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From Views to Value: How to Turn Social Attention into Trust That Converts
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Jeff Zimfer
Q1. Hey, what's up, my friend? Jeff Zimfer. Welcome to this episode of the Mortgage Marketing Radio podcast. Hopefully you can tell this is just me, raw, off the cuff, no fancy editing. It is Friday, May 23rd. We're heading into the Memorial Day weekend. And so it's just a solo episode with what I'm thinking and going through and working on right now in my business and sharing some of those thoughts and insights with you and hopefully that you can maybe garner some value and apply whatever is relevant for you in your business. And let's make sure to take a moment out this weekend to honor and remember those who have served as that is what this Memorial weekend is really all about. So before I get into this week's topic, which is on the difference between attention and trust or the ease of attracting attention versus the value of that attention, I got to give a shout out to one of our members in our Myogen classes platform. Shout out to Wes Terrell. Wes up in Bay Area, California. Wes recently joined our program and wanted to scale his reach and engagement with real estate agents to accelerate his referrals, build his personal brand and attract versus chase agents. And here we are just a few weeks in and Wes has taken, taken it by the reins. He's gone out there and really taken action and I want to just acknowledge him for that because, you know, some people come in and people do various things at different levels. Some people do nothing, some people sit and wait, some people overthink, you know, procrastinate. But not you, Wes. Shout out to you. So Wes contacted his local board of Realtors about hosting classes. And here we go. Wes has six classes with his board of Realtors that they are going to promote. And so Wes will be doing kind of a summer series over the coming weeks. And this upcoming class he's going to be presenting, the first One is the 90 day CMA, which is a pretty cool strategy we got from my man Jimmy Burgess in Florida, which is how to use a video CMA using Google Earth and how Jimmy did this and now shares it with agents across the country where Jimmy got 11 million in listings in 90 days and sold 9 million of that. And so what we do in our community at my agent classes is we share those concepts and ideas with agents. We teach them how to fish, right? We show them this idea, we lay the groundwork and the framework out for them so they can simply go swipe and deploy and execute this idea and get listings and it works. It gets you appointments, it gets you invitations to brokerages team meetings, et cetera. So stay tuned for more results from Wes coming up because his first class is Tuesday, June 10th. Now, if that sounds at all something of interest to you, look, we're not right for everybody, but if you wanted to learn more about what we do, and you are closing at least three loans or more per month, and ideally you've been in the business at least three years, well, then this might be a fit for you. And the way to find out is you check the link in the show notes and you book a call with yours truly, me, and we have a conversation and see which of our two options is right for you in our platform. So once again, check the link in the show notes and perhaps we can have a further conversation. Okay, that said, let's get into this concept I've been thinking about for quite a while now, and it's really, you know, starting with this premise, as I said a moment ago, the ease of attract. There's a lot of people talking about attention right now, right? There's a lot of people talking about view counts and going viral and look how many views I got and things like that. And there's a lot of people who teach the viral method, right? The secret hack for going viral. And in our industry, right, what we do, mortgage, real estate. I'm not sure that that's the right message to be giving. And I talk with a fair amount of content creators, some at a very high level, some who run very large YouTube channels, some who have very large followings online, you know, hundreds of thousands or millions of people, some who. All they do is their whole. Her whole life is all about creating content and understanding algorithms and what works and the hook and this and that and. And that's all well and good. That's for my own learning and understanding and for the testing that I do at various levels. But back to my original point, we're talking about the ease of attracting attention versus the value of that attention. And a lot that I've been thinking about lately is, you know, you think about these platforms that we're all posting on, right? Whether you're at Instagram, LinkedIn, YouTube, wherever it's at, social media, right? As you guys probably know by now, that is what's called rented land, right? You don't own that land. You don't control it. As we well know, those platforms can make changes that can be significantly impactful, oftentimes in a detrimental way to our audience and to our content and things like that. Sometimes these platforms can go away. Case in point, with TikTok, we'll still see what's going to happen with that, right? But let's start at the top of the frame of the funnel here. This is a lot of what I talk about. It's actually what we do in, you know, my agent classes. Community is step one for you. Now you tell me, right, do you need to create more awareness whether it's amongst your, you know, referral partners in your local market, whether it's from consumers, whoever it is that you're trying to quote unquote, attract, right? You've got to create awareness, AKA attention. And there's a lot of talk around attention. And I'm going to get into in a moment about like, what's the value of that attention. But getting attention for the sheer sake of just getting attention in my mind is not enough or it's not really the point. I mean, yes, it starts with we've got to become known, right? We're in a business that requires us to become known. So back to we talk about awareness. How do you create awareness? Well, let's talk about that. In today's world, right? In the social world, we've got three different ways to create awareness, right? Writing, audio and video. And I've done all three of these. So writing, right, you can write posts on X and LinkedIn, maybe threads, audio, you can do podcasts, video. You obviously we've got short form and long form video on the various platforms. And so that's like top of the funnel, right? And there's various stages of trust that are built because the first step is to get awareness, you know, quote unquote attention, right? And the next stage is, well, what do you do with that attention? Because attention for attention's sake doesn't have a lot of roi. I mean, you can get attention for a moment by showing up in somebody's feed, right? And then that attention is gone. And what I'm trying to really focus on for myself and the people that I work is let's yes, create attention or awareness, but let's make sure we're focused on moving that to the next stage, which is trust and then ultimately the final stage, which is transaction, right? And the process I've been going through is identifying which of the options are best suited for me when it comes to creating awareness. And so, you know, I look at writing on LinkedIn and yes, you can post videos on LinkedIn as well. I look at this podcast, right? I've been doing this podcast for over eight years, 375plus episodes now. And Then there's, there's the social platforms, there's video, right? The Instagram, YouTube, et cetera. And a lot of that in terms of discovery, let's call awareness also discovery that is, is, is obviously something that requires a set of skills so for us to be able to build and grow and expand over time. But what I've been thinking a lot about is this is moving from a discovery platform or an awareness platform to trust. And so moving from rented, rented platforms being platforms you don't own, social media, to owned platforms. An example of an owned platform would be email, a newsletter. An example of an owned platform would be a podcast like this. And I would say that if you're really thinking about becoming a modern mortgage originator and being able to convert attention or awareness to transaction, then you've got to have a process in place to move people further down, right, from awareness to transaction. And that middle ground, if you picture a funnel, right, it's going to be on a non rented platform, that's going to be on a platform ideally that you own and say what you will, Email is still the warhorse, right, for transaction. And so as you're thinking about this, I don't know, do you have a newsletter? Do you have some type of a way to engage with people beyond the stage of discovery? You know, I mean, DMs is kind of one example of that, but you don't, again, you still don't own that. You're not taking them off the rented platform. And as I've continued to, you know, kind of experiment and learn a lot and go to different conferences and events and sign up for coaching on various things when it comes to content and building my own platform, et cetera, if you think about the ease of attracting attention versus the value of that attention, you know, picture a graph, right, and you've got this access, you know, on the left side you got a bar straight down and across the bottom you got a right, like a typical kind of access there, X, Y axis, right? And on one side, the left side of the bar you've got the value of attention and the underneath you've got the ease of attraction. And I would say that the easier attraction is, the less valuable it is. So if you can build a lot of attention right, on a social platform, how much value does that have? And if so, let's take TikTok, Instagram, let's take this chart, this graph that I kind of, you know, visually think about this in your mind. And if you think about the ease of attracting attention Things like TikTok, Instagram. And then the graph goes up further. It gets a little bit harder on LinkedIn, a little bit harder on X, harder on YouTube, harder email, harder podcast. So what I think about a lot, I think about a lot with my podcast is a podcast is not a discovery platform. Podcasts do not have a great search functionality. There's no algorithm that puts you in front of people. Podcast is podcast growth is hard. Word of mouth, right? You posting, you doing whatever you're going to do to create awareness. But it's very difficult to build your podcast audience unless you're a well known big name celebrity and things like that. And a podcast has a different purpose and need. But I will say this is that a podcast is one of the best assets for building value of attention, otherwise building trust. And then let me work backwards from there. So we talk podcast at the top of it. Why? Because it tends to be long form. Like if, you know, people listen to you for 15 to minutes to an hour to three hours, like you know, that's a lot of time on brand time on you. And we know that's what builds trust is time engage time on brand time with you, right? You listening to this right now. Some of you might have been listening for years, some of you might be brand new. But by the sheer fact that you and I engage for whatever time this is together, you get a sense of who I am, my personality, my style, my preferences, my values. And so that creates trust. So more time on brand. It's partly why we talk about teaching classes in person by the way, is it's time on brand, right? Face to face, you're never going to replace that connection and trust building at scale of face to face email. Working backwards would be the next right phase of ease of attraction being more difficult. I mean to get somebody to give you their email address, right? You need a good reason. It's not super easy. Like people don't don't want your frigging, you know, PDF and your free guide and your three hacks and things like that. Especially now with the advent of AI and people don't need more information because every piece of information in the world is pretty much at their fingertips. What they need is context. What they need is your experiences, your stories, your expertise and a way to write build trust over time that has a higher value is email. And let me work it back one step further. YouTube, YouTube long form content, yes, it has shorts, but the real right foundation of YouTube is long form content. And myself personally is I'm Actually pivoting some of my. I can't be everywhere and be great all at once, right? So I can't be great on Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, TikTok. Right? All these things great all at once without a big team. So that's why I'm in this place and sharing this with you right now is if I'm looking to grow my awareness, discovery, attention and most importantly, trust. What are the best platforms for me personally to do that? Now for some people, you're going to have your own answer to this question. But once again, I'm thinking as a loan officer and if I'm a loan officer and I want to, yes, increase awareness, I want to build an audience ultimately. But ultimately, really the goal is to build trust so that people want to transact, do business with them. And so the question for me personally is based on what I do, what is the best place for me to focus on for discovery Now, a podcast, as I said, not great for discovery. What's better for discovery? Something like YouTube. Why? Because it is the second largest search engine in the world and people are searching and YouTube has a recommendation algorithm and things like that. So there is a benefit there to putting content there for the purposes of discovery. Right? I mean, take, take X. I'm personally not on X at all. Or Twitter. I don't know if some of you are, but from the people that are better educated than me on, on X, it's not what it used to be. When it was Twitter, it was actually really great for discovery. Less so now. And let's take LinkedIn. LinkedIn obviously is seeing a bit of a resurgence. Several reasons for that. But LinkedIn is probably the last place if you are somebody who prefers to not be on camera and do writing. While LinkedIn is a place you could definitely do that. LinkedIn I would say, is not great for discovery. There are certain things you need to do on LinkedIn to grow your following, grow your engagement and things like that. And remember, and I'm spending a lot of time actually studying LinkedIn right now. So look for more to come from me on how to leverage LinkedIn. If that's your place, your jam. But once again, LinkedIn is similar to other platforms where your content is gone the next day. Essentially. Yes, you can have posts that kind of continue to expand and grow over time. And there's a certain science to that in art and a science. But I'll dotted line back to YouTube as to. That's another benefit to YouTube in particular is, you know, you have content on YouTube that can continue to get engagement and views for months and years after you posted it. And so stay tuned for me to be doing some more interesting things with YouTube that you might be interested in. Keep listening to this podcast or check your email for some additional announcements coming on that. And then Instagram, right? Facebook, right? We know what the game is there, all that fun stuff and then TikTok. So anyway, we're going from least valuable or least value of attention, I should say, to most value of attention. And we're going from easy to hard. And I just want you to think about that because you've got to choose and decide where you spend time and what's your purpose, what's your goal for even being on social? For a lot of you, I know, it's you want to create an audience, you want to find clients, you want to build a personal brand, you want to attract people to you, right? And that's all awesome. And some of you do this already. Well, on Instagram or other places that I'm not leaning into personally or choosing, let me say this, I'm not choosing it to be my primary focus for some of the reasons that I discussed. Okay, so what's your thought? I mean, I would love to hear your response to this. Where are you going to be focusing your time? What's your thought on building attention? Right? And the value of that attention versus trust and where you're going to decide to put your, your time and effort and resources in if you're in this game for the long haul. Right. And how are you, what is your process to move that awareness, right, that you get from whatever discovery platform you're on and to move that awareness from borrowed to owned relationship platforms, as I mentioned, podcasting, email, those are two relationship platforms. And with email specifically, I mean something of a tangible newsletter, not just random emails with interest rate updates. And then ultimately the final stage is, right, moving people to transacting. What's your process for that and where do you need help? So if you listen to this podcast and you want to respond to me, you can, if you're listening on Spotify, you can leave a question or a comment there. And you can also follow me on the socials, on LinkedIn, on Instagram, whatever your preferred social is, you can find me, my name, my podcast on there, let me know. And then ultimately you can also in the link below, there is a link that says ask Jeff a question and it's a link you could just tap right now on your mobile phone and you can leave me a voicemail and I'd love to get your feedback, your thoughts, your questions. Where do you need more help and guidance on that? Just look for the link in the show notes that says Ask Jeff. And I'd love to get your feedback. Cause I want to riff on this more. And if you think this is a topic we should pull, pull this thread even more and go deeper on this conversation. Let me know, because that's why I do this. So anyway, that is kind of what I'm thinking about here today. I'd be curious to know how it's jarred your thoughts. As I said, leave me a note, leave me a voicemail, and if you like this episode, leave me a review. As always, make sure you take care of yourself. Be smart. Thanks for listening. I'll see you on the next one.