentionally paired that. So this is by the way for anybody listening. We're going a little bit deep here, but there's a there's a lesson here is if you're showing up creating content, if you're putting messaging out there repetitively, what people are starting to create an attachment to your marketing messaging, your communication that's going out there and things like that. So I'm sure you would advise or confirm, be aware of what it is that you're intentionally putting out. Oh, maybe they're lacking intention, but whatever the pairing is that's happening, it's going on, right now. And that's becoming your personal brand. So people need to be pretty cognizant of that, don't they? Yeah, absolutely. And I would also, I would also throw in one other caveat in that it also has to be something that where there is a deep personal connection within yourself towards towards that message because I mean, people will see through it like we can see through that glass window right there. If it's if it's not genuine and if it's not if it doesn't truly line up with who you are as an individual and who you are as a professional, then it's going to become exhausting both for you, but also it's it's going to that transparency is going to reveal it to not be true. I guess that's why so many people I know when I was originating early or in the early days, you know, I leaned into the first time home buyer thing, right? Because most people can relate to that meaning we've all been a first time home buyer. Of course, a lot of originators at some point. So so you can you have an affinity to that. Let's pivot a little bit again because we could go all day on personal brand. Oh, yeah, we could. All right, let's just get real. Back to what I opened up with about personal branding, the revolution of personal branding and AI, this is why I wanted to get back to is what do you think is hype versus real with the intersection of AI like where do you see that going? You can talk about your take on actually let me riff for a second if you don't mind. Okay. So I was actually taking notes before today. I saw an article that was that was talking about AI stars, a Hollywood AI stars and that there's this influencer, if you will, this actress who's completely AI her name is Tilly. She has 63,000 followers on Instagram and she's already getting inquiries from real Hollywood agents to be featured in film and other types of things like that. And so the the concept is synthetic talent. Okay. So where do you think you're seeing? I know you're seeing this bubble up. You're watching people the whole hey Jen and the avatars and what's your give me your riff on that for a little bit on where do you think that is going to fall in or not? Oh, there is a deep rooted part of me that hopes that it backfires. So it's extraordinary spectacularly on whoever tries to bring that into the mortgage. Is there a place for it though? No, because in my opinion, the in the mortgage industry, there is zero place for deception. Is it deception? I mean, let's just let's take it contextual. It's on how you frame it. Right. Because I think contextually, I mean, who knows? This is also new. We don't know, right? I mean, five years from now, just like we thought like holding your phone in front of your face and recording video like, oh, yeah, who's going to do that? Right? But I mean, people used to the reject electricity, you know what I mean? When they stay wanted to stay with gas lamps. So I don't know where this is going to go, but I do think I'm open to the possibility that there's a place for AI generated content that's an avatar of you. I think it's very contextual. Last little story. Somebody shared with me the other day, there's a realtor on YouTube who for the last three months has done 100% exclusive AI avatars of his or her content and his view counts and everything are up and all the metrics by which you would measure that. I'm not saying that that's per se billing trust, but let's narrow the focus for a little bit. Would there be a place in your world for context? Some place in that funnel early stage for that AR avatar avatar engagement. With some with some caveats. Yes. I would say if if you were disclosing upfront to the to the client. Yep. Like let's talk voice. Yeah. Voice is really really big right now. Yeah. Voice. It takes all of three seconds for that bot to make the disclaimer. Oh, Mr. Ziffer. I'm James. I'm an AI chat bot and you and I are going to engage in a conversation. If you would like to continue using my services. Press one or say, okay, right. As long as the consumer is informed that that that is what's going on. I don't have a problem with it. It's when you're trying to disguise it and say, yes, I'm a real human when it's an AI persona that has been generated based off of some database of all these different prompts or different phone tree discussions. Then I'm sorry. I just I have problem. I don't disagree with you. I'm just thinking about the use case you gave there and move it to video where if it's your the AI avatar version of you and it's just like, hey, what's up? You know, this is Jeff's AI avatar. You know, you're talking to me if you'd rather talk to Jeff, whatever, right? Press one or you know, all that fun stuff. But I think the disclosure upfront makes sense. It just makes me curious down the road because you know how so right now LOs have YouTube videos where it's the same FAQs they get, right? So she's like, hey, go watch the video about what about this? What about that? What about that? What about that? Right? It's just them pre-recorded or bomb bomb videos. I think there's a place for that where so the library have go watch my educational, you know, classroom about all the different steps of getting alone, et cetera, et cetera. And why not just streamline that with AI avatars? Do you think that's appropriate? Yeah, because that changes things. That's for the purposes of me as a consumer. I'm just trying to articulate, you've presented it now based on that description. You presented it now in video format rather than in an essay. Yeah. I mean, I could go to, I could easily just go to a blog that was 100% generated by AI. Yeah. And read through it, grab the information that I need. Sure. And make my own decision whether or not I want to believe the validity of the data that you just shared with me in word form, supposed to video form. Okay. So I get your take away is there's a small window of context for you where that will work. Can clearly do not trying to see the customer. I think everyone would agree with that. Oh, no. So be transparent. But let's get back to let's keep let's pull on the thread a little bit more. So you have the floor to riff for a little bit on how are you using AI? What's your yeah, where do you see that intersecting? And let's go back to the marketing executives who you serve. Are you having conversations with them about that? Yeah, yeah. And I would not be able to do what I'm doing the way I'm doing it right now without without the assistance of AI. AI to me is one of the most knowledgeable. I'm going to use I won't say intelligent. But it is one of the most knowledgeable research assistants that I've ever been able to find outside of a human research. Right. That's crazy. And because there are there's a there's a lot of things in the analysis and the the strategic talks that I have with clients. There's a lot of research that goes into it. Now they're kind of research that I'm doing. It would take me usually two weeks to to go through all of the different resources that that I want to look at and do all of the scrubbing and do all the vetting and and do all of the the online stocking of their entire digital footprint. It would take me weeks to to do all of that myself or to even to hire somebody to do it part time on an hourly basis. Now I've got agents that I've built into chat to be team for flexing claw to do in a minute. And so I don't that kind of a use case is not I don't believe is doping anybody that is no that's a great assistance is the specific reason why AI is so useful to me. And then I take the results of those problems and then I assimilate the most important components into what my recommendation is going to be to that company. Okay. What are you what are you having at research that makes me curious as a fellow marketing buff? Well a lot of it is doing just doing the scrubbing of the entire scope of a digital footprint. So because I can I can go to a company and say all right what's your primary URL. Oh okay you act as a consumer and yeah. And so I basically just go and and find ever do as much digging as I can as big a breadth of research as I can in terms of your entire digital footprint because with a lot of companies they've probably had multiple different iterations of their website right there might be certain subdomains or certain extensions that they completely forgot about because they either weren't and didn't show up on an index map or or or a side map. And so they just lost track of it but it's still out there because it's on some other server that they thought got shut down but it really didn't. And so it just go that that kind of a search knows to go and find all of those digital presences or presence presences. Digital assets will call it that exist and that helps me kind of assimilate that and to find anything that's like a red flag is like oh you need to take care of this go find where it is shut down or to take from a different perspective be able to look at it kind of lift up the hood and see how that site is performing so I can get a sense of this is probably where you rank without going into a drafts or SEM rush or any of those other analytic tools. I can get a good sense of this is where all your pages are ranking for SEO but one step further now with geo a generative and general optimization this is how how good a chance you stand at being cited by LLMs and if a consumer is doing doing their search. So you're helping mortgage companies marketing executives leverage GEO to hopefully get found in some of this AI search. Absolutely because that is that is I mean I was I was on a webinar earlier this the future proof webinar that's hosted by Melissa Langdale and Megan handy and I were having a conversation over AI in the future of marketing and one of the things that I said then was that Google was very nervous about what was happening in the transition of people moving away from using search engines like Google and moving over to GBC and perplexity and all these other LLMs for conducting similar searches and just the whole reasons for doing it on that webinar this is back in like May when I was on and at the time I said Google's got about 12 to 18 months before they really hit a critical point of needing to do something I was way off on my estimate it was closer to three months and and and Google to their credit they have they have they've stepped it up with Gemini and they're don't know that the announcement has been made but very soon they're going to be announcing an AI first search platform to replace the traditional search platform that everybody knows also they're great head to head against perplexity for example yep go ahead and have that perplexity launches own browser yeah I was using that the other day comment yep it's interesting it's it's really fascinating seeing how people are it what's what what I think is the coolest about about what AI is doing is is it's democratizing the whole the whole search game so now those the rockets of the world the zillas of the world the those companies with big deep pockets have almost overnight I don't want to say completely I mean they're it's not like their market sure it's going to drop to zero tomorrow but but almost overnight they have lost a massive competitive advantage over the little guy over the midsize I have to be over the over the independent broker that that's in the local market the local the AI is is going to benefit local established retail and brokerage shops so much if they if they learn how to leverage it the right way in terms of putting out the kind of authoritative content that LLM's reward when conducting their searches because when when you put them when you type in a prompt into chat gbt let's say chat gbt isn't just looking at the words that you that you typed in have for your question it's making it's smart enough and I'll go ahead and say intelligent enough to make inferences based on context clues of how you type and and also taking into account the history of past threats that you that you've generated so it's it's conducting what some people refer to as fan out queries so one single prompt could result in up to 50 75 100 independent searches all done in real time all done instantaneously and deliver the results as quickly as you see that little thinking icon come up or text come up and then there goes your response so it just depends on the depth of the prompt itself yeah but it's using those and this is what as a as a former institution I found fascinating when I kind of discovered that's what it was doing was the whole concept of using context clues because I somehow used to teach was reading comprehension was not that challenging if you if you knew the tricks and context clues was one of the first things that I would teach my students what to look for like tone of voice and imagery and and all the different symbolism all the different literary devices that that writers especially Greg writers would use to tell a story elements of I've been trained to do the exact same thing interesting um all right so let's close it out on this you referenced something there a moment ago about geo and you said that you think AI uh in that context benefits the smaller player versus the big 800 pound gorillas um can you ride us into the sunset on on specifically how somebody listening right now could be loan officer could be marketing executive biz dev person how do they because because there's the window right so so what were the what would be the action items for them to do through the rest of this year to get on that bandwagon of getting found in AI search um first of all if anyone comes to you saying I promise to get you cited on AI people promising that oh absolutely really yes but if anybody promises you that say we can get you cited on chat to be two searches hold onto your wallet and don't believe them because this is it's one of those one of those things where the technology is sober and new and so um it i mean every day right it is evolving and something is changing there a new model is is dropping of chat gpt like um by i remember playing around with five with chat gpt five when it first came out and there it was immediately by the response was immediately bivircated in the people who absolutely loved it so oh my god this is revolutionary it's all these things as other campus like holy crap the whole sessions everyone's they were on four right and it's and so you just there's a mix back this is a process that is going to take time to evolve i mean google didn't get to where it got overnight a ggeo or a i search or whatever academic you want to attribute to it's not going to get to where it's going to go overnight it is changing very very quickly um and i conducted some pretty deep analysis about a month ago and came back to because i wanted to revisit it and came back to it again and the results were drastically different really in terms of what it served up in terms of where it served up in terms of trust because what i did a couple of months ago was i wanted to i was just conducting experiments so i built a custom gpt to do to do to take 20 different consumer based prompts specifically targeting like mortgage industry at all with the with the end result of wanting to find a local mortgage expert to help me in x market so i had 20 different queries all phrased very very differently and i had this list had that built into a spreadsheet had another column that listed out the top 200 metropolitan areas and so what i was a built this this custom gpt to basically take each question and extrapolate it across each of the 200 metropolitan areas and give me the results so i mean i mean you multiply all that together i think it was a total like 25 000 different independent searches yeah we're we're run and then fortunately because i did not want to take the time to scrub all of those responses i said okay here's the responses and loaded that up and said okay now scrub this and tell me what are the top 10 citations that that came up in all these responses and the results in the first one were unexpected and there were a couple of familiar names that that i recognized in there at experience.com was one that that i was kind of impressed to that it showed up as much yeah and then the second result of names was completely different listed of of of websites of who are else yeah and i was like that's fascinating like okay so and so now my next iteration is so okay back in june or july you gave me this in august you gave me this yep um why was it different and so that's one of the things that i really really love doing it is when i run an experiment like that i always cap it off by saying okay why give me did it did it tell you why the different references yes and it's uh that asking well asking not on that i haven't done yeah but with other projects that i've run when i ask it why what was your reasoning behind this what was your thinking behind this and there are some miles where you can actually open up that sidebar and watch in real time right as it's going through its as process and but i wanted to know the logic i wanted to know what what was how did it come to this decision what was the what was the stream of color to the train of thought yeah that it was following and i've learned more about how llm's work just by doing that just by asking that question of the interesting leave me to point a to point from point to point you can have that on going yeah i found the same thing to be true as well uh because i've been teaching classes to realtors uh on geo in conjunction with loan officers and um that's one of the things that i recently did as well and it's it's very interesting to see it's read it in some cases it's fast experts it's these review aggregator sites which is a lot of what i've seen it it served back in terms of the generic type a find a realtor i want to buy a house in whatever you know what i mean all those types of things it's it's first and foremost looking at a lot of those those review aggregator sites and then of course the content as it you know although is it is it is it is it listicle structured whatever easy to read and that's a whole nother skill by the way which i'm sure you help market executives understand is what format what types of content is the uh looking for yeah which is very important right yes yes the actual straight yeah i'd never actually answered your question what should they be doing yeah that is exactly that's what they need to be focused on because if you're using a i to write a whole bunch of blog articles you're missing the point uh if it's a ii does not believe in fluff and it will uh and and and a lot of the the results that generate their generate from the prompts are because the prompts are bad or because the prompts are asking the wrong questions i'm more interested in asking the right questions right more so than i am getting yeah correct answers oh because when you when you're asking the right questions that's what's going to lead to better results right so if you've got the right prompts in there that are structured the right way i want you to include a bcd i want you to to build in the the meta description so once you build out all the schema and then here's the content and then give me and and then the FAQ section so what they are what lm's are rewarding is the the rotated nature of the content and is it uh is it is it is it valid data based on the query that or the prompt that was that was input well that's a whole lot of the skill set that marketing executives uh if that's who's listening right here and they're in their company they've got their different data you know they're they're their content sources of blogs and etc and websites and even that content needs to be looked at yeah in terms of how is it currently formatted yeah absolutely and if you are an executive listening right now and you recently or even not so recently fired your copywriter and they were a very skilled copywriter you need to give strong consideration to hiring them back because they understand innately how language works and how and how to structure things in a very specific manner not to be formulaic but to but because it's going to meet the criteria of what lm's are looking for and if you are a copywriter or PR or comms you're you're in a really good spot and you need to die I thought yeah I was gonna wipe out all the copywriters because no no that's a whole that's another podcast that's another episode all right James this has been awesome glad we could do it in person for those who are listening and want to learn more about what you do we're going to link up number one your LinkedIn profile yeah right which is probably a great place to follow but also the website give us the name once again Kyloom advisors C-A-E-L-U-M advisors this spelled E-R-S E-R-S all right we'll put those two links in the show notes appreciate your being here everybody listening by the way if you're listening to this you're a loan officer and you're at a company and you want to get this interview over to somebody internally biz dev marketing somebody who needs to hear this from a guy who's been in the trenches and it's helping people do it now with marketing executives please share this episode with them and get them in a conversation with James once again thanks for making time Jeff has been awesome for sure for me all right let's do your to do like the episode share it we'll see on the next one bye for now okay that's it for today's episode before we wrap up I just wanted to remind you about my agent classes you're proven system to double your agent referrals in just 90 days imagine never having to co-call again instead building real lasting relationships with top-producing agents who want to send you business with done for you presentations marketing automation weekly coaching it's all designed to make growing your business easier and fun so if you're ready to take control of your agent referrals and grow your income visit mortgagemarketing.pro or check the link in the show notes and why you're there don't forget to check out the success stories from other mortgage pros who've already seen incredible results thanks for listening and I'll see you on the next