What is your mortgage supermarket?

I don’t know if you guys drink beer, but there’s this beer company in San Diego called Saint Archer that I want to talk about today and relate it back to how we’re marketing ourselves in the mortgage industry, and Saint Archer had a particularly cool story.

When they first launched, they had a website and on their website, as is typical for companies to have, it’s like they had their locations page and it explains where you can actually get their product. Well, they hadn’t made a beer yet, and they really hadn’t started heavily marketing yet. What they did was, that was pretty cool, was that they figured out their distribution ahead of time.

So on that page, on their site, it said, “Where can you buy a Saint Archer beer?” It just said, “Everywhere Stone Brewing is sold,” which I thought was super cool because they basically reverse engineered the process and found their and secured their distribution, to make sure people could actually get their product before they started marketing it.

So, as you go to market yourself, you have to ask yourself two questions

1. If I get somebody’s attention, is there an easy way for them to consume me, so to speak? Can they get to me? And that’s where I think a website comes in. So somebody finds you, whether it’s through an association ,or a realtor referral, or ads or anyway you’re putting yourself out into the market, where are you directing them? And when that person gets there, can they easily connect with you, learn about you, understand that you’re professional? So that’s number one.

2. Can people discover you or is it solely on your shoulders for you to go out and find people that may be interested in working with you? So like Saint Archer, people can discover them now because they got the distribution everywhere Stone is sold. So in the liquor stores or in the supermarket, somebody can just go in knowing they want a beer, maybe knowing they want something different and discover them because they’re already there.

So for you, you got to ask yourself, “Well, what’s my supermarket. Where can people discover me?” And I think, especially in today’s environment and moving forward, if you watch the trends, the supermarket for you is Google. So if somebody is going to go search for a new loan originator, most likely they’re going to go to Google and you have to ask yourself, “Do you have the distribution already, for them to be able to discover you?” And if not, then maybe that’s something we should focus on.

So again, two things. Can people easily get to you and can people discover you? I hope that helps. If not, Saint Archer’s still a great beer and try it out. Talk to you soon.