This is just one tiny excerpt from “How To Market Your Mortgage Broker Business” (a 2 hour audio training course) that you can download for free.
Jassen: Now there are a couple of kind of straggler topics that I want to talk about real quick, before we close out tonight. One, during the very beginning of this webinar you mentioned the offline marketing and using meetup.com to do some offline networking. Could you go a little bit more into what Meetup is, what you are going to find there and kind of how you find it of value.
James: Sure. Meetup is a website where you can find local groups that are meeting for a variety of topics, both personal as well as business related. You are going to be able to go on there and say, “I am interested in dog training,” and you are going to be able to find meet up groups that are interested in dog training. If you happen to have an interest in dog training, you can go down to that group. There are going to be other people there that have that similar interest. They are going to be talking about dog training, but eventually someone is going to turn to you and say, “So what do you do for a living.” You could say whatever your 30 second elevator speech is and then you could say, “Hey, can I get your card or give you my business card,” and they hand you theirs and now you get them onto your mailing list. They get your newsletter and over a period of time you develop a relationship with them and can do business, whether it is directly related to business or if it is one of these side personal interest type things as well. You use Meetup for more of the personal side, I tend to us it solely for business. But is it effective in the personal side for generating business?
Jassen: Just to explain what you are talking about, I am divorced so I participate in some of the singles events on there here in the front range of Colorado. Because I like the fact that I can meet women that are outside of my normal social circles because my normal social circle to be honest is really hard core marketing people such as yourself, and people I work with, and so in order for me to get out of that I can use a place like meetup.com in order to go have fun, meet up with people for drinks or to do interesting activities, like here coming up in a week or two there is this thing where a bunch of people are getting together to go to one of those vertical wind tunnels where you get to fly, stuff like sky diving without the sky diving. Fun things like that. You meeting all kinds of interesting people, and in my business we estimate that as an aggregate across the country one in twenty people have a significant tax problem, and by meeting enough people it is inevitable, like I said earlier, especially this time of year, people are always asking me tax questions once they find out what I do for a living and so, yes it is for personal, but it generates business inquiries. It does turn into clients, like I am doing a tax return for somebody that I met this way. In my opinion it is a great way to have fun and meet new people and everything but to also expand your SOI, your sphere of influence. To go from the old saying of everybody knows 250 other people, well expand that out, and I think that is incredibly powerful to do.
James: You are finding that going out there and using more of the personal networking side, you are finding new people to add to your mailing list and stay in contact with who may have a problem or may need your service or may have a referral for your service, and the same thing is true for mortgage brokers. If you are going out there and you are just meeting new people, whether it is a hobby or something fun or if it is strictly going to more business networking type events which there are on meetup.com. You can go and establish relationships that way. I strongly recommend that you go out there and do that and expand your sphere of influence like Jassen says.
Jassen: It is even more important for somebody such as a mortgage broker because, I think, nationwide something like two thirds of Americans own their own homes and the other third are renters. With that many people being homeowners it just makes sense to know as many people as you can. It is very different from my industry where I have got to meet twenty people in order to meet one that is a potential tax client. If you are a mortgage broker you meet three people and two of them probably will need a mortgage sometime in the next four or five years. The numbers are definitely in the favor of a mortgage broker. Just because of the nature of their business.
James: Yes, your analysis there I think was off a little bit in that you said one third of the people were probably renters and two thirds were homeowners. I would actually say all of those are candidates for the loans because the renters are probably going to be buying houses, especially if you have programs directly related to that. However, the other side of it which your numbers were right but your description of it isn’t necessarily wrong is that one third of all people who own houses own their houses free and clear, and so those guys might not be good candidates for loans, but they are good candidates for referrals because they know people that don’t own their homes free and clear or that need loans, and so they can be great referral sources for you especially if you meet those guys and they know, like and trust you.
Until my next post,
James
P.S. This is just a small part of what you’ll learn in the full training: “The World’s Greatest Mortgage Broker Marketing Course”.
Inner Circle Membership - Daily, Live Training for Bird Dogs, Wholesalers, Real Estate Investors and Real Estate Entrepreneurs with Q&A and consulting and more.
This is just one tiny excerpt from “How To Market Your Mortgage Broker Business” (a 2 hour audio training course) that you can download for free.
Jassen: So I know, for folks that don’t know, James has, I believe it is, a full week long mortgage broker marketing course on the same topic coming up here pretty soon, and I know that you are going to go way, way into this during the week long course, but could you talk about some of the offline ways for building that list that we are talking about.
James: Sure, you are right, there are online and offline strategies for building that list, but realize that both the offline and the online ones are meant to be building that internal list so that you can market over and over to them. So you are really looking at just different ways in order to get names and addresses of people who know, like and trust you onto your list and then repeatedly contact them so that when they do have a need or someone in the sphere of influence has a need, they think of you. You have top of mind awareness for them.
So, with that being said, the number one way to do it is get out there and network. Face to face offline marketing is a lot about personal networking. So go out to the Chamber of Commerce, go to MeetUp, find your real estate investor groups on there. Find things that you are interested in. Just go out there and make new contacts. Find business groups where people come into a lot of different contact with other people that could need loans, and just get out there and have people know, like and trust you and be top of mind for that opportunity, and it is not going to be something… in the overwhelming majority cases… it is not going to be something where you go down there on Monday, and you generate business on Monday or Tuesday. It takes time to build these relationships, and you need to invest in that to build your list up and go do that. So those are just some of the ways that I could definitely think of to go do offline marketing.
Jassen: I think that I just silently heard 70 or 80% of our audience on the line groan when you said that they have to leave their cubicle and go out and actually interface with people. I know you will get really in depth on this on the full week course, but the people that aren’t necessarily people people that don’t want to go out and meet people. What will you tell those people?
James: Well, you are like me. I don’t like to get up from my desk. You know me, whenever possible I would much rather do massive lead generation online and then have people calling me being on the right side of the desk than to get up and do that. Now, do I get up and do networking? Sure, I run a local real estate investor group. I am out there every Wednesday night meeting people doing that. I have a mastermind group on Tuesday that I go to. So I am out there networking in our community and being active, but I much prefer to do online type marketing so you want me to talk about online marketing at this point or do you want me to just tell them that there are other solutions out there because there really are.
Jassen: Well, we are going to spend probably at least, again, I know we are going to go over time, but we will probably spend at least half an hour tonight talking about the online side of things so I guess what I am really asking is for somebody that maybe isn’t as into the whole networking and schmoozing thing. It is something that they really do need to do and most people will acknowledge that like you just did. But what would you suggest to them as I guess some sort of preplanning thing that they need to be doing ahead of time before going into events and Chamber groups and things like that.
James: Well, I guess the important thing to realize is that you are not there to specifically sell at that point. Really, what you are trying to do is you are trying to collect name, address, telephone number and e-mail address of people that now know, like and trust you that you can then market to over a period of time using newsletters, using direct response marketing, e-mail, go to my website… here are some special reports, here are some client testimonials I have just got… so things of that nature in order to help build your business, but you need to somehow go out there, get face time with somebody, not necessarily in the business capacity directly but just so that they know who you are so that when they receive your newsletter they are like, “Oh yeah, I remember him. He comes to our (whatever it is) and I like him, he is a nice guy” or “yeah, he has helped some people. I have seen that in his newsletter. Oh you need a loan, I know Billy. Billy actually is a mortgage broker. He can help you. Here is his card or here is a newsletter I just got from him. Give him a call, and I am sure he would be able to assist you.” That is what you want, but you need to build that list of people up. You are not just doing it cold.
[James remarks about the run on sentence in the previous paragraph: that may be the longest run-on sentence I've even seen transcribed from what I said. If only my English teachers saw that. Geez!]
Jassen: Ok. One of the things I would encourage people to do, and this is something that I picked up when I was doing newspaper advertising sales years ago was to have the 30 second elevator speech perfected. The kind of thing where somebody could slap you upside the head at 3:00 in the morning, and you would bolt up out of bed, and they would say “What is your elevator speech?” and you just blurt it out. Your 30 second elevator speech is not a pitch. But it does need to express your unique selling proposition, your USP, very succinctly and explain to people what you do, and why they should come to you ultimately when they need someone who does what you do. You have what usually the rule of thumb is less than 30 seconds to capture somebody’s attention and leave that first impression, and so your elevator speech, so called because if you ran into somebody on an elevator you have got until it gets to their floor to get it out. So having your elevator speech written and perfected, I think, is really important and there are entire books and courses about just creating that 30 second elevator speech so there is a lot to it, but that is something I would encourage people to work on putting together, especially mortgage brokers, because how many people own a home and how often do people move and need new loans. You are always going to be coming across people that are homeowners that will someday refi or buy a new home or people that are renters that will buy a home. You are surrounded daily by people that are one day going to require your services. I think it is really important for mortgage brokers to have that 30 second elevator speech down packed.
James: Yes, and just so people are clear. If you think your 30 second elevator speech is, “I am a mortgage broker,” then that is not correct. You need to have a much more descriptive speech that you have memorized about what you do and whether or not you focus on first time home buyers or refinancing or commercial properties or whatever it is that you decide is your niche, you need to know that you need to talk about your benefits that you offer to somebody and what your ideal client would be.
Jassen: Right, and really the elevator speech is the answer to the most common question that people ask you when they meet you which is, “Oh, what do you do?” If you are out and about and actually meeting people like you should be, you are going to get asked about a billion times a day so it can’t be so “I am a mortgage broker down at the mortgage shop.” No, it needs to be, “Oh, I am Jassen Bowman, and I specialize in assisting first time home buyers effortlessly navigate the process of obtaining the low rate and low cost loan for their first home that really meets their needs.” Something along those lines that really spells out the benefits of doing business with you, like you said.
James: Right.
Jassen: I just wanted to spend some time on that because I think that the elevator speech is so important when you are out doing these networking type events because I meet so many people that they just say, “Oh, hi, I am a mortgage broker.” Well, that doesn’t really tell anything.
James: Yes, and people are confused as to what that means by the way.
Until my next post,
James
P.S. This is just a small part of what you’ll learn in the full training: “The World’s Greatest Mortgage Broker Marketing Course”.
Inner Circle Membership - Daily, Live Training for Bird Dogs, Wholesalers, Real Estate Investors and Real Estate Entrepreneurs with Q&A and consulting and more.
The following is an excerpt from “How To Market Your Handyman Business” (a 1 hour and 41 minute free training course download available to our visitors).
Jassen: OK, OK I wanted to talk -we’re already talking about Meet Up and networking in the offline marketing section real quick though I want to say a few things about Meet Up go to meetup.com and look for these real estate investor groups in fact you run – through Meet Up you run the real estate investor group for Fort Collins here in Colorado right?
James: That’s right.
Jassen: OK, and it’s not just real estate investors that come to your meetings right?
James: No, not at all actually we get some very good networking, mortgage brokers, real estate agents from time to time and handyman providers from time to time and insurance guys from time to time and they show up and they say “Hey, I have an interest in real estate investing and I want to meet some other investors and learn some stuff” and that’s perfectly fine, I love having those guys there.
Jassen: OK, so wherever you are in the country there is a real estate investor group and chances are it’s probably on Meet Up it wouldn’t surprise me. There are also different mixers and trade events and what not, for different types of industries so real estate agents, mortgage brokers, tons of people connected to the property industry in general which as a handyman is obviously your largest market, there’s plenty of those groups on Meet Up. You can also create your own Meet Up group it’s like twelve dollars a month or something like that?
James: I think that’s what it is its like fifty bucks for a half a year or something like that.
Jassen: OK a very, very inexpensive way to put together a group and you know this for yourself when you get a group of people in a room, magic happens right?
James: Yup, absolutely and being the guy that runs that group automatically gives you credibility and expertise.
Jassen: Yeah, you’re the expert you’re the guy, you’re the man.
James: I’m the guy that started the group.
Jassen: Exactly, and everybody’s going to come to you I don’t think I’ve ever seen one of your incred meetings where there isn’t a flock of people waiting to talk to you after the meeting because you’re the guy.
James: Yeah, that’s true. So, if you start the group then people want to come and talk to you. You know they are going to seek you out to be the distributor of information so they may come up to you and say “Hey, who do you go to if you need to repairs done on the house?” “Well, I do repair what do you need?” and then you can be the guy that does that. You can start a group for investors; it doesn’t need to be an investor per say that does it.
Jassen: Right.
James: Let’s say I just want to network with other investors or maybe you start a group for real estate agents and you help them network and you help them grow their business.
Jassen: Right.
James: So, there’s lots of ways to use MeetUp.
Jassen: You start a group for contractors to grow their business and then you’re networking with electricians and plumbers and landscapers and general contractors and you’re all swapping business and helping each other out, you’re going to be getting business out of that.
James: That’s right and they can share with you what’s working in your local market, you know some markets, thrifty nickel -
Jassen: Oh yeah…
James: And the American Classifieds and those types of things would also be good things to throw in the mix other markets they don’t work at all. You know some markets have a newspaper where they get a lot of business from other markets don’t and so I don’t want to give you stuff that’s not going to work in your market so I tried to make it so that the content we gave you is good for everywhere.
Until my next post,
James
P.S. Want access to our full 7 hour training course? Upgrade to “The World’s Greatest Handyman Marketing Course” today to get instant access and take your handyman business to the next level.
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The following is an excerpt from “How To Market Your Handyman Business” (a 1 hour and 41 minute free training course download available to our visitors).
Jassen: OK, now in terms of marketing that you can do – we’re going to talk about a bunch of different types of marketing that you can do but first of all what are some of the I guess the non-internet ways that people listening to the call tonight could build their handyman business effectively and inexpensively?
James: Well I think you’re talking about offline versus online type of marketing let’s talk about some very specific offline strategies and remember what we’re talking about here are ways to build your client and prospect database so even – let me take a step back and say you need to have some type of database that you’re storing all of your contacts in you can use Outlook, you can use an Excel spreadsheet if you’re on the MAC I think they call it what address book or contacts or something like that any of those types of programs where you can put all your data in and you can get all your data out in some spreadsheet looking format is what you need to do so set up yourself with an internal database where you know all your contacts are listed there you’ve got their telephone number, you’ve got their mailing address, you’ve got their email address and then you want to be building that database as much as possible so a lot of the offline marketing strategies are going to be ways for you to go out there and build that database and the top three that come to mind are number one you’ve got to join your chamber of commerce and you’ve got to be out there networking-
Jassen: Yes
James: -So you’ve got to be meeting people and one of the great ways for business owners and people that might need stuff like this is the chamber of commerce and so go out to the chamber of commerce, start meeting people, start meeting real estate agents a lot of real estate agents are chamber members and you can go meet them and you can refer them, a lot of real estate investors might be there people that own rental properties they’re good clients for you and a lot of business owners own houses and they see the value in paying someone else to do the work for them and so you want to go find those types of guys and you can do that at the chamber the other one I’d recommend you do is use like a site called meetup.com where you can just take your hobbies and your passions or maybe you want to go and attend the real estate investor group meetings or maybe you want to go attend the real estate agent group meetings or maybe you want to attend the real estate agent group meetings or maybe you want to go find one where they are talking about the homeowners or things that would be directly related to jobs you want to do and go join those groups and participate, don’t go there and think that you’re going to get business the first day, it’s not going to happen but what you will be able to do is go there, meet people, develop good relationships with them, let them know, like and trust you, give them your business card and a lot of times they’re going to give you a business card back which is really what you’re wanting to do because then you can take their contact information put it into your prospect or client database and then every single month you’re going to send out some type of newsletter or promotional material or something just to remind them over and over again that you are in that business and you can help them so the two I’ve mentioned so far chamber of commerce and meetup the third one is volunteering your time and find other charitable minded people, what’s the best thing about people that go to like these charity events Jassen?
Jassen: They’re like minded-
James: They’re like minded but the other thing about is you know they are into volunteering their time and a lot of them are going to be more likely to hire people to do work.
Jassen: Right.
James: So you want to go and focus on those types of things and you know I hear something because I’ve talked about this sort of thing with so many business owners over the years and I can already hear the objection – but, it will cost me .50 cents or .65 cents in order to get a newsletter out when I calculate in my first class postage and printing and everything like that and now I’m going to pay .60 cents per person on my list per month in order to send something out-
Jassen: Yeah
James: -it’s the cheapest marketing you’ll ever do
Jassen: Yup
James: OK, so a lot of people are going to look at “oh I can do free marketing, oh craigslist, I’m going to post on craigslist its’ free right?
Jassen: Right
James: No… yeah you’re going to get some prospects from craigslist, and you could get jobs from craigslist but really what you want to do to establish that long term relationship so you have 200 people on your list that know, like and trust you and they are constantly referring business, or they constantly have jobs for you and you want to spur on referrals and you want to encourage that, you want to encourage them to call you first to give bids and if they have any problem with anything you want them to think of you first and so that’s the type of relationship you want to establish and the way you do that is with one little mailing each month and maybe an email here and there a little personal thing, let them engage with you and I think we’re going to talk about some of those strategies here in a minute.
Jassen: Yes, yes I wanted to comment on two things you just talked about real quick one is that some of our listeners may be a little intimidated about the whole database thing, so I just wanted to say if you’re not good with computers or you don’t know how to set up even an Excel spreadsheet or something like that, go to just about any high school kid or if you’re near a college you know put a flyer up on you know the bulletin board in the student union or something like that and extremely inexpensively you can have a high school or a college kid that will be more than happy for very little money to set up something that is easy for you to use to make this happen ok.
James: And off the top of my head I’ll give you a system it’s so easy ok- go get a shoebox and anytime you get a business card throw it in the shoebox-
Jassen: Right
James: -once every two weeks or when you get 10 or 15 business cards in there call up your high school kid and have them come over for an hour and enter all the names in there for you and then once a month you have them come over for an hour and do the newsletter for you.
Jassen: Right
James: And that’s it.
Jassen: And if you’re doing an Excel spreadsheet tell him that you want to do for your newsletter a mail merge he’ll know what you’re talking about.
James: Yeah and if you need additional information I’ve got tons of stuff on how to do mail merge on the website at LearnToBeRich.com.
Jassen: Right, and now another point I wanted to make about networking with other people, you and I have both been realtors before and a lot of realtors do first time home buyer seminars or new mover seminars and mortgage brokers do these as well and it is extremely common for them when they are putting these events on to get a room full of people and trying to find other people that will speak at these little couple hour gathering because everyone else in the real estate office is going to be like “oh no… I don’t want to speak at a little first time homebuyers seminar” that is an incredible opportunity I think for handymen to get in front of a group of people and become and establish themselves as an expert in you know getting the home ready for sale or what home buyers need to look for when they are purchasing a home and those sorts of things right?
James: Sure and if you’re a handyman and you offer like an inspection service you know maybe part of your business model is that you do home inspections a lot of the handymen I know do and that could be a great service you can offer so you can go in there and you know talk to them you know here’s what you do in your business and here are 5 things you need to look at and then realize if you hired someone like me to come in it’s going to cost you like X number hundreds of dollars and we’ll go do this whole checklist for you and we usually can help you negotiate the price down based on things we find so a lot of times my service is free because you know you may pay me $450.00 but I’m going to find $2,000.00 worth of repairs that probably could be done at some point but they probably don’t need to be done right now or I may prevent you from buying a house completely if you find something really wrong but at least I can go in there and we can say look there’s $2,000.00 worth of repairs that we didn’t know about let’s reduce the price down by $2,000.00 now they’ve traded $450.00 to you as the handyman in exchange for a $2,000.00 price concession in buying the house.
Until my next post,
James
P.S. Want access to our full 7 hour training course? Upgrade to “The World’s Greatest Handyman Marketing Course” today to get instant access and take your handyman business to the next level.
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