The power of personalization in local mortgage marketing

Justin Ulrich
You bet, if you wouldn’t mind, we could just maybe talk a little bit about your background and what got you to the role that you’re in currently over at AnnieMac.

Ellen Duncan
Definitely excited to dive in with you today. So as you said, about 15 years of always a career marketer. I started my career as a digital marketing transformation consultant, but straight out of school. So had to sort of learn on the job. 

I spent a few years working with Accenture in a consulting role across a lot of different industries, got to know OEM and automotive with General Motors. I worked with Southwest Airlines and on the user experience of their first in-flight wifi experience to bring your own device.

Also got the opportunity to start working with the Coca-Cola company. I left Accenture after the second chapter of my career to join the Coca-Cola company and spent about eight years there at the culmination leading digital marketing for the North America division. I usually have a Diet Coke right here, but it’s not quite, right afternoon, so I’m about to have it.

Still a big lover and fan of the brands and company there. In 2020, we all went through our own sort of transitions and life experiences, and I decided to take a step into being an entrepreneur. So as you know that I founded an independent marketing consulting business called Pineapple Partners, in which we partner with many different verticals and companies to really drive their growth strategy and marketing transformation.

A part of what I do in a day-to-day basis is work with AnnicMac Home Mortgage across their brands and companies as chief marketing officer. So still own and operate Pineapple Partners and work with some wonderful clients there, but also I’m really happy in my role as CMO at AnnieMac.

Justin Ulrich
Very cool. Did you plan that little ding to go off right when you said Pineapple Partners? That way people-

Ellen Duncan
I almost want to call out AnnieMac leader who’s texting me.

Justin Ulrich
It’s like Pavlov’s dog, when they hear that ding on their phone, they’re gonna think Pineapple Partners. Well, that’s good. I appreciate you running through your background, lots of awesome experience with some really well-known great brands that obviously do very well.

So if you wouldn’t mind, let’s talk a little bit about, with your experience in these different industries and lots of different tactics and initiatives from a marketing standpoint, what do you think based on your testing experience really moves the needle for someone who’s trying to do their own local marketing?

Ellen Duncan
Definitely. I think that’s a really great, especially with what we’re talking about here is local marketing is at the end of the day, when you’re communicating what it’s with a customer or in our case at AnnieMac, a borrower or a referral partner that you have a relationship or someone you’re trying to generate awareness and drive a relationship with, you have to be relevant, customized, and personalized. 

So I can talk through a few examples of what we do at AnnieMac, but even reference my days at Coca-Cola where I’ll give a little background there.

We are obviously an international company. There’s two countries that Coca-Cola doesn’t do business in, but then also works with local bottlers with sort of boots on the ground, very local presence, local sponsorships, partnerships, retail and restaurant, food service partnerships as well. 

And so when we think about local marketing, I’ll go into AnnieMac and maybe can introduce a little bit who AnnieMac is and what we do. But what we really believe is that the most important aspect of local marketing is understanding the unique needs of realtor partners, borrowers in the given market. 

I mean, you think about someone that’s trying to buy their first home in Texas versus maybe someone that’s retiring and wants to downsize or maybe even buy a second vacation home in the Philadelphia area, the kind of realtor referral partner they’re working with, their kind of financial situation, what they’re looking for from a communications and product standpoint is different. 

And so we really believe in sort of providing all the options to our branches and LOs so that they can customize at the local level to what makes sense for them, their market and their customers.

Justin Ulrich
So is it, can you just dig in a little bit deeper on that? Are you providing like a program that they have all the kind of prepackaged assets and stuff that they can go in and kind of tweak a little bit and make their own?

Ellen Duncan
Exactly. There’s sort of three, I’d say key areas that on an ongoing basis we’re providing. So one is what we call a monthly topical package.

And so we’ll back up for a second. And so the sort of bread and butter of AnnieMac Home Mortgage is what we call a distributed retail business. And so we have local branches and divisions, most of whom go to market as AnnieMac Home Mortgage.

We do have some DBAs in some regions, but what we do is from the corporate or sort of the center, quote unquote, is provide monthly topical content. It really helps our Salesforce customize and localize. So think about things like flyers, social templates, ideas on presentations they could be giving to realtor and referral partners, even video scripts to get them going. 

But with a lot of ability of either, insert local relevant fact here, or even ideas on, hey guys, think about the market, what’s happening in your area, even the weather, are school breaks happening?

Did anyone win a championship? What are very sort of applicable things that a receiver of that communication would really say, hey, yeah, I know that LN, that LO is in my area. They understand my needs because they are sort of one with the community.

So to that point, it’s marketing collateral that adapts to each market. We talked about print materials, but again, having the places where it’s really plug and play to highlight local data, success stories, et cetera, to be, but it doesn’t look like it’s sort of boilerplate could apply, but it’s even I’ll go as far as, we talk a lot about using your actual borrower, your customer images, or people that look and feel like your borrowers. 

There are local markets that lean certain ways demographically or culturally. And we wanna make sure that it’s relevant for your market there that doesn’t feel cookie cutter and applicable at any market.

Justin Ulrich
Yeah, it is interesting. We kind of fall into this conversation quite often on this podcast. And it’s, a lot of times, folks just don’t know where to start.

And so if you provide the direction and just get their ideas going, they’re kind of wheels turning, then they can take it and kind of run with it and try something. And then once they try something, my gut tells me is that they become more and more comfortable with the more reps that they’re doing. 

And then they can kind of, eventually the momentum builds and then they’re off on their own and don’t necessarily rely on your, maybe your suggestions as often.

Ellen Duncan
Yeah, I mean, it’s often that we know this about so many parts of life, or like the first just getting started is the place. And so again, that’s where we’ve, I’d say we’ve really learned, even as a marketing team at AnnieMac to almost to that point, be very specific into it, even tactic that way.

Or if someone’s really struggling, I guess to your point of getting started, what is a local event or what is something that’s happened to be there? Great listing you’ve worked with or a great borrower story that you can start with. But again, it’s to your point, sort of local and personal first, and then grow from there.

But like so many things in life, it’s making the first step.

Justin Ulrich

Yeah, for sure. The other call out that I really liked was you talked about stories and telling other people’s stories, which is another thing that we talk about quite a bit. I think because people, if you think about like from the dawn of time, as far as we can understand back to like, people communicated through stories.

Like if you look at like cave paintings and stuff, it wasn’t just pictures, right? They typically tell a story and that’s how folks learn. And that’s what people connect with.

And if you can get someone to connect with you through the stories that you’re telling, not only the viewer, but also those that you’re telling the stories about, you’re able to build trust in an audience within your community that otherwise you might struggle to do so.

Ellen Duncan
Yeah, I mean, so much of, whether it’s brand storytelling or even I’ll say selling storytelling that would your customer in our case, whether that’s a realtor, referral partner, a borrower can see themselves in that story, then that’s when it’s gonna resonate the most and have that sort of brand recall or even LO name recall. 

It can go as deeper when we think local, even the type of house you’re showing, there’s oftentimes you’ll see a lot of within the real estate space, whether mortgage or realty, you’ll see like these big, beautiful homes. We know the average American home is $350,000.

We have to be aware and tell the stories that are gonna resonate with who we’re actually wanting to communicate with versus even sort of, like I said, sort of cookie cutter or even aspirational sometimes.

Justin Ulrich
Yeah, a hundred percent. So you’ve tried and tested a lot of different things across different brands. Do you have an example of something that you tried and maybe just failed?

And it could be that obviously you learned from the failure and you move forward from it, but what just didn’t work?

Ellen Duncan
Yeah, I’d say failure is always important in order to learn and sort of, whatever quote you wanna say, fail forward. What I would say continues to, continue, I should say we’ve learned from it, but it continues to not work for double entendre is the assuming everyone has a certain type of story. So to that point, we’ll talk about things like, talk about local sponsorships or what’s a local community event.

And then we’ll find out that there’s a branch that frankly is just very rural. There aren’t really town gatherings or a spring fair or local things to sponsor. And so we might, I’ll say, give an example of, one of our monthly topical, a big suggestion of, hey, go out, host this kind of event, follow up, be here in person, showing up, doing recording, bring realtors in and record videos with them, get them online.

And then someone will say, I’ll give an example. We have branches in places like South Dakota, Utah, where just things are frankly hours away to drive. And it just, again, it’s not applicable to that market.

And so it’s for us as marketers at the center to really understand what those local markets are. I’ll say similarly, but different example, but where I’m able to bring this experience with work, like with AnnieMac, I have worked in the past with a nationwide nonprofit that has local market presence. They are a really interesting entity.

We might be able to note them in the notes. I just didn’t, but who they are, they’re one of the largest nonprofits. They deal with finding a cure and supporting patients of a illness we all know of.

And it’s always interesting when I hear from their CEO about why they maintain the local chapters because of their belief in each market being so different. So that people that have this disease and the way that they wanna relate to those with them in Wichita, Kansas is very different than Washington, DC. 

And so the ability to fundraise and communicate, even vernacular, you look at their CRM campaigns, they change emails based on the local markets because of how often someone wants to get communicated with, even how casual or formal, all those things you need to understand because we’re in a big country, a lot of nuances to all of that.

Justin Ulrich
Yeah, for sure. Yeah, you think about, it’s really hard for anybody to build their own audience from the ground up, especially I hadn’t considered in more rural areas where some folks, especially in those areas, they may not even be using social media as prominently as in other areas. So you have to try to figure out ways to tap into audiences that already exist.

And when you have something like this nonprofit or a different community organization, try to figure out how you can kind of plug into what they’re doing and help out and serve the community in ways that you maybe didn’t think of to then gain access to that audience that’s already been built.

Ellen Duncan
Yeah, I think just that notion of being open to piggybacking on that, there’s oftentimes, there’s always the ability, it’s one plus one equals three, it takes your point to find either a local group, community, serviced event, even education, or even just, I mean, our case of realtor brokerage that’s trying to get better and saying, let’s come together and go after it, especially if you’re going after the same sort of local audience.

Justin Ulrich
Yeah, have you had an initiative that, I know you talked about the nationwide organization a second ago, but have you had any other initiatives that worked really, really well?

Ellen Duncan
I’d say a few things that have worked well, we’re still optimizing for sure, are, and again, this gets a little bit within our space, within AnnieMac, are first-time homebuyer seminars. These are the place where it’s this opportunity to get in front of potential first-time homebuyers, have an open forum, sort of Q&A, information sharing, to one, provide a service to the community of just where a lot of people, frankly, don’t know where to start. There’s a lot of myths about how much money you need to have in terms of a down payment.

They’re not aware of credit offerings or down payment assistant programs, and where we’re able to partner with, again, whether it’s a local college, whether it’s a realtor, whether it’s a school, a church, and bring that value offering education to the community, but through a trusted partnership, to your point. 

So it doesn’t necessarily feel sort of overly salesy, but we’re able to find a key place of, these people want this information. Let’s be a trusted advisor at the end of the day, whether they partner with us as their lender today or in 15 years, but they see our local branch in LO as a trusted advisor.

Justin Ulrich
That’s great. Yeah, I’ve heard a stat. It was one of our recent guests called it out, and I’m totally gonna mess up the number, so I’m just gonna make it up, but it’s something around like 50% or 48% of Gen Z folks who may have the ability to purchase a home, they typically don’t, because there’s a lack of trust with the lender, and they just don’t wanna pull the trigger because they feel like they’re unsure as to what they’re getting into.

Obviously, we’re running uphill against high rates and other high prices and other things, but- 

Ellen Duncan
No, but just to that point of sort of the notion of financial literacy and just providing, just the information to inform people, again, to build that trust and continue to grow on it versus just leaning on them to, or expecting them to know and just come to an LO with all the information.

Justin Ulrich
Yeah, no, that’s a great suggestion. If you had a suggestion for someone, it could be an LO, it could be a real estate agent, it could really be anybody who does their own local marketing, what would a suggestion be for them to really try today or this week that could really move the needle for them in terms of building momentum if they’re struggling to drive growth in their local area?

Ellen Duncan
It’s gonna sound basic, so I’m happy to grow on it, but I can pin you to the whole point of just starting is you have a database, whether it’s in your contact list, hopefully it’s in a CRM or something that can be segmented, but everyone has, if you’re in a version of this business, you have a database that can be leveraged. 

Oftentimes we see, especially in, I’ll say the retail mortgage space, a lot of, we call it like set it and forget it. So a reliance on, we set a database in, we have it segmented by certain borrowers, certain realtors, maybe you have your active realtors, inactive realtors, but then a reliance on the automation of a CRM.

If you’re not in there checking in, sending, or either customizing, adjusting, or net new writing, something that is local. I mean, I live in the Philadelphia area, it’s been 75 degrees and sunny, everyone is in a great mood. Right now, it’s a great reason to reach back out, check in, say it finally feels like spring, let’s get back in touch, see what’s going on.

But if you only rely on the automation, automation’s great, as I work with great marketers at Anniemac that are doing that on behalf of our LOs, but we, one day maybe with AI, we’re just gonna send, once it’s sunny, an email on behalf of everybody, but we’re not doing that today, and that’s where, really at the local level, owning your business is to take advantage of your database and your local knowledge.

You’re there walking the streets, you see when a high school team wins a championship, you see when the weather changes, you see when a listing goes live that everyone’s been wondering about that house for years, that you’re able to act on that, either via quick social media posts that goes to your network, or through things like your CRM.

But it’s just, again, being comfortable, practicing enough to make yourself comfortable to just act on those triggers.

Justin Ulrich
Yeah, that’s a really good point. I do think that when we talk about lead funnels, lead gen, you get the lead, you trap in the CRM, it’s great, like best practice if you have an automated system to reach out, but you tend, like you said, to set it and forget it, and you’re missing tons of opportunities to be able to reach out and connect on a personal level if you’re just relying on those more general communications to go out.

Ellen Duncan
Yeah, I always try to help our teams understand, and even ourselves as marketers, is we are all receivers of marketing ourselves, and we all know to, let’s say, at least 80 to 90%, when something feels a little more automated versus something that you can tell really is truly first name, not just insert first name here. 

Again, all of that is beneficial and does help, and we are able to reignite cold leads with that through automation, but at the end of the day, when you really know something is truly personalized based on what’s happening today, or especially in the local community, it’s gonna get a lot more responses.

Justin Ulrich
Yeah, my favorite’s when I get an email that says, hey, first name, just wanted to check in.

Ellen Duncan
Happens to everybody, and we’re all the receivers of it, but yeah, it’s pretty bad.

Justin Ulrich
Oh, man. Well, these are all great suggestions. I’m curious what it’s like being in your shoes and having worked with so many different businesses across so many different industries.

Like, how do you keep organized? You got best practices for certain things that just don’t apply in some industries, but they do with others. Like, how do you kind of stay focused?

Ellen Duncan
Great question. I’d say a few different things. One is, from a true marketing standpoint, it’s not, and I have a couple of clients that I’ve worked with that are investors in other companies, and so they’ll see some of the work across, and it’s the thinking always needs to change, and the strategies and understanding your consumer segments, your offering, obviously, a lot of those things.

But the needs themselves of understanding who your target audience is, what are their needs, understanding that archetype, what are their media consumption habits, how can we talk to them, how often do we need to talk to them, all of those things are the basics. 

And so that’s where it’s one of those, I would say sort of refreshingly interesting that so many organizations that I work with and have worked with, irrespective of the life stage, whether a seed stage startup all the way to a publicly traded Fortune 50 company are still struggling to understand exactly who their customer is and how to best engage with them. 

And so that’s where, but at the end of the day, everything we’re talking about when we’re saying local, but the notion of personalized, make it relevant when they need it, all still applies.

And so for me, it’s really what I love about what I’m able to do on a day-to-day basis. Like I said, I work on AnnieMac business every day and love growing that company, but able to still keep my hands and engage with other organizations that it keeps those muscles. I really, my personal, one of my personal sort of mandates for myself is to avoid muscle memory.

And so by continuing to engage across other verticals, you’re able to see trends, understand what’s happening and be able to apply that no matter the business you’re working on.

Justin Ulrich
Yeah, that’s awesome. I do, it resonates with me. I think a lot of folks don’t consider like getting to know their customer better so that they can better communicate and better provide value that addresses their specific pain points.

And one of those ways to do that is just to engage with, to talk with, have relationships with your customers, get to know them better, be human with them. It builds trust. They’ll wanna purchase more depending on the business that you’re in, but they wanna do more business with you moving forward.

There’ll be long lifetime customers, but you also get to know that segment a little bit better so that when you try to get others that look like them, it’ll be much easier for you to bring that business in.

Ellen Duncan
Yep, and then it’s that notion of, even if you take an average American home buyer, the stat tends to change year over year, but does an average of eight to 10 mortgage transactions in their lifetime, including refinancing, things like that. And so that’s where it’s still this sort of long customer lifetime value, but where we find this unique opportunity is to help our loan officers and branches stay in front of their home buyers. 

So you might’ve bought your first home in 2022. Well, maybe based on your rate, you might need to refinance. But typically, you’d still want to engage them in a valuable way. So that’s another, I’d say, nuance where local marketing and having that intelligence, boots on the ground mentality that you’re part of the community and can use that is helpful where you’re not just sending…

Again, we believe in and we always wanna do the nuts and bolts of happy loan anniversary, happy birthday, email, checking in for the holidays, but those are sort of the expected, but where we can encourage those value added interactions with past customers to keep AnnieMac in our lowest top of mind. So whether that’s quick market update of just, hey, checking in, let you know, like value of homes increased a lot. We can talk about home equity or we can just let you know.

So we’re in front, we have some tools and some automated, again, campaigns that we’re sending to provide, not just checking in to check in, but as much as we can with valuable information.

Justin Ulrich
Yeah, and staying top of mind means that if they have anyone that comes up in their sphere that they can make the referral, which also makes me think of your customers or the buyers are one segment of folks that you’re gonna be going after. You should also be going, if you’re an LO, maybe going after real estate agents as well to provide value to them so that you stay top of mind so that they give you referrals when it comes up. 

If you’re an agent, do the same with LOs or other folks within your sphere in your local community. You know, it’s not just about providing value to your end user or your buyer, but it’s providing value to everyone within your network if you can do so.

Ellen Duncan
Definitely, and we really see our realtor referral partners as our key customer. And that’s where, as we have new products, learnings, just even stats, things that we can enable them with. We go as far as even, we have a really great product called the Cash2Keys platform that helps buyers have cash offers when they previously would not be able to financially have a cash offer.

And once we arm our realtor referral partners with getting, you know, it only takes about 30 minutes to getting certified in the Cash2Keys program, we then provide them with a ton of social content, again, video scripts, come together, help them record videos so they can, again, it’s another tool and something they can bring to go to market and hopefully get more buyer agreements and things like that.

Justin Ulrich
Perfect, no, that’s awesome. You’ve given us tons of insights. I, you know, I love that you wear so many hats.

One of the things that I thought of, because, you know, aside from all this, you’ve got kiddos, you know, and you’re super busy. I’m sure you’re running all around at different sporting events and stuff. We’ve got four kiddos too. So I know that you kind of get in a taxi mode when you’re not working.

Ellen Duncan
Yeah, but it helps you. I think even, you know, always have that sort of, I call myself a marketer’s marketer. I’m a sucker for good marketing as well.

And my daughters now, because they’re in first and third grade, but they hear me on a lot of calls. We had a cute thing happen recently with a at-home billboard. And my nine-year-old said, like that, she truly said, that doesn’t really seem to resonate with her target audience. You got it. There you go.

Justin Ulrich
Well, hats off to you for wearing so many hats. You know, typically what we like to do is try to get the background of our guests and drop them into AI to come up with a fun image. So I thought that Wonder Woman was very appropriate for all that you do.

Ellen Duncan
Oh my gosh, that’s amazing. Love it.

Justin Ulrich
Awesome. Well, yeah, for sure. Before we let you go, Ellen, you know, how should folks follow you? How should they follow your brand?

Ellen Duncan
Yeah, great. Thanks for asking. So for AnnieMac Home Mortgage, I would say, so LinkedIn, follow AnnieMac Home Mortgage on Instagram, at @anniemacnation.

We, myself, Ellen Duncan, also our CEO, Joe Panebianco, or Joseph Panebianco, I think he’s on LinkedIn, providing a lot of market insights. He’s been in the business for over 25 years. A really great leader. Follow him there. And then I also share a little bit of my life as a working parent and what that, on Instagram, as @pineapplellen.

Justin Ulrich
Very cool. Well, this has been awesome. I appreciate you joining us in the lab. Thank you for listening, everyone, and hope to see you on the next episode.

Ellen Duncan
Thanks so much. This was great.

Justin Ulrich
You bet.

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.