Summary
In an era where 54% of Gen Z doesn’t trust financial institutions, how do successful loan officers earn customer trust? In this episode of the Local Marketing Lab, Rachel Witt, Assistant VP of Marketing at ALCOVA Mortgage, reveals proven strategies to build authentic connections in the digital age. She shares how loan officers can earn customer trust through community involvement and strategic video marketing.
Community involvement that drives results. Local impact matters more than ever. Rachel explains how ALCOVA’s community-first approach helps loan officers build lasting relationships. She shares specific examples of successful initiatives that turn skeptical prospects into loyal advocates.
Video marketing that builds genuine connections. Today’s homebuyers want more than just transactions – they want relationships. Rachel demonstrates how simple videos can transform the customer experience. From milestone updates to educational content, she shows how video helps loan officers earn customer trust at every touchpoint of the buying journey.
Employee advocacy that amplifies reach. Personal authenticity beats corporate messaging. Rachel reveals how ALCOVA dramatically increased their LinkedIn engagement by empowering their leadership team to share company content with personal insights.
Key Takeaways
Here are some topics discussed in the episode:
- Gen Z’s distrust of financial institutions and how to overcome it
- Leveraging community involvement for authentic business growth
- Creating effective video content
- Successful employee advocacy programs
- Consistency in content creation
I would challenge everyone to actively look for ways to add video to their process. Clients are going to remember you more just by recording some simple, easy videos.
RACHEL WITT
Resources
- Connect with Rachel Witt on LinkedIn.
- Learn more about ALCOVA Mortgage.
- Follow ALCOVA on LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, X, and TikTok.
- Check out BombBomb video messages.
Other shout-outs
- Will Baylock for video marketing.
Transcript
Justin Ulrich
What’s up everyone, and welcome to the Local Marketing Lab, where you get real-world insights from industry pros to help you drive local revenue and local for growth. This podcast is brought to you by Evocalize – digital marketing tools powered by local data that automatically work where and when your locations need it most. Learn more at evocalize.com.
Well, what’s up and welcome to the Local Marketing Lab. Joining us in the lab today is a guest with a wide variety of marketing experience in various industries. She’s a licensed horse show judge, she loves the movie Gladiator, and is the Assistant VP of Marketing at ALCOVA Mortgage. Rachel Witt, thanks for joining us in the lab, my friend.
Rachel Witt
So glad to be here. Thank you for the invite.
Justin Ulrich
You bet. Yeah, it seems like you guys are doing some really cool stuff from a mortgage perspective, sorry, from a marketing perspective in the mortgage space. I noticed that you were recently on a Total Expert video where I picked up on you from, and we recently partnered with them too, so I figured, hey, it might be good to bring you in and maybe talk a little bit about your experience and how ALCOVA is helping their loan officers go to market at the local level.
Rachel Witt
Awesome. Let’s dig into it.
Justin Ulrich
Let’s do it. So I guess to start off, why don’t you tell a little bit about kind of your experience at ALCOVA. I know that you kind of rose up to the ranks and maybe a little bit about what helped drive that growth. What were you doing so special from a marketing perspective?
Rachel Witt
Sure. I’ve been at ALCOVA Mortgage for going on eight years now. I started off as a marketing specialist and moved up to manager of marketing operations, and now the AVP.
So ALCOVA is a really great place to learn and grow, and I’ve been very honored to be a part of this company. Before I even came here, I also worked at the Kroger company, and I was a producer director there doing internal video production for them, and then I also did associate communications and engagement with them.
All of that to say, that was very much, even though it wasn’t like a marketing title, you were doing marketing within the company to get people within the company to take action on something or whatnot.
And when I finally decided I wanted to make a career move and shift to something different, marketing was just a natural approach for me. So ALCOVA gave me a shot, and here I am today, grateful to be here.
Justin Ulrich
Very cool. Yeah, it’s funny how you kind of fall into your role. I, too, similarly, right after college, I got into tax accounting, which is not…
My personality does not suit me well to be a tax accountant. It’s marketing all the way, and I was fortunate enough to have some pretty good mentors early on in my career to say, hey, maybe you should shift and maybe go back and get your MBA and get into marketing, which is… It’s the best thing I’ve ever done.
It’s like way more of a fulfilling career for myself personally than it would have been had I stuck with what I was doing. But I guess now that you’ve got a few years under your belt there over at ALCOVA, so what are some things that you think really moved the needle from a local marketing perspective?
Rachel Witt
Community involvement is a really big piece of what we do here at ALCOVA. We have our ALCOVA CARES initiative where we’re doing a lot for teachers and schools, and we have a market on the market event every year where we are getting school supplies for the Roanoke City Schools, which is a huge part of our community that is always in need every year. So we do a lot with that.
We do Toys for Tots. We did a lot with disaster relief. So when the hurricane was hitting North Carolina, we did a lot to raise money and get assets to those people who were in dire, dire need just to get by every day.
So that’s a lot about what ALCOVA is, but when you look at it more from a local perspective or a perspective of a loan officer, community involvement is a really big deal because so many people, especially today and the younger homebuyer generation, they’re so skeptical about banks and lending institutions in general. In fact, a recent study by FinLocker showed that 54% of the Gen Z generation, they don’t trust lenders at all. And that’s your next group of first-time homebuyers.
So you have kind of an uphill battle to get those folks to change their point of view in order to work with you. Homebuyers want to work with someone who isn’t just there for the transaction. They are invested in the long-term well-being of the community.
And that’s who we are here at ALCOVA. So we really encourage our loan officers to find something that they’re truly passionate about in the community and we’ll lend them some money to make an impact in that way. And we’ll do a lot to help them with that on social media to press releases, what have you.
But when an individual loan officer takes the time to really engage with the community, they’re building relationships. And I call that organic networking. And people are going to be more likely to refer friends and family that they’ve met with a loan officer at a local fundraiser or a little league or some charity event.
And it’s better than meeting someone in that type of aspect rather than just seeing someone in an ad somewhere. It’s a lot more of a genuine connection, if you might say.
Justin Ulrich
Yeah, that’s very interesting. I hadn’t heard that stat about the Gen Z being so distrusting of lenders, loan officers. But even more interesting is that it aligns like that generation aligns so well with social channels.
So if you’re trying to build trust with a segment of folks that are all over social, what are some things that you’ve tried or that you’ve seen work really well to help build trust on those channels?
Rachel Witt
Well, I think one of the best ways to do that is through first-time homebuyer education. So we talk about the younger homebuyer. They’re doing this all day long. They have their phone in front of their face. That’s where they are. So you have to meet them where they are.
The same study that I mentioned earlier demonstrated how so many of the younger homebuyers, they feel so overwhelmed that they’re making costly mistakes in how they do their budgeting. And they’re missing out on home ownership opportunities altogether because they don’t know what they don’t know. 49% of the next gen say that they aren’t even confident in their knowledge of homebuying.
And the really cool thing that this report breaks down is it actually shows topics that Gen Z is searching for online. And I’ll give you some of those stats. 28% are searching for, how do I invest my money?
28% search, how do I pay off my loans and debts? 18% search, how can I save money? And that’s a huge struggle for so many people right now with inflation in the economy, the way it is. They can’t even save the money that they need for a down payment, but they probably also think they need a 20% down payment and they don’t know the options that are available to them.
16% search for, how do I buy a home? 15% search, how do I create a budget? So these are really great numbers because they give you a starting point basically on, you know what the barriers are, you know what they’re trying to learn more about online. So that’s the starting point for your content strategy and how you can educate them and get them down on the right path.
They may not be ready to buy today, but if you nurture and help grow and educate them, they’re probably going to come back to you down the road because you helped them get to the point of where they are now ready to buy a home. So social media plays such a huge role in doing that and video even more so.
Justin Ulrich
Yeah, it’s…platforms now are moving away from putting so much weight on like searched content and more on the algorithm to serve up the stuff that, I mean everybody who’s listening knows if they’re in social, like they’re just getting content thrown in front of them all the time and the more you engage with certain things that just the algorithm gets smarter and smarter and serves up stuff that it believes you’re going to engage with.
And if you’re in that segment of folks who are, who are, you know, Gen Z, maybe a little more distrusting, and those are some pretty high percentages in terms of the content they’re searching for. So you know that that segment is already searching that content.
So like you said, if you’re making content that’s going to align with those things, it’s going to stop people in their tracks and they are going to listen and like, follow you, you know, and then the more content you produce in the same vein, it’ll continue to serve up to them, serve up to them. And when it comes time to make that decision, you’re top of mind and you’re the one that they’re going to, they’re going to seek after or going forward with.
Rachel Witt
Absolutely.
Justin Ulrich
It’s also interesting too, if you have content that you know, like, that’s a really good place to start. If you’re creating a bunch of content, you’ll be able to determine what stuff is actually resonating and getting traction. And then you could take, if you have some extra dollars, you could put some money behind that and run that content as an ad, because, you know, it’s already getting picked up by the algorithms, and it’s already getting lots of traction.
So why not boost it in the form of an ad, and that’ll start driving even more eyeballs towards your content.
Rachel Witt
Absolutely.
Justin Ulrich
Have you seen anything that you’ve maybe tested? Because as I understand, you’re in charge of all of marketing for ALCOVA, right? So you help loan officers, this is the assumption, but do you help them through preparing kind of, or giving them content plans or giving them directions of what type of content they should produce?
Are you producing content for them to push out? And if so, like, what are you seeing works and what doesn’t work?
Rachel Witt
So we do a lot of corporate level marketing. And we invest in a lot of tools and technology to help them do the things that they need to do. So like we invest in the Total Expert CRM, we invest in integrations that go into that CRM.
We do make content marketing calendars for loan officers to use. And we give them ideas for Reels based off of some of the subjects I talked about earlier, talking about how to do a budget, how to save for a down payment, what the home process looks like, talk about down payment assistance programs, things like that.
But I do want to talk about one of the tools that we’ve been really pushing lately with our loan officers. And it’s the BombBomb integration that we have with Total Expert. And this goes back kind of to the video marketing that I was talking about. Video is very different today.
It’s such a big trend that people are moving more and more towards because people are so big into watching Reels and such. But the reason why video is so important is it’s quick and it’s digestible content. It’s a personal reflection of who you genuinely are as a loan officer.
And that is getting more and more important to the home buyers. Video also doesn’t have to be perfect anymore. It’s not always about having the perfect lighting, the perfect audio, the perfect background.
You know, as long as you sound okay, and you’re not blurry, and your background isn’t distracting, you can take great video just at the hand of your smartphone. And you can get across a really great message and almost have that speed to lead as well. And we want our customer experience to be the best in the industry.
And video goes a long way to helping you accomplish that goal. Video is the best way to educate, update and communicate to your clients or your realtors even. And regardless of what industry you work in, I know I work in the mortgage industry, but I think this appeals to a lot of other industries.
I would challenge everyone to actively look for ways to add video to their process. And that’s what we do here at ALCOVA. With BombBomb, we’re able to take milestone updates and convert them into videos that our loan officers record, where they basically update a client on, hey, here’s where you are in the process.
Make sure you do these things and don’t do these things until we’re done and we’re at the closing table. Hey, you’re in the underwriting phase. Here’s what to expect from that. You may be hearing from me on some conditions we need to clear before we can get you to closing. Don’t worry, we’ve got you. We’re going to take care of you.
We’re going to make sure we communicate to you as soon as we hear back from the underwriter. Anything like that, it gives the home buyer more peace of mind and they feel like they’re literally being walked and held by the hand throughout the whole process. And I guarantee you that helps you with retention down the road, because they’re going to remember you more just by recording some simple, easy videos.
Justin Ulrich
Yeah, great, great suggestions. Smartphone storytelling is so, it is a massive opportunity that we have. Like you said, in every industry, we work with multiple industries.
And if you have any level of local marketing that you’re doing, it’s for you. And you don’t have to have a massive content plan, you know, well thought through strategy, just get some ideas and just start recording. And the more you record, you get some reps in there, you’ll be able to accelerate your learnings, you’ll put content out there, you’ll be able to get better and better and better.
So the quality will go up. But throughout that entire journey, people are also getting to know you, you’re giving them tips, but you’re also giving them insights into your life, into the community, right? You’re just telling different stories about the community.
So you get in front of them and continue to build that trust that that younger generation of new up and coming buyers is, you know, starving for when it comes to mortgage space.
Rachel Witt
Yep.
Justin Ulrich
Have you tried anything that has just totally bombed? Or seen someone do something that’s totally bombed? You don’t have to call them out by name. But if you do, that’ll be even better. No, I’m joking.
Rachel Witt
There was there was one point early on in my time here at ALCOVA. We had a loan officer, he wanted to send out some chocolate bars that were like, shaped like dollars and he wanted to do it during like tax season when people were getting tax refunds. Let’s just say early spring is probably not a good time to be sending chocolate through the mail.
And chocolate is a little heavy and expensive to ship too. So that was a total flop. Don’t do that, guys. Don’t do that.
Justin Ulrich
Just get a melty mess.
Rachel Witt
We give them a hard time about it. It’s a good laugh.
Justin Ulrich
Yeah, I’ve seen folks send dollars, which always gets my attention. You know, I’ve gotten just dollar or dollar bill in the mail. It’s kind of, kind of fun direct mail, though.
I mean, that’s a that’s a good point. Like it’s not dead at all. If you look at your your engagement strategy, you should basically take a step back and think what are all the channels that I can communicate across?
And how do I get them to all tie together? You know, so as you’re doing these reps, and you’re finding out what works, you’re also be you’re going to be, you know, getting inspired as like content and messaging and like, directionally, like where you continue to go and then think through Okay, well, now that this type of stuff is resonating, how do I get that message across all these other different channels and get everything working for me and direct mail is 100% still alive.
Rachel Witt
It is if you’re doing it right.
Justin Ulrich
Yeah, yeah, yeah, that’s the thing. Yeah, do it right. Cost effective. But what I like about it, though, is it’s it’s trackable. You know, I tend to as a marketer, I tend to default to the things that are more trackable, because I can, I can actually, you know, calculate what the ROI is on my time spent on on certain activities.
But there are some things that, you know, you may be able to track like with social content, there’s vanity metrics and stuff like that. But I would suggest not getting caught up in in in those types of metrics with social content, the more you do, you’re just going to get more and more momentum, and you’ll get eventually you’re going to hit that one vein where you’re creating content that takes off.
Stay in that vein, and just keep creating similar content. And you’ll continue to be showed up, you know, by the algorithms to viewers.
Rachel Witt
It’s funny that you mentioned that. Because that’s something that we really did last year with our LinkedIn content. So it’s not necessarily that we were never putting out great content to begin with. We were, but we needed to really channel employee advocacy more here at ALCOVA, especially through our leadership team.
People trust people more so than brands. So they’re not always going to engage with brand content, but they will engage with brand content that is shared by someone that they know, and have a lot of respect for, someone that they view very knowledgeable, great about the industry, and that’s who our leadership team is.
So we put a strategy together to help get that content reposted more by our leaders with an authentic message from them to convey something great that we’re doing at ALCOVA, something great that we offer about an employee that works here that’s doing great things.
And we were able to get that message out a lot more effectively. And our LinkedIn numbers shot way, way up, we started to grow our audience more, more people were seeing our content. And I even had an owner send me an email, he said, hey, I know so and so at this other lending company, they’re saying what we’re doing on LinkedIn, they’re saying we are just totally killing it right now.
People are noticing. And it’s, it’s a really great. It’s great to hear. But it’s also good to know, like, our content was always good. We just had to do a better job of getting it out there more. And employee advocacy is such a huge thing.
Justin Ulrich
Yeah, yeah, it is interesting. I called out it being a vein. If you think about gold mining, once they find once a miner will find that vein of gold in the rock, they just keep following it.
And so that’s what I would highly suggest, like we’re talking about now if you like you had employee advocacy, advocacy content, keep producing that until it no longer does what you’re expecting it to do. And then you’ll find the next thing. But there’s no reason to stop if it if you if you just keep, you know, getting the results that that you find to be positive.
So it’s like just keep mining that vein, keep following it. Eventually, things will shift, but milk it for all it’s worth, you know, while you while you have it.
Rachel Witt
Absolutely.
Justin Ulrich
Is there someone that you’ve that you think is doing marketing really, really well on the local level, it could be across social, it could be across any channel? Does anybody stick out?
Rachel Witt
There is a loan officer here at ALCOVA that I think is doing a tremendous job. He’s number one, a very genuine person. He really, really wants to help people.
But he’s one of the ones here at ALCOVA who has really embraced video marketing. He does the things with bomb bomb, he sends updates, he’ll record one off videos. If he has a client that’s really struggling to understand something, he’ll record a quick video and send it to them.
He took literally the bull by the horns when it came to video marketing. He and he went from also having like zero reviews to he’s now the number two ALCOVA loan officer here in the company for the most reviews. So because he would like he would record a video to his clients and he’d say, Hey, click the link below.
Make sure to leave me a review. I’ve been having a great time working with you on this loan. I hope you are too. If you are, make sure to click the link below. He literally points below to the link. It’s such a simple concept, but it was a way for him to really, really drive his reviews, which was a big goal of his.
And his customers tell him all the time, I love the videos. I loved the experience with you. Thank you so much. I’m going to be referring you to some people I know who are looking. But the thing about him too is he’s great at what he’s doing, but he’s also consistent in what he’s doing as well. I think that is such a big struggle.
Like people have the best of intentions when it comes to marketing. They have great ideas, but they don’t always execute them and they don’t do it consistently, which is so important.
Justin Ulrich
A lot of times it’s disheartening to take a lot of time to create content and put it out there. And it doesn’t get the metrics that you were hoping for. And people just, they’ll try, they think they fail and they’ll walk away.
But consistency is key for sure. Doing the same thing over and over for a prolonged period of time, the algorithms will reward you for it. It just takes a little time. So once you get started, don’t stop. Just keep going. Keep going.
Rachel Witt
I tell folks a lot, your first video is never going to be your best video and it does not have to be perfect, but you can’t get to your 100th if you don’t do your first. And you’ve got to do your first. Yeah.
Justin Ulrich
Yeah, for sure. Who is the loan officer? What’s his name?
Rachel Witt
His name is Will Blaylock and he’s actually local here to my community. He’s in our Benton branch.
Justin Ulrich
Very cool. We’ll try to get a link to his content so people can see all the great stuff he’s doing. That’ll be, that’ll be cool.
Well, awesome. Well, before we jump, I did want to highlight a little bit of something about your personal life. So you mentioned that you are big in the equestrian space. So what is it that draws you so much into that space? I don’t even know how to, how do I phrase that? Are you an equestrian? Is that the term?
Rachel Witt
So yes, I do ride. I am not a professional equestrian. I would be what you would call an amateur rider, but I’ve been in the horse industry ever since I was born.
My father and my mother both had a huge passion for horses when they were young. My dad actually was the first to graduate from college in his family and he went on to become an architect, but he always wanted a horse. And he got his first horse when he was 16, sold it for, he bought it for like $325, sold it later for $375.
He says, I made a $50 profit. I am well on my way to my horse passion. We now have a farm with about 80 different horses and we breed and raise them.
And we have like Arabians, saddlebreds, hackney ponies and hackney horses. And in the Arabian industry, you can cross them and produce an outstanding individual to compete in the half Arabian circuit. So we do a lot of that.
So I actually have my own horse right now. The fun thing is I bred and raised him with my dad. Raised him ever since he was a baby. We put the cross together in our minds. We made it happen. And I now own and show him.
And he was actually number two in his division last year in the country. So he’s a great horse himself, but it’s fun to raise them from the very beginning and then see them go on and do great things, win championships and thrive. And we obviously sell a lot of them too.
And it’s great to see people have great connections with them. They do really well, but they’re also just a great individual horse that you can have just a great loving relationship with as well.
But I also judge. Oh, that’s a lot of fun too. And I’ve also done a lot of coaching in the past with kids. In fact, one of the kids that I coached when I was in my early twenties, she’s now the head coach at Texas A&M and she is literally killing it right now as a collegiate coach.
Justin Ulrich
That’s awesome. Yeah. We had, my dad had a thoroughbred percheron mix growing up and it was like 17 and a half hands, 17 and a half hands high.
And my brother, I remember as a kid, we were like teenagers. He’s like, he jumped off the fence to just jump on it bareback and just try to ride it. And this thing bucked him so hard and he had a mouthful of dirt. And it was probably one of the funniest things I ever saw.
Rachel Witt
Horses will humble you very quickly.
Justin Ulrich
Very quickly. Well, I thought it might be fun to drop you into AI, but you know, knowing that you’re an equestrian, how cool would it be to actually have a unicorn?
Rachel Witt
I love unicorns. Let’s do it. I love it.
Justin Ulrich
But even better, it might be fun to see you, you know, actually riding around and you know, the, the time of your favorite movie, Gladiator, going to battle.
Rachel Witt
Even better. I love it.
Justin Ulrich
Well, awesome. Hey, before we let you go, Rachel, how can folks follow you, follow your brand?
Rachel Witt
They can follow me on LinkedIn. Just look for Rachel Witt. Definitely go follow ALCOVA Mortgage on LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok. And X, formerly known as Twitter. We’re in all these places. We should be everywhere.
Justin Ulrich
That’s right. You got it on lock. You lead all the marketing. So those are all the right channels. If you’re listening, we thank you so much for making it this far in the episode. It’s always, you know, great to have listeners like you listening and especially for so long.
Rachel, it was a ton of fun having you in the lab. I appreciate you taking your time to give us some, some of your insights and your learnings.
Rachel Witt
Awesome. Thank you so much for having me.
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.
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