Going Consumer Direct with Google Ads

In today's highly competitive mortgage industry, building profitable relationships with the real estate agents is essential for success. However, finding effective ways to secure agent relationships can be a challenge. With so many mortgage loan originators vying for the attention of real estate agents, it can be difficult to stand out and establish meaningful connections. Our new case study featuring loan officer Chris Cogill is a must-read. Chris has closed a remarkable 36 million in funded loans from agent referrals. And in this case study, he shares his proven strategies for building strong relationships with real estate agents and leveraging those relationships to drive more business. To get your hands on this resource, head over to LOKestudy.com and download your free copy of the case study today. You'll find actionable insights and practical tips that Chris used to close 36 million in funded loans from agent referrals and how you can, too. Don't miss out. Go check it out right now, visit LOKestudy.com and download your free copy today. Loan officers that, especially loan officers that aren't that great at generating referrals, loan officers that, you know, tend to struggle with the idea of letting go of their pipeline to go out and generate more business, you know, those are typically the loan officers that do really well with the consumer direct marketing. Hey, listeners, Jeff Zimfer, welcome to another episode of the Morgan's Market Radio podcast. Thrilled to bring this episode to you this week where you get started in just a moment. But before we do, of course, this episode is brought to you. Many of the episodes is brought to you by me, me and my agent classes and the Morgan's marketing pro membership. What do I mean by that? Have you noticed the market has shifted, right? And the market has shifted into the new market, which is you need to get back to work and generate your own leads, you know, for the last two years, plus we've had leads coming to us. It's been raining, refies and mortgages and deals and it stopped raining were in a different market. We're in a different climate right now. And when there's a market shift, what do we do? Do we stand, you know, sit on our hands, do we stand on the sidelines and scratch your head and wonder what we do? Hopefully that's not you. Hopefully you're getting into action mode. In action mode, in this market is, you've got to shift your attention to for a set of what we're doing in the past, which was, right, a capacity issue and working towards, you know, the focus was on how do we handle capacity? Well, the new market is how do we actually generate awareness? How do we generate interest? How do we generate actual business and leads, right? And how do you do that? Well, you've got to get into lead generation and of course, there's multiple ways to do lead generation. We coach on that in our mortgage marketing pro coaching group. But and so there's lots of different ways, right? You know, database and all the different things and social media and calling and, but look, the bottom line is this is if you're looking to grow your purchase business, I've not yet seen a better, more effective way than leading with an educational platform. We have one to offer you. It's called my agent classes. As a matter of fact, here's a quick story from one of our members, Brian the fame, Brian, how you doing? Hope you're well. But he's been, by the way, a member of ours for, I don't know, 12 months, 18 months, something like that. And he said because of his consistent teaching of classes that he was just invited to become the in-house lender at a real estate brokerage that has 1,200 real estate agents. And that wouldn't have happened without our platform of my agent classes, building a platform to attract, engage and convert real estate agents and add more value than any other lender. So are you looking for lead generation? Are you looking to generate purchase leads? Lots of different ways you can do about it. Do it. We're going to talk about one of those ways on today's episode, but one of the ways, as my guest will explain and agree with, is one of the ways to generate purchase business. Of course, it's still going to be referral partners. LeadGen has its place in terms of consumer direct and paying for leads and paper click traffic, which we're going to talk about. But let's just face it, the quickest, shortest path to leads to the lowest total cost, the highest conversion source of leads is a referral from your database, from your sphere of influence and real estate agents. And if you want to be like our member, Brian LaFame, and actually attract agents to you and get agents coming to you saying, I want to work with you, well, what are you doing differently? How are you going to attract them? How are you going to build that mechanism by which you're going to drive engagements and conversations? I'm going to invite you to go check out my agent classes and the mortgage marketing pro membership. How do you do that? You go to mortgagemarketing.pro. Imagine this, right? A complete turnkey library of content that you can easily download, repurpose, share, and teach agent classes in your own local market in person or virtually. We've got members doing it both, and they're getting 10, 20, 30 agents out of class, and they're scheduling 6, 8, 10 agent meetings, every single class, and they're getting referrals. Chris Cogel, another member, pulls a million dollars in originations out of every single class he does on average. You want to see the success stories yourself? Go to mortgagemarketing.pro, check it out, learn more there. Okay, onto my special guest. This week, speaking of lead gen, as I had mentioned, another source for generating leads is Google, paper click, right? Eight advertisements, eight traffic, mortgage lead generation, right? And there are a few people that I've known or have met that understand this space, the mortgage and real estate housing space, when it comes to lead generation and how to actually leverage tools like Google, and we're going to be talking about paper click here today on this episode. What it is, how you can take advantage of it. We're going to be sharing some case studies, some of the changes that have happened with Google. But more importantly, if you are looking to diversify your lead gen portfolio, right? Once you've got your base of referral partners set in in your past client data-based field influence, once you've got that base set up, well, then it makes sense to start to look at the other sources for lead gen such as paper click, which we're going to talk about on today's episode, Michael McAllister, the founder and CEO of Empower. L.O. EmpowerFunnels.com is the website. What they do is they generate exclusive mortgage leads and everything you need to convert them, a complete system and platform. And I believe this is Michael's second appearance on the podcast. And so if I bring somebody back for a second time, right? It's because I see them doing good things and I believe in them and that if you haven't heard about them, you need to hear about them. So that's why Michael is here today. By the way, don't forget that if you are interested in learning more, Michael has set up something, especially just for my listeners. First of all, you want to definitely go request a live demo. You go to EmpowerFunnels.com. There'll be a link in the show notes. But if you decide to move forward, if it's for you, he's offering $500 off the setup fee just for our listeners. By the way, guys, I don't get anything for this. It's just I'm a believer in what they're doing over there and empower L.O. and I encourage you to check that out further. If you think you're at the right stage, you're business for that. So EmpowerFunnels.com, without further ado, let's get into this week's show. Michael McAllister, welcome back to the show. How are you doing? We're doing fantastic. We are here today to talk about not all things because we don't have enough time. But we're here to talk about at least some important things around paper, click, consumer direct, mortgage leads, this ever changing evolving subject. So let's start with, I'd like to do this for any of the listeners who are unsure. Let's talk about the various types of what we're doing today, by the way, guys, is we're setting aside referral partner conversations and all that for the time being, not to say that you couldn't partner with him on some leads you generate. But what we're going to focus on really now is I'll use the tune term consumer direct. So Michael, when I say consumer direct, what should loan officers be thinking? What does that mean to you as a person who runs a right agency that helps L.O. generate leads? Yeah. So the difference between consumer direct and what I would refer to as traditional mortgage marketing, traditional mortgage marketing is what was established all the way back in 1930 when the mortgages came out, which is realtors have, realtors have gated access basically to homes on the market through the MLS. And so we're going to go make friends with realtors and when they get the people coming and knocking on their doors asking for MLS access that refer to them to us for the Greek wall. Traditional mortgage marketing is basically a referral base like what you talked about. Consumer direct is going to be the antithesis of that kind of which is marketing directly to the consumer of the product. Instead of marketing to real estate agents is that is my customer. I am now looking at it as like the person who is applying for the mortgage is my customer and I'm marketing directly to that. Got it. And how do we reach them for what channels are means? Digital is going to be the most the easiest to access, I think, for most loan officers. It also is the most effective in a lot of cases. If you look at quick and loans, or I guess rocket, right, I always call them quick and loans, I can't ever make that shift, rocket, whatever you want to call them. If you look at what they do, I mean, they have, you know, they do super bowl sponsorships and state, you know, and television ads, radio ads, et cetera. They do a lot of other consumer direct type marketing. I mean, all of that is still geared towards the consumer, but that low hanging fruit for most loan officers is going to be digital online, where, you know, you can get it with a lot less upfront, basically. Okay. So digital, but in terms of running ads, where we're paying for this access or paying to reach consumers, different than just posting content for free on social media platforms. In our discussion today, we're talking about specifically Google and what you call paper quick ads, right? Correct. Yeah. I mean, that's definitely what we specialize in. Consumer direct though. I mean, most people don't think of consumer direct as that like free social content that they're posting, but at the same time, if that free social content is geared towards people that are the consumers of the mortgage and not towards real estate agents, then that technically still is consumer direct marketing. One of the heaviest hitters in our market here locally, you know, she would consider herself a consumer direct loan officer based on multiple conversations we had. We've had, she doesn't do one bit of lead generation. It's all social, but for the sake of, you know, what we're talking about, yeah, paid search, organic search event would be considered consumer direct, but yeah, that's what we look at it. So let's take the big question, which is, why should LOs consider growing their business with some paid advertising? Yeah. I've always been the type of person that if you show me something that works, like I'm going to repeat it over and over and over again until it doesn't work anymore, right? And so that's why paid advertising is always resonated with me is that at the point that you, at the point that you create a funnel basically, a funnel that recreates applications or pre-approvals or closings or whatever you want to measure that by, at the point that you have a system that recreates this, this item that you could be compensated for. If you cost you $1,000 to generate $4,000 of income, then you basically have, you know, you basically can grow as fast as your operations can support it. That's why I always liked it and why I feel like for loan officers, especially loan officers that aren't that great at generating referrals, loan officers that tend to struggle with the idea of letting go of their pipeline to go out and generate more business. Those are typically the loan officers that do really well with the consumer direct marketing and their eyes, they are taking their hands off their marketing and focusing on loans and making sure that those loans get closed. Obviously, you can take that too far too, but yeah. All right, so let's talk about this pay per click, right? Let's define what that means. And I know some people might think this is overkill or simplification, but there are people that need a little clarification on what pay per click really means. Yeah, for sure. I mean, I think there's a lot of people out there that would say that they know what PVC or pay per click means and that wouldn't like, would appreciate the explanation anyways. You know, just based on my experience. So PVC pay per click, basically, if you look at Google ads, for example, we're going to use Google ads as an example because that's what we specialize in. When people, when I pay Google to show ads for my customer, I'm not actually paying Google to show my ads, I'm paying Google for the clicks that them showing my ads generates. So in theory, if you were to put out an ad that was so terrible that nobody clicked on it, like, you wouldn't pay Google a dime. You wouldn't get anything from it, but you wouldn't pay Google a dime for any amount of impressions that you collected on their platform that didn't actually garner a click. So that's going to be the definition really of pay per click marketing is exactly that. You are paying based on people clicking on, you know, clicking on your ad. Yeah. And speaking of specializing in Google, there's a reason why you chose to specialize in Google versus Facebook or Instagram ads. For example, do you want to briefly say why that is? Yeah, I mean, I like my backgrounds as a loan officer and it was probably 2016. Yeah, 2016, 2017, when Facebook ads were starting to become really popular for loan officers and back then targeting was amazing. Like what you could target on Facebook at, you know, on Facebook as a loan officer was literally criminal, but it was amazing. I mean, as far as like being able to target people based on their income category, their credit score, you know, whether or not Facebook determined them as likely to move, which you know behind the scenes, they're factoring in things like credit score and income and whatnot. And one of these things that HUD came down in like 2018, 2019, you guys can't do this, like slam Facebook with some sanctions and they pulled way, way back. But I was doing it back then and even then when it was like at its prime, I just, the leads were garbage and I worked internet leads in the car business prior to being a loan officer. And so it was just kind of a coincidence of the fate basically that I had the experience to be able to say like, this kind of seems like like really low intense, like this, this kind of seems like the car leads that I would get where people would ask me about $25 Amazon gift cards, right? Like that's kind of what this feels like when I'm, when I'm showing people, you know, a list of pocket listings in order to get leads for a couple bucks to lead, it's just, you know, a name email address and phone number of somebody who wants access to listings that aren't on Zillow is not necessarily as valuable as getting somebody who's searching for mortgage-related information. So ultimately, you know, I got lucky enough to figure out the Google ad system. I mean, I banged at my head against the wall for a couple months, but, you know, I knew that that was the place that quick and loans at the time, rocket now, Zillow, lending tree, bank rate. I mean, I've got tools now that confirm what I couldn't confirm back then, but tools now confirm that all those companies are getting their traffic from search. So at the time, it just made sense for me to figure it out and five years later, here we are. Okay. Cool. Thank you for that. So I want to play around with a little bit of search terms. Yeah. This is something that you deal with every day. This is something that's evolving and this is also, I'm asking selfishly for a little self-education here on my behalf. So I can sound smart when I talk to other people and, you know, decide to give you credit or not. That's good. You know, the classic, here's what I'm reading or hearing is that, you know, for some time, an example of a search term would be, you know, filling the blank near me, real turn near me, or Thai food near me, or I don't know if people did like, you know, mortgage broker lender, whatever near me so much. But now what I'm hearing is that people are doing things like what FICO scores used to buy a house. How much do I need down? And those are some of the search terms of more recent that are coming up more often than the more traditional ones. Is that accurate, you know? Yeah. No, that's, that's, where are you reading that from? That sounds incredibly well, right? I can't believe it. Top secret. I think I might be seeing this blog called EmpoweredFunnels.com. No. Okay. I got there perfectly. So, no. Yeah. No, that's exactly, that's exactly right. I think about how we used to use Google. I mean, I remember 2001, 2002, I was too young to be using Google, but using Google. Anyways, it was just how I was raised with family and technology. And I remember, like, the big thing back then, like, you had to use quotation marks and plus signs and stuff to make sure that you got exactly what you were looking for, because the indexing of the search results was such that, you know, you'd find a lot of garbage if you didn't search properly. Well, over time, Google has gotten better and better and better at matching the intent of, you know, search results, the intent of content with the intent of somebody who's searching, which has made us more dependent on that, which has made us more dependent on how easy that is. And so, yeah. I mean, I always use the analogy like a car mechanic. If, you know, if your car made a really distinct noise as you went to started and then blew out a plume of smoke out the tailpipe, like, you're probably at that point, you know, a lot of people think that their instant reflex would be to search mechanic near me. But then when you really think about it, no, most people, before they call that mechanic, they want to be a little bit educated on what it is that they're, you know, what might be going on. Like, you know, car made screaming noise and then blew smoke out what's wrong? Like, you know, some people literally use Google like this. And as I say this, you know, it's, I think a lot of people in the audience will identify with this. There used to be, it used to be a joke, a common joke that like, my Google search history was like the most private, like, depths of my soul, right, because I have some of the most embarrassing, like, just random thoughts typed into a search engine. Well, that's the way that people use Google now. And so, that's really what created the opportunity for mortgage-led generation for consumer direct companies is the gap in understanding and that where most local brokerages are still bidding for mortgage brokers near me and paying 20 bucks a click while my clients paid, you know, 12 to 13 bucks a lead in our paying 2 to 3 bucks a click for the searches that, you know, rocket mortgage and Zillow home loans are these companies are bidding on too. Okay. I've been doing some testing while we're talking here and doing different search terms and trying to find a local source or local result where these were Google is serving up, you know, the three packs, so to speak, right, which is the three people, three primary results are going to serve up. And when I'm still finding, like, when I did this stuff of like, how much down for a house and that kind of stuff, obviously, who comes up in a lot of those search results are the big players, right, the rockets, the world, the people who are writing tons of content on their blogs and things like that. So and that's more of like an SEO discussion than a PPC per se. So let's, for the listener right now, they're like, okay, that's all great. What do I need to do? Like if I'm going to do paper click, what are the search terms or how do I, you know, how do I find, how do I get those people to find me like, you know, me through that funnel? Yeah. I mean, I think there's, there's two sides that like, depending on how deep you want to get into this, like, you can get really, really deep into this and, and I, you know, if you're going to get really deep into this, I say, uh, it's all about, uh, tracking, pick, like tracking, tracking everything, you know, making sure that your conversion tracking is dialed in 100% that you're collecting, you're collecting your click identifiers and passing those back to Google every single time because like, Google's machine learning does really, really well if you're feeding it well. So they have a broad match keyword strategy, which is one of the things that they've really improved over the last like five to seven years, um, which is, you know, rather than type, rather than telling Google exactly what keywords you're looking for, you're telling Google basically keyword ideas, basically concepts. And so they can stretch a little bit and start to look at the intent again. Like I was saying, the intent of the searcher versus the intent of the content. And so using that broad match category and, and not running ads if you don't have a conversion set up, if you, you know, do not run ads if you don't have a conversion tracking set up because it will be a giant waste of money. But if you can feed that data back to Google for long enough to change your bidding strategy from a manual bidding strategy to a strategy where you're telling Google, hey, optimize for these events that are happening. Once you do that, the account will basically run itself. I mean, you'll have to do some massaging here and there. But if you can get Google to take that pixel data and start targeting searchers based on who's most likely to turn into a lead, that's really where the results kick in. So that's like, that's like, if you're really getting into it, the bare minimum is make sure your Google My Business Profile is set up. Like that is the bare bare minimum. Like you've got to have a Google My Business Profile. You got to have reviews on your Google My Business Profile. Like that is such low-hanging fruit for so many loan officers. It's silly to me when we get people coming through and demoing our product and they don't even have that set up for themselves. If you're saying that's relevant to the success of your ad strategy? No, not necessarily. No, I mean, it can be depending on how you're running the ads, not how we run the ads. That's a long and complicated story. It will not benefit us based on how we run the ads. It can. But at the end of the, like I said, it can if you have those two links together and speaking, you know, speaking to each other. But at the end of the day, it's more like if you're not going to go all in on Google ads, like you shouldn't be dipping your toe in on Google ads. So, you know. So I know that's, and by the way, we don't prepare for any of this. I'm coming at you with frigging perv balls and everything like crazy, which is cool. But for the listener, let me break it down to my level. Let me force gump this for me. And that is why the, I don't know what that came from, but I'm using it. I'm stealing it for me, will you please? The obviously the importance of the Google business profile is because even if somebody does click on your ad, they're likely going to bounce around and go look you up and search you anyway by name and so then they're likely going to come across your Google business profile, hopefully, if you have one, and then secondarily, like you said, if it's optimized with reviews and et cetera. So we don't want to overlook that absolutely. No, that's, oh, sorry, go ahead. Back to the Google conversion pixel for a moment, just to stress the importance of that. Why that's important for Google, you said to install that to attract, to track your conversions. And so Google now can use the data it gets from your conversion tracking pixel to better understand who to serve that ad in front of more often, right? Correct, correct. And nowadays it's more advanced than just the pixel installation, like it used to be that's all you needed was to put the pixel on your side and Google would track it every time. Apple has made that really difficult over the years with their intelligent tracking prevention. The solution, if your technical is not that complicated, but there's a big caveat that's if your technical, the solution is basically you got to collect the GCL ID somehow, like you can set up your Google ads to tag the URL when somebody clicks on the ad with the GCL ID, which is like their unique identifier that Google takes to match it up with everything in their database they have on it. So if you can send Google the click ID and the conversion event and the time that they converted, then Google without the pixel can get all of their information. And so Apple's tracking prevention won't prevent you from doing that if you know what you're doing. That's why people work with you so you can help you hear that out. Yeah. That shit happened like three years ago and when it happened, it scared us. It scared us the first time that we saw we were missing 30% of our conversions in Google and didn't know why. I mean, it was really scary. I can't imagine not having the technical acumen that we have to be able to figure that out. Like just when I was a loan officer, if that would have happened, like that would have been the end of me generating leads as a loan officer. Yeah. Like any of these changes, you figure out how to overcome them, some kind of work around. All right. So back to my search results test, little here. So I typed out mortgage broker near me and I'm sitting here in Las Vegas. And when I see at the top are these ads, by the way, I can tell you what I'll do is I'll just for you being on the same page. You listeners can't see this, but the YouTube version of this link on the show notes to go to YouTube channel. So I did mortgage broker near me. You can see at the top earn more bips. That doesn't seem very consumer direct, but anyway, that's that's a next, I believe, I believe that's somebody that works. Yeah, exactly. Somebody somebody who works for next sub recruiting. Interesting. Okay. But anyway, the next ones seem more relevant. Wonderful website. I don't know if you're familiar with these guys. Yeah. That's UWM site, right? Find a mortgage broker.com, UDM, UDM, and then Blackman Home Loan. So this to meet and then right below Blackman is Rocket. Look at this. So these guys are beating Rocket, which is nice for those who don't like Rocket. But secondly is I want to point out this. This seems to me to be at least because I know the industry. Maybe that's problems on bias, but this seems to me to be the most relevant result for that search or this one as well. Yeah. I mean, if you like at the point that you know what you're looking for, and if what you're looking for is mortgage broker near me, but we always make that joke, like nobody searching mortgage broker near me, except for recruiters and rake shoppers. Okay. Well, then let's talk about that. What are they searching? Because I tried that, but give me something to search. Yeah. How much house can I qualify for? So how about how much down do I need or how much house can I qualify? Which whatever. Yeah. I don't know they're the same, but all right. Okay. So check. So yeah, FHAlons.com, so that's owned by a mortgage research center, which is Veterans United. Okay. So that's the first result, then your second result, best money. That's an affiliate site. So if you click on that, you'll basically get 10 consumer direct lenders that are buying leads that they're redirecting traffic to. Got it. Okay. Well, oh, go back. Where's that black man one? They're doing something, right? Is that the one you? Is that the one we were looking at earlier? The. Uh-huh. That's in the previous search. Oh, okay. Cool. So they're landing page was do that. I think it's two tabs over Las Vegas, Morgan. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. They're landing pages doing some stuff, right? They got a little bit too much navigation going on. But anyways, that's the size of the point. We can go back to search people. Sorry about that. Wow. That's what we want to tune into the YouTube channel. People. All right. We're going down, scrolling down, you know, you always have your top three and then we go organic, organic, organic, and so you're going to scroll down again and then your ads will start up again, which will be like technically page two of the ads. So there we go. Top value offer that looks like maybe a local wholesaler for like out there in Vegas. You better.com. We know who they are. They're still in business. Barely. They want it all. But hey, like this is their bread and butter right here, though. This is the only reason that they are still in businesses because they run these PPC campaigns and have a consumer direct call center. They act like they're the super modern, like mortgage experience, but they're not. They're just a consumer direct call center with like a little bit more recent branding, a little bit more modern branding. Mm hmm. Mm hmm. Interesting. Another lead aggregator here. Yep. Yeah. So this seems to be for those that are ready for this at where they're at at the place in their career and they have the budget and the wherewithal and the right mindset to running, you know, paid lead campaigns, it seems to be a, I mean, is this a game just for the big boys and girls? Uh, I don't think that I don't think so. I mean, like, I guess it depends on what you look, you define like I don't want to alienate anybody, right? But, you know, our minimum, our minimum recommended ad spend is a grand and like our, our management fee for one market is a grand. So, uh, that's two, that's two grand a month. I mean, I, like, don't give me wrong. Like, it's a loan officer in their first year of business if they don't have like a business background of some sort, this isn't, this isn't going to be a great fit for them. But I don't think it necessarily takes like a heavy hit or a lot of, you know, a lot of your hitters that are already there, unless they got there with consumer direct, like, they don't want to add this unless it's to like provide leads for their teammates. Right. Right. You know, they're trying to build a team. Just doing another search, which is how to get a mortgage free approval or something like that random. Yeah. So lending tree bank rate, two of the top ones there, those are two of the top five companies at consumer direct, they're, they're bidding for how to get a mortgage free approval. You go further down here, consumer affairs. So that's another aggregator like affiliate site. Yeah. So what you help people do though is you help people in these search examples we just ran here. You help people show up in those search. Yeah. I mean, more than that, we like, we, we helped that I would, I would even go as far to say we don't help them show up. We helped them generate leads. I say we don't help them show up because the, the approach that we take is not slapping their brand out there. Like we do, we use this approach we call hiding the salesman where we're going to introduce them as the loan officer and we'll put whatever compliance language we need to on the page or whatever. But in that hero section on the page where we're trying to get them to take action and submit their information, we are making the site appear like a third party resource. And then at the point that the loan off that the lead is submitted, then that loan officer is introduced to the lead. So, you know, we like that's proven over and over again, that's what we help loan officer with. I don't want to put you on the spot, but, um, do you have an example, landing page, we can pull up or something? I'm actually, you know, I'm just super curious. Well, I'm seeing. Give you a minute to pull that up because I'm, you know, I've seen these and so I'm just curious to see what yours looks like. Not that this is like a, you know, a friggin comparison or a, what they used to call on the day, a contest. Yeah, let me see here. Well, anybody listening right now should know if you didn't hear my previous interview with Michael, which I got, that's going to be like what two years ago, something. It's been a minute. Um, on that interview, and I can link it in the show notes, we had one of your clients on there who was getting, I forget the exact ROI, but it was like a 6X ROI. Yeah. Yes, versus his return. And he was in South Dakota, if I recall, South Dakota Brent's still a client to this day. He's not as heavily invested into it, but he's been a client since, I mean, shit, the first month that I was in business, you know, five years ago. Yeah. And by the way, obviously, you have a lot more clients than that. That's just the, he up and we haven't had him on the show, um, but my point in in bringing that up is like you've been doing this for a while and getting results and you've had clients with that have been with you. And if you wanted to listen to that episode, um, there's, you know, him, himself, the loan officer talking about his results. So, uh, let me just see, I got to make sure I have sharing, you're done. Okay. You can share any time. Yep. All right. Let's do this. And launch. All right. So this is just one, this is one of our templates that we have basically, we've got a few different templates. I don't share too much, too much information, but it's super basic, super basic, this landing page converts, converts traffic at 20 to 25%. Meaning 20 to 25% of the people that click on the ad of the clicks that my clients get charged for this landing page will convert into a lead that fills out. Mm hmm. All of this information. Mm hmm. And by the way, I know you listeners can't see this, but he's showing me the website. And if you've been to these sites before, they're, they're very much interactive, like the big boys do. Lower my bills and all that stuff. You go through the series of questions. And this is qualifying, right? I mean, asking all the questions. Exactly. Exactly. And if you have good marketing automation set up on the back end, you can segment your list based on the answer to these questions. All right. Nice. Okay. Cool. So it's exactly how I thought it might look. Yep. In terms of that page. Not a lot to it. Yeah. Some people might find that surprising. Yeah. But the point is, you got to understand where the consumer is, they just want to get through that, hop through that process as fast as possible, you know, I'm ready to get pre-approved, pre-qualified, whatever. And let me go to this site. Okay. Great. Here's the questions. Yes. No. Yes. FICO. Blah blah blah blah. Four minutes later. Boom. I'm done. 90% of the traffic that we get through the sites comes from mobile. So picture more like like mouth open scrolling on your phone. Like you're making it as easy as possible for them, not necessarily because consciously they want the easiest experience possible. But because like as long as you can take advantage of like that zombie fucking drone, I mean, sorry. I don't know if I could say that I do it all the time. As long as I can, as long as you can take advantage of that like zombie drone status that they're in, I've just flip, flip, flip, flip, like that's the key to getting them to turn into a lead basically. All right. So briefly, what happens after submission of that information? The life of the lead. Yeah. So the lead, so at that point, thank you, Page pops up, introduces the loan officer. We've got a nice, you know, pretty thank you page where we put their headshot on it. At this point, this is where we want to make, let them know basically you've been matched with the local loan officer that's going to help you out with this. And then from there, it doesn't make any, you know, internet leads converted a really low rate. Historically speaking, I mean, you know, two to three percent, you're doing pretty well when it comes to internet leads. And so that wouldn't be time like an effective, an effective use of any loan officer's time and it wasn't five, six years ago, but with marketing automation where it's at today, we're adding these to a marketing automation platform that's going to do, you know, text messages, pre-recorded voicemails, if the loan officer opts into that, we're kind of shying away from that these days, emails, though, and, you know, basically, we're going to help them at that point learn how to work in consumer direct pipeline, you know, loan officers obviously aren't going all in on this business model right away. And so a lot of that initial, like a couple months in training is teaching them how to, you know, work this into an hour or two a day so they can have a new channel of business without necessarily taking over their life. Yeah. I think that describes it very, very well in the channel of business without it taking over your life, but one that's incredibly relevant unless you face it with the consumer journey, a lot of them are going for the mortgage piece first, and then, you know, approaching a realtor, et cetera, and how all that happens. So I guess let's do it this way. I don't know where you're at the listener right now, but I'm going to guess if you've been with me for any time, you recognize the importance of call it consumer direct or have it having another pillar to your business. And why this is so relevant for today is I was listening to a conversation earlier. And as you know, Michael very well, and all my listeners know, I'm still very bullish on referral partners for reasons I've mentioned before. They're still at the front of the deal and all that kind of stuff, however, they are also being impacted by this digital shift in that the consumer is also circumventing the realtor during their journey as well and getting to that, and it's all about how soon can you get to that consumer and let's just face it, they're circumventing the realtor, they're circumventing the L.O. together all this information until they're ready to actually engage. Well, I think, you know, the winner is going to be who captures that person early on, right? And does a great job of nurturing that relationship. So even though I'm bullish on realtors, know that because they are being affected by the same issue that they're going to have a smaller piece of the pie as well. That's why these companies we're seeing, right? These big companies, Ibuyers, let me buy the property for you, site unseen, all that. That's why they're getting a piece of the market here. And in a lot of cases, the realtor is being taken out of, you know, the situation on that piece. And now Zillow is going to try and capture that piece or open door or whoever it is, right? Yeah. So that's not to say we throw the baby out of the bath water. We just need to be smarter and more nimble and agile. Case in point, why someone like you is very relevant for L.O.'s today. So with that said, what do you want to add on top of this as like the final cherry on the cake? I mean, I honestly, I would say that like today more than ever. I mean, I've been doing this now, you know, either in production or in marketing for like seven years now. And I've never been more sure that that realtor, like referral relationships are crucial, crucial to your business going forward. And I haven't been somebody who thought that before, like I started this, I started this business as somebody who like literally dreamed of a world where realtors just like stopped existing. Like, and that's how I started this business. And so for me to be going back on that, but honestly, it was, it was your, like it was sitting in on your class that caused me to like change that perspective and understand that like, this isn't us against realtors. This isn't loan officers against realtors. This is like like local business versus big data. This is, you know, this is the consumer versus Facebook. This, you know what I mean? Like this is so much bigger than than like then who it has the power in a relationship with a real estate agent. And I think being able to go into those relationships from a position of strength and not only in being able to demonstrate that like I have referrals to give out, but like I understand what the next phase of this business looks like and I can help take you there. Like there's nothing more valuable than that in my opinion, you know, going to the next five to 10 years of the mortgage. Love that. Love that. That's a great way to say that. This isn't about us versus them. It's about local versus big data. You know, look, that's, that's awesome, man, because that is who we're fighting against, right? These big well-funded companies that are capturing market share and getting to the consumer sooner, but we can still David and Goliath, right? David can still win. Yeah. Yeah. No, I mean like like rocket mortgages and this business to cut out loan officers there in this business to cut out loan officer and real estate agents. Same thing with Zillow Zillow's not in this business to cut out real estate agents there in this business to cut out real estate agents and loan lenders. So 110% like that, that's the truth, like it's not as far as the agents. It's all of us against that big, those big data companies. All right. So let's talk about what's next because hopefully some people are interested in a place where they might want to learn more. We've done something special for them, but why don't you tell the listeners if they want to learn more about what you guys do, what do they need to do? Yeah. So everything, like in order to sign up for us, you have to book a live demonstration. That's kind of like our intake call. We're going to make sure you're a good fit for us and vice versa. We do have limited availability in market, so please don't shoot the message here. Like whoever your sales rep is when they say, hey, I'm sorry, your market sold out. Do you want to join the wait list? I would say there's 40, 50% of our markets that are full right now. But you're going to go through that live demo. One of our sales rep is going to walk you through exactly what we do, why we do it, show you the landing page, show you the examples that we can compare it to, et cetera, and show you anything else that you look into now, basically. And then if there's a spot for you, we'll offer it to you and we'll go from there. But if you mention in the intake and the demo intake form, where you're requesting that demo, if you mention that you come from mortgage marketing radio or at any point before paying an invoice or even after, I don't give a shit, if you say you heard about us from mortgage marketing radio, we'll give you 500 bucks off. All right, and I wrote down the website that they should go to, which is empowerfunnels.com, correct? Correct. Empowerfunnels.com, yes, sir. Spell that. Want to make sure we're not screwing that out. Is there an E in front of that? Yep. E. M is in Michael power funnels, like the things you used to put oil in your car. Right. And so what they do is they go to EmpowerFunnels.com. They request a live demo and then on that intake form, it's going to say referral source or how did you hear about us? And I see it says right there, mortgage marketing institute podcast. There it is. Just for you, Jeff. Hey, man. I appreciate that. And by the way, listeners, just show, you know, I don't get anything for this, meaning, you know, Michael and I didn't work out so Jeff, I'll give you X amount of money for every sign up. That's not how it is. All right. It's just by now, you know, if I bring something to you, it's because I believe in it. And so there we go, full disclosure, empowerfunnels.com, I'll put that link in the show notes, 500 bucks off if you choose to do business with Michael and gang. All right, buddy. Look at that. We finished with like two minutes to spare. I love it. That's pretty good. That's pretty good. Fantastic. No, seriously. Appreciate you very much. Appreciate all the work you do for us in the industry. listeners, you know what to do. If you want to take the next step, do it. And hey, by the way, if you haven't left us a review in a while, you could do that too while you're doing it. Sitting there on your phone. You got that podcast app. You're going, oh, deeper review. There it goes. Anyway, Michael, so great to connect with you again, man. Yeah, you as well. Thanks for having me on. As always, it's always a pleasure talking to you on this. You bet. And so everyone, thanks for tuning in. We'll see you on the next one. And bye for now. Hey, guys, what's up? Real quick, you've heard about the mortgage marketing pro membership before. And I just want to quickly remind you of that. You're in a place in your business where you simply need more purchase loans. You need to fill your pipeline with purchase business. Let's just face it, agents are still a solid pillar of business and sources of purchase business for you. Well, good news. Our mortgage marketing pro membership helps loan officers like you close more loans without the hassle of chasing agents or cold calling. None for you agent classes, expert training videos, a marketing automation platform that automates the entire process for you, everything you need to build your personal brand in your local market, attracting convert agents into referral partners. Plus done for you proven marketing materials and plug and play content to make promoting your class, getting agents, butts and seats, partnering with affiliates real easy. But that's not all. You'll also get access to our weekly mastermind calls with top L.O.'s authors, speakers and coaches to learn the best strategies to grow your business right now in today's market. And as an extra bonus for limited time for all new members, you'll get access to a database of 200 agents in your local market that have closed anywhere to from eight to 50 transactions in the last 12 months. And we'll provide that list uploaded into our platform for you. So you can get off to a fast start in reaching actually productive agents. So what are you waiting for? You can check out more at mortgagemarketing.pro, see more of the success stories there. And if you feel compelled to do so, book a call, we'll have a chat, we'll see if it's a fit. Don't miss out on this opportunity to take your mortgage business to the next level right now. Head over to mortgagemarketing.pro.