Modern customers are savvy adopters of anything that makes their lives simpler or adds value. For many lenders, that has meant huge investments in best-of-breed technology solutions to improve customer experiences and capture more business.
Imagine what would happen if organizations made equal investments in their producers – or their personal brands.
If you’re a marketing leader, you might be worried it will detract from the corporate brand.
In reality, investing in your producers helps them expand your reach within their local community. People drive meaning for brands, enhancing the customer experience with a level of personalization no company can achieve with mass-produced, generic marketing and sales communications.
Listen as Total Expert Founder and CEO Joe Welu and The Basis Point Founder Julian Hebron discuss how banks and lenders can build a better brand, empower their producers and grow the lifetime value of their customers.
Humanizing Your Brand to Reap Rewards
“Find those evangelists and the ones that are willing to cooperate with a core set of rules, but then let them shine in their own way and with their own personality and their own message, and that humanizes the brand.” – Julian Hebron, Founder of The Basis Point
Julian: Think about that for a second. What are you doing inside a company marketing organization when you’re serving loan officers? You are oftentimes answering to them, and we’ve all done it, and I’ve done this for most of my career, but one of the things that I did over time is to find those evangelists and the ones that are willing to cooperate with a core set of rules, but then let them shine in their own way and with their own personality and their own message, and that humanizes the brand, and that becomes these campaigns. To Joe’s point, those are replicable.
Joe: Yeah, you’re elevating. You have to think about how are you going to elevate the loan officer in social, in their communities, at all of the things that we talk about on a successful multichannel marketing strategy. I think some of the big national brands, they do the regional and the national branding stuff really well, but what we call the long tail of marketing, which is all those little local communities as this massive long tail, and that long tail is where all the personalization happens – or should happen. That’s where a lot of the revenue and reward is reaped. If you carefully execute that local strategy.
Elevating the Experts to Reach Your Customers
“The companies that focus on elevating loan officers as the de facto experts in their community, they really do well. That model works. It really does.” – Joe Welu, Founder and CEO at Total Expert
Julian: This is something that in my own experience with Total Expert I have an opinion on, but I’m going to save that. Company brand versus loan officer brand?
Joe: Yeah, both vitally important. If you think about this, the company brand gives that initial layer of trust. People want to know what your company is. They want to have familiarity with it. They want to have that sort of brand recognition, but the personalization of that brand — you think about you have sales people that are in communities, going to schools and churches and local events, with all those people in the marketplace, giving them the ability to be branded as the expert in that area as that professional is critical.
Joe: We see the companies that focus, and this is more obviously on the retail channel, of course, but the companies that focus on elevating those loan officers as the de facto experts in their markets and really being purposeful about doing it across social, the community events, and having a playbook for those guys to really be that de facto expert in their community, they really do well. That model works.
The Power of Borrower Trust
“Millennials still want a person. They want to know how these decisions are going to impact their financial future.” – Joe Welu, Founder and CEO at Total Expert
Joe: People want to do business with other people. They want to do business with people they trust and, of course, brands that they trust. We’ve proven that in the real estate transaction, mortgage transaction, the technology is going to continue to enhance the experience and, in some cases, there’s maybe going to be a slice of the market that can be taken and the robots can totally run it, right?
Joe: But the majority, you think about all the millennials coming up, what do we know about them? They want to research everything. They want to interact when they want to interact, so timing and relevance is really important, but they still want a person. They want to know how it’s going to impact their financial future.
