On our recent Ask the Expert webinar, we sat down with Mortgage Expert, podcast host, and Thrive Mortgage leader, Phil Treadwell, to hear his first-hand experiences, tips, and tricks on how loan officers can build their personal brand to power business growth.
A big misconception when building a personal brand is that it’s about selling. You don’t want to be a walking commercial advertisement for your business. Building your personal brand is about using your platform to educate and share knowledge. The results you earn from building relationships are what materializes into future business. As Phil Treadwell puts it, “Effective marketing is the balance of trust and attention.” Build trust by educating to gain your audience’s attention by finding something they value.
Here are 5 Ways to Get Started Building Your Personal Brand:
- Tell Your Company What You’re Doing
For loan officers that want to build your personal brand within the company that you work for, it’s important to be open and honest with what you are trying to accomplish and why. Have a discussion with your managers about your plan. It’s a win-win situation, as you’ll bring in more business as a result.
- Use the Marketing Formula
When starting on your personal branding journey, use the Marketing Formula to answer three questions.
- Who is your audience?
- What is the value or message you are trying to deliver to that audience?
- What is the best platform or medium to share that value or message and reach your audience?
Phil answers these questions through the lens of his own Mortgage Expert podcast:
- Who is your audience? Mortgage professionals
- What is the value or message you are trying to deliver to that audience? Tips to make Mortgage professionals more money
- What is the best platform or medium to share that value or message and reach your audience? Podcasts
- Document, Don’t Create
People looking to build their personal brand often feel pressure to create content. Instead of trying to create content you think your audience values, start by documenting what you are doing. Keep focused on one platform. Phil gives the advice that whatever content you like to consume is typically what you are going to like to share. Like to watch videos? Start a YouTube channel! While documenting what you are doing, you’ll help others in the same situation.
- Be Consistent & Build Your Database
Don’t get discouraged if your content doesn’t take off right away. Consistency is key. You are building relationships and trust with your audience — that doesn’t happen overnight. To be consistent, you need to share content every day. A good approach is to ‘batch’ create content. If you have a few hours free, create two or three videos or posts (whichever your medium is) and save those for a day when you are too busy to create something new. Consistency extends beyond content to tracking and following up on your leads! Every person you meet should be added to a database. Start easy with an excel spreadsheet and make it a point to share the content you create with that database often.
- Keep Measurement Simple and Appropriate
A lot of people get excited when they’ve created a lead, and this is great, but it’s not the only success metric. You started on this personal journey to help people, and the ultimate goal and success metric should be getting people into homes. Starting out, you should measure reach. Reach is the total number of people who see your content. Likes and comments are validating and can provide ways for you to engage with your audience, but reach is the best place to start. How many times have you read an article or watched a video, but not liked or commented? The majority of your audience is going to consume and may not engage.
If you’d like to hear more, you can watch the webinar here.
About Phil Treadwell:
Phil Treadwell is a Certified Mortgage Advisor and a 17-year veteran of the mortgage industry as both a top-producing mortgage banker & independent mortgage broker. In addition to working at Thrive Mortgage, Phil is also the host of the Mortgage Marketing Expert podcast, and he is the Co-Founder of Industry Syndicate podcast network. Phil was named to National Mortgage Professional Magazine’s lists “40 Most Influential Mortgage Professionals Under 40” in 2019 and “Most Connected Mortgage Professionals” in 2021 as well as “Top 20 Mortgage Professional of 2020” by Yahoo! Finance.
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