Digital marketing for mortgage: What actually works

Justin Ulrich
This is awesome. I was trying to figure out what is the best guest that I could possibly get on the show, and the name “Gillette” popped into mind. It’s the best a man could get.

Drew Gillett
It sure is. Although, no relation to the brand.

Justin Ulrich
Oh, man. Yeah, I’m sure it’s a brand new joke for you. Well, hey, I’m super excited to get you into the lab.

For those who are listening, they may or may not know that you guys are one of our great partners, and we get some insight into things that you guys are doing on the marketing side behind the scenes. 

I thought it would be awesome to bring you on, give your role over at Guild, and talk us through some of the great things you guys are doing from a local marketing perspective to give some of our guests some insights around what really good marketing looks like. 

But, before we do that, if you could tell us a little bit about your journey and how you got to where you are at leading the marketing team over at Guild.

Drew Gillett
Sure. Well, let’s see. I’ll start with nobody intends to get into mortgage. That’s not the thing to think about when you’re in high school and college, any of those things. 

My journey started, kind of my first career was in the legal field, working in litigation with law firms, that kind of thing. I’d grown up around attorneys, and so it just kind of made sense for me as I was exploring what do I do next.

So I did that for about seven years. I was primarily in the litigation consulting side, so also a career I didn’t know existed until I landed there. And so I was working on things like witness prep and jury selection and mock trials, all the cool behind the scenes things that you see on TV, which are way over-dramatized, but it was fun.

And then I decided to make a pivot and figure out what was next. So I stepped into another side of consulting. I’m in Seattle, so I figured what’s the next logical step? Well, tech companies, right? They’re everywhere. 

So I was working with a few of the big names around here in the Seattle area, and I was working with a vendor who worked with them, and my contract was coming out.

So I had a full-time offer from one of those big companies, and my recruiter called me, and she said, hey, I want you to take this interview with this mortgage company. Are you interested? I said, not really, that sounds boring.

She said, no, no, no, just go meet these guys. I think you’ll really like it. And I did.

So my journey started there in the mortgage industry. I met with a regional VP up here in the Northwest, and they hired me in knowing that this was part of the end of our interview decision-making process. You’re overqualified.

We want you to come in and do whatever you think is best. I said, well, that’s a really interesting proposition, especially compared to this other job offer I had. I said, let’s do it. And you know what? I can leave anytime it gets boring.

Justin Ulrich
Yeah, I mean, that’s the thing. I think on the marketing side of things, because I do marketing as well, it’s a lot of fun, and it really is what you make of it. I’ve worked in some pretty boring industries as well, like telecom and payment processing and stuff.

It’s not really exciting, but if you are interesting and you’re creative, you can make it exciting. And that’s actually what makes you a really good marketer in those spaces. It helps you to stand out amongst all the other kind of shades of gray that are out there.

So, you know, Guild, they’re massive, right? You guys are like, I think, number five in terms of on the retail mortgage side.

Drew Gillett
Yep.

Justin Ulrich
2,300 loan officers, big deal. You’re working to help on the field marketing side of things, like get the name and the brand out there, not only on behalf of all the LOs, but also you’re arming them with tools to do their own marketing as well.

So it’s been a transition over the past almost 10 years that you’ve been there. Where did you kind of start? Where did you come in from a marketing standpoint? Where were things? And then what did you put in place to help enable the LOs to own their markets?

Drew Gillett
Yeah. So Guild has always been kind of the flavor of a local lender, right? We have brick and mortar branches all across the U.S. I think we’re somewhere just under a thousand physical locations, right? Which is a totally different model than an online lender. 

So when I came into Guild, it was very much focused on how do I help the people in my market get their name out there, build their brand, build their presence so that they can generate business. Our loan officers are commissioned based, right?

So they only get paid when they close a loan, but at the same time, their goal is to help everybody possible get into a home or get a better rate. And they’re not incentivized differently based on anybody that they help. 

And so my goal initially was how do I help build this business at the micro level and start to learn this industry and make sure that it’s succeeding at that level and it’s scalable.

Justin Ulrich
What were the first things that you kind of put into place? You’re like, if I’m going to make a significant difference, I need to tackle this thing. 

Was it the brand? Was it tools or things to put in the hands of the LOs doing marketing for them? Where did you focus?

Drew Gillett
So Guild had just gone through a big rebrand right before I joined. So pretty much everybody was adjusting to this new style, this new message, this new kind of different marketing points that we were using across the company. And so I came into a little bit of turbulence trying to figure out not only how do I do this, but everybody else is also figuring out how do we do it too?

It wasn’t a drastic change. It was just a change, which is always work, right? And so when I came in, I tried to bring a lot of the concepts that I had developed over my career in sending the right messaging and enabling the right tools for the job as opposed to just whatever you have been using.

One of the challenges but benefits of having such a distributed retail salesforce is that a lot of people have come up with their own solutions because they needed to, right? They are boots on the ground and they need to make things work. 

One of the first things that I did when I went into one of our biggest branches in the Northwest was talk about video. Even back then in 2016, this is something I knew is the way of the future, right? You need to have your face. You need to be present.

People need to understand who you are if you’re going to operate in a local market under a large brand. So it’s something that I started pushing from day one and still push today.

Justin Ulrich
Yeah. It’s one of the most impactful kind of tactics you can employ. And I think even on the marketing side, it’s intimidating, especially to get started and do your first videos.

A lot of times people think animation, design, I got to do graphics. Luckily, because not everyone out there has the skills to do that, but the demand on the consumer side is that people want authenticity. So that makes it really easy for somebody to go in and create their own videos.

You see a lot of the talking heads all over the social channels. That’s what people like. They engage with it.

It helps to establish a personal connection and the algorithms love it. You’re way more likely to get served up to folks in your local community if you’re doing video versus other content types.

Drew Gillett
I agree. I mean, it’s built into the algorithms. You put a picture of the front of your business versus a picture of your face.

It’s going to perform better if it’s a picture of you. It’s just the way it works. And like you said, it’s the audience that you’re speaking to is asking for this. So it’s easy, right? They want human. They want hyperlocal.

And that’s what we want too. We don’t want to push the brand. One thing I commonly say when we’re starting projects internally or I’m working with new partners is Guild does not succeed if somebody gets a loan with Guild Mortgage.

Guild only succeeds if they get a loan through Guild Mortgage with one of our local lenders. And that’s how we approach every aspect of marketing from a central space. But it’s to help emphasize that we’re here to support our loan officers in their branches.

Justin Ulrich
Yeah. Yeah. And it’s like the customer’s experience with a loan officer. The marketing helps to bring it in, but it helps to establish the relationship and repeat business and stuff. 

So there’s more than just getting that initial loan. It’s like giving them the tools they need to help establish those relationships so they can keep the business coming back for themselves over and over the years.

What are some things that you may have tested, excuse me, that would have worked really, really well from a marketing side on the local end? And then maybe some things that you’ve tried that, man, it was a flop, but you still learned from it.

Drew Gillett
Sure. What works really well, and I’ll speak to the recent time frame, is building a personal brand online. Online is this big open term, and then we can narrow it down to say on social media, which started as social networking.

So it works when you own your channel, own your space, own your community online, and start using social media as social networking. Also, a really easy place to get your face on video. So we are emphasizing that, pushing that with our loan officers, really trying to help people step into it.

Like you said earlier, it can be hard to record your first video, right? It can be kind of scary. I don’t know what I’m doing.

Do I need to hire a big production company? No, you just need to hold up your phone and take a video and talk about some stuff. These are the same conversations that they are having every single day with anybody they’re on the phone with or in person.

It’s just putting it out there. So that’s something that’s working out there right now.

A couple of things that we’ve tried in the past that didn’t work. Those are always fun. What do we learn from the flops? There are so many ways to burn money.

We’ve gone through phases where we do digital advertising, whether it’s spending money on Google Ads, whether it’s working with a vendor who’s selling this nice new shiny offering where they say they can bring you a bunch of leads. 

And generally, it’s an easy way to burn money because you can be too broad. You can be too non-specific. You can be mis-timed with the market. That’s not the way people are finding you. You’re misaligned with your audience.

You’re marketing to the wrong people. So there are a lot of pitfalls there that we’ve gone through, learned from, and helped educate our loan officers about how to avoid. But there are also a lot of really good, right ways to do digital marketing.

Justin Ulrich
Yeah. I think you touched on it’s an easy way to burn money. The thing with on the digital side with paid, it takes time.

And that’s another, if you don’t have best practices and stuff baked into what you’re doing, and you’re just, you’re trying to do things you don’t quite know what’s going on. That’s where it’s like, not only are you spending a lot of money, but you’re doing it over a longer period of time because you have to really give it a chance to work. 

But if you have something set up that is not going to work from the get go, you’re kind of dooming yourself and you don’t realize it until a couple of months have gone by and you’ve kind of burned through that cash.

Drew Gillett
Yeah. I mean, I kind of related to like building a road to your storefront, right? So you can spend too little and you’re building brick by brick this road to your storefront that some people are going to take, but you’re really not going to get the traffic you’re looking for because it’s not really a road.

You can switch it up and then you’re starting from ground zero, right? You switch from brick to something else. Now you’re starting over, you got to try and see if this is going to work.

But really the winning formula is you make a clear path, you spend the right amount of money, you do it for the right amount of time and you do it with the right content on the right channels and it ends up building a direct road to your storefront.

Justin Ulrich
So how do you, so how are your LOs doing it? How do they know what the right amount is like to get started? It seems like it’s a, I know it’s a daunting task just on the marketing side, having done my own paid digital stuff for different companies.

Like where you start is kind of a nightmare because you, the whole time you’re sweating and thinking, is this the right place? And am I just going to throw a bunch of cash in a hole?

Drew Gillett
Yeah, the right place to start is before you even consider spending money on paid ads. The place you need to start is your processes, your follow-up, your team behind you that you have for contacting leads because online is 24-7, 365. But most individual salespeople can’t be, even if they want to be.

And so you need a team set up and you need a process and a system set up to handle this. Otherwise, again, you’re back to burning money. So that’s where to start is the process.

We give loan officers at Guild a ton of tools to help make this successful. We have a team centrally that we offer called our dispatch team, which is like an ISA or some kind of inbound call taker. And so when people are either reaching out digitally, so through email or a form or something else where they’re calling in, this same team is the team that’s doing outbound.

They take these calls and route them. And if a loan officer is not available, book a meeting, right? Those kinds of things, those processes.

Separately, you have to have a system for follow-up. Most people who reach out to you through a digital ad are not immediately ready to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars. So you need to have that follow-up set up and in place.

It is, in my opinion, the most important thing to make that first contact point and get the first response. You need to validate that this person is actually interested in what their basic situation is. When it comes to housing, we all know it’s complex.

It’s expensive out there right now. And there are challenges, but everybody’s got their own unique financial story. And one of the key attributes of Guild is that we like to dive deep into that and find out what someone’s goals are.

How much are you comfortable with as a monthly payment? Which can dictate, do rates matter? Probably not. It’s really about how is this going to fit into your lifestyle and your journey for home ownership?

Justin Ulrich
So for those, you’ve talked a little bit about the tools that you guys provide for those who are maybe, and it could even be outside of mortgage too, but maybe trying to, they’re struggling to get started, maybe struggling on the social side of things. They’re not seeing the growth they want. I know right now the market is tough.

What are some things that you would suggest they could do? Just maybe test today or maybe sometime this week to help get the ball rolling in the right direction, especially in this tough time with the housing market.

Drew Gillett
Yeah. I’ll touch on a couple of things and they’re industry agnostic really. But when it comes to sales and local business, I already touched on video, personal brand, social media, those kinds of things.

Do a digital audit of your space and of yourself. So make sure that you’re showing up everywhere consistently, that you have a presence, that you’re regularly participating online because people will look for you online. It’s just the way it is today.

The second thing you need to do is get out in your community. From a local marketing perspective, what is having an impact right now are in-person events and participating. So just like I mentioned, social media, social networks, social community, in-person community is just as important, if not more.

One of the things that loan officers come to me about a lot of times is, okay, well, what do I do? What do you mean? Just like throw a happy hour and hope people show up?

No, not really. Find out what your interests are. And the easiest way to do that is what do you find yourself going down rabbit holes on?

When you’re on YouTube and you keep clicking and clicking and clicking, or you’re on TikTok or you’re on Reddit or whatever it is, what rabbit holes do you find yourself going down all the time consistently? Those are your interests. So find groups in your community that are built around that and start to build relationships.

Those will lead to more business in your local community. And those people are the same ones who are going to be looking you up online. So that’s why it’s important to have that tied together.

Justin Ulrich
Yeah, I talk quite a bit about the importance of doing exactly what you’re talking about. And with the idea being that you’re tapping into audiences that already exist. Whenever you form a relationship with somebody, they have a following, right?

They have their own sphere of influence. And if you’re able to make the connection with them and then potentially to their network, now you’re able to really grow at a much faster clip than you would if you were running your own, let’s say you’re doing your own organic social campaign or something like that. If you could bring in others, even better.

So an example of that might be, hey, you’re running down, like if you’re on the mortgage side, hey, you want to go highlight a local real estate agent who might be having an open house or something in the area. Go in, take a video, drop into the open house, give a little one minute clip on you talking to them and showcasing their personality and giving them free marketing, right? 

They will love it. They’ll love you for it and they will do what they can to help drive business your way. Now think if you did that with a multiplier, if you did that with 10, 15, 20, 50 people in your community, pretty soon you’re going to be the mayor and everyone’s going to know who you are.

Drew Gillett
Yeah. And I think that’s a really key point just to highlight it again, building relationships outside of agents and realtors has to be part of your strategy.

Justin Ulrich
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Cause otherwise you’re competing with other, if you’re an LO, you’re competing with other LOs in the same area for the referral business of the well-known agents, right? 

You want to obviously do what you can to form those relationships, but it’s going to be pretty saturated relatively quickly. So it’s like, you might as well, like you said, put your feelers out in other areas to help tap into those audiences as well.

Drew Gillett
Yeah. I mean, it kind of calls back a line, your net worth is your network, right? And it’s not the idea of like who you know is just like worth money.

It’s when you start engaging with the owner of that local coffee shop and you can introduce them to somebody who can help them with a problem they have, you’ve just added value to this relationship. 

And you can go meet, you know, the local barber and introduce them to an agent who can help them find a home because they mentioned they’ve been looking cause you’re in the real estate space while you’re getting your hair cut. You’ve now created that relationship times two, right? You’re building that connection sphere and that’s when the magic happens.

Justin Ulrich
A hundred percent. We have a real estate agent and he lives in our neighborhood and he is so plugged in. His name is Kyle Skrola.

I don’t know what agency he’s with, but he is the coach of the lacrosse team for the kids. He coaches swim team, you know, a couple of weeks after lacrosse is over with, like he is plugged into everything and everyone in the neighborhood knows him. They all really like him.

All the kids love him. He’s coach Kyle, you know what I mean? And he’s basically like really embedded himself into the, into the community through his efforts, doing things that have nothing to do with real estate.

Do you have any, any examples you could think of where, where, and it could be, it could be outside of the industry as well, but like someone who’s doing their local marketing like really, really well.

Drew Gillett
I mean, I love to follow like these interesting big brand success stories.

So I’m going to talk about some that are outside the industry because I talk about it all the time. There was an interesting one, Nike, for example, there, there was a marathon in Mexico City where Adidas was the title sponsor. And so what Nike did from a local level is they had a movement called what was it?

Own the marathon, I think. And they placed a bunch of hyperlocal out of home, like billboard banner, bus stop ads throughout the entire track of the race that not only just were like their logo, but there were messages tied to the event. So as you got further through the marathon, it was messages about getting tired and you can take that next step.

And like all those moments that create that feeling, not only for people participating in the event, but really gave that brand value of like, they get me, right. It’s authentic. They know what’s happening right now.

They’re not disconnected, even though they’re an international company, they’re here and they’re speaking to me, right. It’s that, that feeling of connection. I thought that was a really cool example.

Justin Ulrich
No, that is a really good one. That is a really good one. Yeah.

When it’s tough to, if you think about like the size of Nike’s huge and to do something local like that, it’s an undertaking. Now you think of how many of those things are they doing, you know, all over the world, it’s, it’s gotta be insane. But when you, but you, I mean, there’s value in it, right.

In local engagement, there’s so much more value than it, if I were to run like a, if I were to run, let’s say a paid digital campaign nationally, odds are that the, you know, Google or Facebook, wherever are going to spend my money in like big metros, like New York, LA, Chicago, right. And it’s just going to spend it up as efficiently as possible. Right.

And it’s not really going to benefit me, but if I were to do it in my local area, obviously I’m going to get the same, I’m going to get way more benefit from doing so. Right now, if you can do that with your strategy, like if you’re on the corporate side and you can empower your teams to be able to do local marketing at scale, it’s way more effective than just running one campaign kind of one and done on behalf of, you know.

Drew Gillett
Yeah. I mean, I’ll circle back to that’s one of our differentiators, right. Because we have this distributed retail force in the community, you know, the, the people that you’re working with when you buy a home are in your community, they know people in your community, they’re there.

So they have a deeper understanding of how to apply the larger Guild brand into that local space. And that’s what we try and empower them to do.

Justin Ulrich
Yeah. Give them tools, templates, give them a starting point where they can get all the heavy lifting out of the way, fill in their information and kind of go from there. Like it seems like a solid approach.

All right. Switching gears just a little bit. So I did some digging in your background before bringing you on.

And I mentioned a little bit earlier, like you love, you know, adrenaline filled sports, wakeboarding, snowboarding stuff, like all of the same things that I like. And I’m like, what else does this guy like that I like? And I’m digging in and you have like, a lot of Nintendo references in some of your content.

Did you grow up like was Nintendo your thing growing up?

Drew Gillett
Oh yeah. I grew up a video game junkie, still am. My current dog’s name is Zelda. So yeah, it’s a thread that runs throughout.

Justin Ulrich
I wanted to name, we recently got some cats and I want, I like the show Arrested Development. I wanted to name the cat, one of them, George Michael. And it was like, we’re not naming the cat George Michael.

I’m like, could you imagine if it got outside and you had to yell for it?

Drew Gillett
Might be some core shadowing.

Justin Ulrich
Well, I thought it might be cool to take, you know, given that your interest is kind of in the Nintendo world, you know, drop you into as a kind of a Pik-a-Drew, you know, Pokemon trainer here. 

Drew Gillett
So there we go.

Justin Ulrich
Well, it’s, this is as good as an NFT without the value is what I like to say.

Drew Gillett
So we’ll see. It could always go up.

Justin Ulrich
I mean, you also go down the Bitcoin and crypto kind of rabbit holes. So you might know something I don’t. We’ll get it over to you and you can make some money on it. 

All right, man. Well, hey, before I let you go, how do folks follow you? How do they follow Guild Mortgage?

Drew Gillett
Yeah. So Guild Mortgage, you can find across all the big social channels. You know, if it’s for business, we’re probably going to be posting on LinkedIn, but we have a really fun and engaging Instagram channel.

We’ve been creating, the team has been doing a lot of really cool creative content out there the last year or so. So I’d recommend anybody go check that out and give us a follow. If you want to follow me, I’m very active on LinkedIn as well.

You know, personal stuff. Typically I keep it to Instagram and Facebook, but LinkedIn I’m the most active on. Almost, you know, a few, a couple of times a week I’ll put something up there of just tactics or ideas that are working. So feel free to give me a follow and my content will be there.

Justin Ulrich
Very cool. That’s some really cool content. And the other thing I like about your channels is you had, it seems like you do a lot of traveling.

And so just to see, you know, the different places you go, the food you try, you know, it’s a very well-curated social channel, you know, across all of them. So good work on that.

Drew Gillett
Well, I’m a big believer that traveling gives you perspective. So I try to do it whenever I can, because sometimes when you’re just in the grind, it can get you locked into a mindset that, you know, you need to be able to step out of. And sometimes that’s physically stepping out of your comfort zone.

Justin Ulrich
Yeah. Very well, very well put. Well, awesome. Drew, it was a ton of fun having you in the lab. Thanks for joining us. And thanks to you to everybody for listening.

Drew Gillett
Yeah. Thanks.

Justin Ulrich
As always, thanks for joining us in the Local Marketing Lab. This podcast was sponsored by Evocalize. To learn more about how Evocalize can help you grow your business, visit evocalize.com. 

If you learned something from today’s episode, don’t forget to subscribe on your favorite podcast platform and follow us on LinkedIn and Facebook @Evocalize. That’s Evocalize and on X at Evocalize. 

And remember, keep innovating and testing new things. You’ll never know what connects with your customers best unless you try. Until next time. Thanks for listening.