“What’s next?”
It’s a common refrain we hear from our loan officers, and I know we’re not unique in that regard. Today more than ever, LOs are looking for that edge. They understand the path to success as originators is clear: become a trusted adviser for borrowers and agents while leveraging technology to manage transactions, pipelines, marketing and more. Mobile technology, automation, lead-generation and any other time hacks or tools that generate one more deal a month and a few more minutes at home each night are what move the needle.
LOs who don’t have that edge will fall behind. These are the stakes for our industry — and LOs everywhere have put marketers on notice.
This week, Movement Mortgage’s director of digital experience, Trey Rigdon, discussed this very topic on a HousingWire webinar with Total Expert’s CEO, Joe Welu. The two addressed how innovation in marketing technology requires an equally rapid pace of technological adoption by lenders.
At Movement, we’re in the midst of that transformation. The pace is rapid and unforgiving. Our LOs demand the best marketing solutions and strategies. It’s a challenge I know my peers in the industry face everyday, too. It’s also an opportunity for adaptive, strategic LOs and their marketing teams to gain an advantage.
Our approach to marketing technology was recently outlined in another HousingWire piece, written by our chief information officer, Henry Santos. Santos said, “Our goal is to tap into the Gig Economy by sourcing solutions and ideas from the vast global supply network of startups, incubators, fintechs, and open source collaborators who are willing to compete to build rapid solution prototypes without all the bureaucracy and inertia of traditional commercial, contractual constructs.”
From this we launched our inaugural Crowdsource Challenge, bringing together some of the top technology companies in the world to help Movement think, test and deploy disruptive digital products to the market. This approach is one that we hope would not stop at just Movement, but one that is embraced industry-wide as well.
While we are nearing an announcement of the winner of the Crowdsource Challenge and then embarking on the build-out of our next-gen LO platform, we must equip our loan officer today. With that, this week we rolled out the Movement Marketing Suite, a comprehensive yet fluid collection of tools and technologies to help our loan officers drive more business.
The suite includes industry-leading vendors such as MBS Highway and BombBomb, but new to Movement loan officers are our new partnerships with Yext, leadPops, Social Survey and a social media startup called Yip Yip. With their listings and SEO optimization, lead generation, reputation management and social media posting capabilities, respectively, these four partners offer the enterprise-wide, hands-free, automated support that today’s loan officers demand.
In the LO marketing arms race, where “what’s next?” is as common as “what’s for breakfast?”, this is the way to gain an edge. Work rapidly to find, vet and launch new technology and tools from emerging and leading vendors, then surround them with “hub and spoke” content-push strategies, and a coast-to-coast custom marketing team.
This is how loan officers can grow – or transform – into the role of trusted adviser within his or her sphere of influence. LOs who expect to be successful in our industry today (and beyond) are demanding marketing technology that works for them and provides air cover, while they deal with the hand-to-hand combat each day on the ground.
