12-21-20 What Does It Take To Have A Successful Digital Marketing Program Today? With Nick Hedges

In this episode of Lykken on Lending, David will interview Nick Hedges, CEO of localized digital marketing innovator MomentFeed and a recognized expert on the mortgage borrower’s journey. We’ll be talking about what it takes to have a successful digital marketing program today and how lenders can optimize the purchase journey to engage and capture more nearby customers searching for home loans.

---

What Does It Take To Have A Successful Digital Marketing Program Today? With Nick Hedges

It is Monday, December 21st, 2020, Christmas Week. I’m looking forward to Christmas in 2020. I finally got all the last of my shopping. I’m feeling good. I did well. Everyone was nice. They got their good stuff. Even a few people are naughty. We're so thrilled that you're joining us. This show was created by mortgage professionals. It is for mortgage professionals and we're so grateful to have you on as our reader. Our commitment is to bring you timely information in a format that you can read anytime and anywhere. We are accomplishing that. People are getting reports of reading us doing all kinds of different things. A lot of drive time, workout time, work in the yard time, and things like that. It's a great way to passively grow as a professional. We're thrilled that you’ve chosen our show to do that. Check out IndustrySyndicate.com and MortgageMedia.com. It’s two places. They aggregate other podcasts and you can listen to them. In this episode, we have a special guest that I'm excited about, especially looking at the New Year. I do a lot of consulting and marketing. What's the new way? We're all looking at the new year. Joining us is Nick Hedges, the CEO at MomentFeed. He has a very celebrated background. His companies are famous. Velocify is one of the companies he's had. You can't wait for the interview. It’s good. I want to say a special thank you to our sponsors. Mortgage Bankers Association of America. I’m grateful for our partnership with them. Be sure to get signed up for the Mortgage Action Alliance app. Get that downloaded on your mobile device so that you can have your voice heard in Washington, D.C. You do not need to be a member of the MBA as I see but you should be. Get out and get your membership going. Read the interview we did with Marina Walsh about the average cost for a loan and where things are at. It’s insightful, especially as we're going into the New Year. It's a great episode as you’re planning the next year and that was done on September 14, 2020. A special thank you goes to Finastra, their Fusion Mortgagebot Solution. It does a great job of tracking every aspect of the mortgage banking process. It's a convenience, especially when you look at post-closing functions from the point of sale through the whole process. We’re pleased with our partnership with them. We're going to be doing some New Year programs with each other. We're excited about that. Lenders One and The Mortgage Collaborative, both of these co-ops are great places. We did an interview with Justin Demola back in June 2021. We're going to be getting him back on soon but on December 7th, 2020, we also did an interview with Tom Gallucci at The Mortgage Collaborative. The reason you want to become a part of a collaborative or a coop, which both of these are is because you get up close and personal. You get to meet vendors in a closer and more meaningful way. You also get to know your peers. Peer analysis and what others are doing is so important. We want to say a special thank you to Indecomm. It has many solutions for every stage of the mortgage life cycle. Linda Bomar and Narayan were there with us on August 31, 2020. Insellerate does a great job of working with companies like engaging borrowers. We had an interview with Josh Friend back on August 17, 2020. Celebrity Home Loans does a great job of acquiring companies and growing through acquisition. They pay attention to celebrities. What David Robnett and that company are doing there is pretty exciting. Innovient helps you maximize earnings and optimize your ability to put together great sheets for getting interest rates out in a timely manner. You got to go back and read the episode we did with Ted Kramer on December 14, 2020. That was an excellent interview. For those of you who are not into secondary marketing or the capital markets, Ted does a great job of talking about the capital markets, where they've been, where they're going, and the complexity of going into it. It's a great informative episode for anybody to read. There’s a lot of great content there. Knowledge Coop is the learning management system that Ken Perry has. It's a great program. We love working with them. MobilityRE, as well as MODEC. These two companies do a great job at helping you create tools for originating loans and giving you intelligence as well as recruiting top LOs. You need to check out on our website these two companies and what they specifically do. I'm pleased with the difference it's made for a number of our clients who have brought both of these companies in to work and help them on the recruiting side. Our Virtual Electronic Mortgage Marketing Assistant is Velma, Brent Emler. Also, Vendor Surf and Vidyard. I’m so grateful for all of our sponsors. A special thank you goes out to Alice, Allen, and Matt for their contributions to each episode. We're about ready to get into our Hot Topic segment. Stay right here. We're going to get right into it.

---

Welcome to the Hot Topic segment. In this episode, we have Nick Hedges joining us. He is the CEO of MomentFeed. It’s a new company that he started. We’ll be discussing changes that are going on in the mortgage industry. Specifically, when you look at digital marketing, he's going to educate us on how marketing to consumers has changed with a special focus on the drivers of what has those changes been. What does this mean for the New Year? What could we be looking forward to? We have got a real expert on this topic. I'm so excited to have Nick Hedges joining us. Nick, it’s good to have you here. Thank you. It’s very nice to be with you and your kind words. Your success is something that so many people admire. I want our audience to get to know you a little bit before we get into some good stuff. If they don't know you, they should know you. If they think they know you, there are some things in your background that are fastening. We do have a lot of people who are new to the industry who want to come into the mortgage industry and follow our show. We get a lot of emails from college kids and those considering a career in either mortgage technology or the mortgage industry. I want to get some insights into your background. Probably a lot of my readers know that you grew Velocify from a young startup to a top sales acceleration platform for the financial services industry. A good number of our audience are very familiar with Velocify. Not only did you start something but you successfully sold it and you survived in that sale. That's pretty amazing. Talk a little bit about that. I joined Velocify when it was a small company. It wasn't called Velocify. It was called Lead 360. I was working at a company called Bain & Company. I had graduated from Harvard Business School a couple of years before that. I had entrepreneurs and coursing through my veins. Working at Bain & Company was fantastic but it wasn't scratching that itch. One of my classmates from Harvard Business School who was a venture capitalist introduced me to Lead 360. He had invested in and said, “This company is tiny. They do something associated with lead gen but it's not lead gen. It's software.” We don't know that the mortgage industry is going through hard times because this was back at the end of 2007. “We need you to come in and see if you can help figure out how to grow it.” I took a look at the company. I saw that it had a lot of potential because what they were doing was taking internet leads and helping mortgage companies primarily, organizing them, emailing them, and calling them. I could see how it would be difficult without that system with the volume of leads that these companies were buying to do it. I jumped into the company, I started there in more of a strategy and business development role. I ended up running sales within a few months of being there and then marketing and the Chief Revenue Officer. After being there for about a year and a half, they asked me to be the CEO, which is what I did for the following years. The Founders of Lead 360 found a good venture capitalist but you sold the company to Ellie Mae. You then moved over to the corporate side. I want to talk a little bit about your perspective, your entrepreneurial itch, and that passion that you have and then find yourself in big Ellie Mae as the consumer strategy function. It was a fantastic experience. We decided that we wanted to double down on some of the things that we were doing. At the beginning of 2017, I met with Jonathan Corr. He was CEO at the time. I said, “Here's all these things I'm building. I want to be more deeply integrated into the Ellie Mae platform than we already are. Our customers get huge value from us working together. I want to build out something that does a better job of enabling consumers to enjoy a digital mortgage. It means we're going to have to be passing information back and forth.” He said, “That dead-on with my strategy too. How do you think about doing it as one company?” I was like, “Are you asking me whether I would join forces with you?” He said, “Yes. It makes a ton of sense.” Six months passed. At the end of it, we were part of Ellie Mae which was super exciting. It was an incredible company. It had a lot more scale than we did. We were about a 250-person company. They were probably more of a 2,500-person company at the time. They’re bigger. A lot of my job, frankly, was helping with integrating the two businesses but one of the other aspects of it was leading that consumer engagement strategy which was how we achieved the true digital mortgage. A true digital mortgage as Ellie Mae saw it wasn't just about being able to pass information from one screen to another via the consumer. It was also enveloping that process with phone calls and the ability to email someone and text them when things didn't go right. That was super interesting and very exciting. However, entrepreneurs are born to be so. Being at a big company, even though it was doing some interesting things, wasn't my life's passion. After we've been at it for a year and a half and made some good progress, I talked to Joe Tyrrell who I reported to directly. I said, “I'm having a great time but I want to go and do something new, as in start something again or get into something very early because that's where I'm excited enough.” Joe was a little disappointed to lose me but he's a great guy and understood it. I spun off and spent the following six months wandering through the wilderness trying to figure out what my next big idea would be. I can't wait to get into that but I want to talk about Joe Tyrrell. We had him on the show. I did an interview with him about some of the things that they're doing. Joe has got a huge task in front of him. He’s very capable of doing it. The task is as big as he is. He's a tall guy. I want to talk about what you’re doing with MomentFeed. I love that name. Several people are saying that we talk about it. I want to educate our audience a little bit. We could go into your background. We start by giving a little bit of a historical overview of lead generation and digital marketing. Did Harvard education prepare you? Harvard Business School is a pretty interesting place. You learn everything from the conversation. They call it the Socratic method. There's less about reading books and more about reading short business examples, cases they call them, and then a class of 80 to 20 to 30-year-olds. Your classmates talk about that business, the dilemma they had, and how they should go about fixing things. You have a professor who is prompting you and asking questions. [bctt tweet="Have a business school. It's a pretty interesting place, you learn everything from conversation. " username=""] It gets you always thinking about how to solve problems, which is essentially what you need to do to be an entrepreneur and what you need to do to succeed as a business leader and continuously make decisions when you have limited information. You only have partial information. It certainly helped but I wouldn't say I spent a lot of time working on digital marketing strategy when I was at Harvard Business School. They gave you the business cases. I love Harvard Business Review. They always talk about these cases. They're legendary for that. I love what they're doing. I’m glad we had a chance to touch on that. Give us a little bit of an overview of lead generation and digital marketing. If you could spend a few moments educating our audience where has it been and what are we coming up to? Lead generation is one of the early parts of the internet. If we go back even further, before the internet existed, branding was everything. My first job out of college was I worked for Ogilvy & Mather, which is a global advertising agency. They’re making big blockbuster TV ads and made plans for Ford Motor Company and Kodak. We spent more on TV advertising and making a TV ad. Are there any blockbusters that have ever made sense? It was all about those TV ads and getting consumers to consume the same brand story and buy the same thing as one another, mass consumers essentially. The internet changed everything and enabled businesses to have one-on-one communication with individual people. Sometimes, we call it mass individualism. When the internet became the dominant source of information, it had a deep impact on how consumers consume. When it comes to lead generation, the first thing that a consumer will do when they are trying to make a decision about anything is open a web browser, whether that be on their phone, on a computer or sometimes, whether it's a Siri or Alexa conversation but they're entering the internet. [bctt tweet="When the internet became the dominant source of information, it had this impact on how consumers consume. The first thing that a consumer will do when they are trying to make a decision about anything is to open a web browser. " username=""] What happened with lead generation was that it was the first part of the process. People opened the web browser and they got onto the internet. They couldn't find what they wanted. They were looking for a mortgage and trying to find a mortgage but they couldn't get the information that they needed. Companies like Lending Tree and LowerMyBills were right at the beginning during the entrepreneurial boom in the internet. LowerMyBills, Lending Tree, and a number of other companies realized that all these consumers are looking for information about mortgages. They wanted to get a mortgage. They'd started on the internet. They were willing to put their information on the internet. Lending Tree and LowerMyBills set out a marketing net to collect all these consumers and then they funneled them back into the mortgage companies so that the mortgage companies could then talk to them in the more traditional way, which was picking up the phone and speaking to them. That's how lead generation was born. It became very prevalent and continues to grow and grow. Any quick insights you have to say on how we're seeing it shift? When it comes to the internet, depending on the height of consumerism and how prevalent the internet was then, it guides how you use the internet. If you're a Baby Boomer, when you joined the workforce, the internet wasn't a thing. It wasn't a way that people consumed at all. Someone in their 70s uses the internet but it's not necessarily the first thing that they think of when they're trying to make a decision about what they buy. However, when you think about Gen-X, which I'm a member of, the internet was starting to be a thing when we entered the workforce. I was one of the first people who knew about the internet at my company. Most Gen-Xers will start their buying journey for anything with the internet but then they'll quickly jump out from the internet because it's very comfortable with a non-digital world. You take Millennials. They enter the workforce. Many of them were born on the internet. For them, everything starts and ends with the internet. That's where a digital mortgage comes from. Millennials, in particular, expect not only to start the buying journey but complete their buying journey.

  The greatest change in digital marketing is that. You're a great thought leader. Look at what you started. You started a lead company similar to LowerMyBills and the others. It was a small company and then it grew. You rebranded the company as Velocify and got it sold. You are seeing some opportunities. I can only imagine Joe Tyrrell did weep a little bit at the loss of you. Talk a little bit about the digital world that we see. Where is it going? How we should be looking at it? Over the next few years, there's another generation coming through the workforce, which is Gen-Z. They're going to be buying homes fairly soon too. That's going to have a big impact on the mortgage industry. If we're thinking out in the next few years, how does a Gen-Z think about things? The internet was flourishing by the time they were born. They don't know anything else. They've been on social media since the day they could read. They expected a digital native experience for everything. What I mean by that is there is no internet for that. Everything is the internet, which means that they expect an experience that is digitally woven into their real life. What would happen over the next years is artificial intelligence will meld with the internet so that we can have a truly digital experience in the real world. It sounds a little bit futuristic but you can imagine in the future, I have an assistant talking in my ear, which might be Siri or Alexa but it could be something else. I'm constantly having a conversation with them. I might be sitting at my desk and I'd say, “I think I should buy a new home,” and someone will talk in my ear and say, “That's interesting. You have had a pay rise. You probably do qualify to be able to get a mortgage. What kind of home do you want?” You’re having this natural conversation at the point that the AI is stretched to its maximum limit. It will probably say, “I can't answer that question. Would you like to speak to a mortgage bank? Would you like to talk to a loan officer?” “Yes, sure.” The loan officer will come on the phone and say, “I prefer to meet someone.” Directions will be sent to my Tesla car or whatever it may be. It will drive to the local office and have a conversation with them but it'll be very integrated. That's where things are going. It's a pretty interesting world. We tend to think about online as being one thing and offline being another. The two are emerging. That's where the idea for MomentFeed came together, which is the buyer's journey begins online, regardless of pretty much what generates it. The process is beginning online but it's continuing through the entire process. My daughter is a Gen-Z. We married her off in 2019. They're very successful in their careers and doing very well. They’re already looking to buy their first home. The first question they asked, which goes right down and validates what you're saying is, “Dad, we don't want to talk to anybody. We want to start learning everything we can. Is there a website you can send us to where we can start learning and gaining knowledge?” I directed them to a particular company that does a good job and they're not selling one bit. Do these people want to be sold? It's information at least. That's what I'm picking up talking to my daughter. People want to do a lot of research and sales. Most buyers come into the process very educated, whether it's a mortgage or anything else. Even as a car dealer, I've talked to people in the automotive industry and people turn out to their dealership knowing more about the specifications of the vehicle than the person at the dealership. You have a very educated consumer that once they can't get the information, they want it now. As a mortgage bank, you need to be able to cater to that. You need to cater to the education journey but also when they want the information, they want it right now. You have to have a digital marketing strategy that enables you to interact with the consumer however they want to interact whether it's in person. In-person is still as important. Whether it's by phone or text, you have to be there at the moments in their journey when the information they're getting online is either confusing or a little bit less than what they need.

  We're getting a lot of questions and one is, “You mentioned about a digital native experience. Can you expand a little bit on that?” For me, what a digital native experience means is you no longer think about the experience being digital. Digital is woven into your everyday life so you're not necessarily going through a computer and turning it on and looking at the internet. It's happening with you and around you. One example is everyone carries a phone. As I'm walking out of my house, I make sure I have the keys in my pocket and I pull out my iPhone. I'm writing some search terms for whatever it is I want. Maybe I'm on the way to the office but I'm hungry and I write coffee on Google. It's highly integrated into the way that I do things. That experience is becoming more digital native. My kids talk to Alexa in my house more than they talk to me. They like to ask a question about everything. She’ll play their music and that's how things are becoming. Let's go to Alice first. Any questions you have based on what you've heard so far? This has been fascinating. I've been in the MomentFeed as we've been talking. You said you wanted to wait to take that off but I don't know if I can wait. I want to hear more about MomentFeed. Alice with all that you're doing, kudos to you on how you're interacting with the things you've done. Allen, any questions you have before we get into what MomentFeed is about? Not at all. We haven't talked in a couple of years. Congrats on all the success. I'm excited to hear what's new. Let's talk about MomentFeed. What is the name MomentFeed? Everyone wants to know where that comes from. Talk about it. I didn't come up with the name but someone else did like the founder. I'm taking on a company that's relatively early stage so I didn't find it. MomentFeed is about the fact that on the spur of the moment, people want to get a feed of information when it comes to the internet. It's speaking a little bit to the fact that it's partly social media and partly information. We explain what it is to fully understand what MomentFeed is. What is the business model? What are you doing? What is the problem you're solving? MomentFeed is all about the digital consumer that is mobile. A consumer goes to the phone 96% of the time when they want something and they will put in a search. Unfortunately, for most brands, they don't typically put in the brand name. For instance, one of my customers is Starbucks. You would be shocked at the number of people who do not put Starbucks into the search, even when they want to go to a Starbucks. They write coffee. It's 86% of the time. A consumer puts a search on a mobile for an unbranded search, like a category, pizza, coffee, mortgage, bank, and all those things. [bctt tweet="96% of the time, when consumers want something, they will put it in a search. Unfortunately for most brands, they don't typically put in the brand name. " username=""] What my company does is enable a marketing team in a fairly automated way to impact every signal that Google, Apple, Amazon, and all of these different companies that are serving up information look at to determine who shows up when you do that search. For instance, if you put a mortgage into a Google search or you do it on Apple or wherever you write, “I want to mortgage.” What it will do is the first couple of searches will be paid for ads probably by Quicken, Rocket Companies, LowerMyBills, Lending Tree, or something like that. A couple of links down, you'll see a little map on your phone and it will be a map of your local proximity. It will have 3 and sometimes 4 different suggestions on that map. Those are local businesses that offer a mortgage or whatever it is that you're looking for. We make sure that our customers appear in those three almost all of the time. Doing so is a pretty complex exercise where you're managing a company's local presence across a lot of digital channels, their social media strategy, and all kinds of things. My software is one single platform that optimizes all of those signals so that people show up. The consequence of that is the businesses that use our platform are the ones that get picked. Most people skip past the ad. They go to the map and they're like, “I do want to talk to my local loan officer at whichever bank it may be.” They click on the microphone icon and speak with the mortgage companies straight away. That mortgage company hasn't paid anything for Google for being there. They've just been using my software to do it. Somewhere on your website is one of the first things where it'll bring it up and you do the geocoding and things like that. How much are proximity devices? Proximity is incredibly important. What we talk about when we talk about MomentFeed is its proximity search optimization. This is one of the things that's interesting about the digital native experience that is starting to become prevalent in local matters. It doesn't just matter about writing local on your website but it matters that you have a local network. It used to be, and it still is to some extent, that you could operate in a phone-only consumer-direct manner. However, with the new way of people finding things, it spins a little bit back to branch networks. If you have physical locations within some decent proximity to a consumer, Google, Apple, and other people will feature you in the search results. They care about getting people out of their homes and buying things. If you think about it, it makes a lot of sense for Google and Apple. If they don't do that in other categories, Amazon is going to be the only company left on the planet. All local businesses will disappear. It's in their interest to keep commerce flowing through local channels. It's a huge advantage that branch network mortgage banks have. If you're a consumer direct business, you're typically in 1 or 2 locations. You don't have that network advantage where you're going to show up in a proximity search on what they call the Google 3-Pack, Apple Maps, Waze, or anything like that.

  This is such a fascinating topic. Your company found the niche. It sounds like they went out and followed a similar path to what you did when you went into Lead 360. Is MomentFeed a rebrand of a previous company or was that the name of the company? That was the name of the company. When I joined, it was quite a lot bigger than Lead 360. It was probably 7 times larger but nowhere near as big as the last 5 became. We're there already being successful and I'm hoping to take it to the next level. What you're doing is hitting right where the opportunity is and that is, “How can I compete with the big guys?” Quicken is everywhere. We cannot get any ad searches where I want to be consumer-direct and Quicken is all over here. They're the number one letter and they don't even have a presence. You're hitting on something that should hope for people. It levels the playing field. I'm not thankful for Google and Apple but we're capitalizing on this opportunity. If you're going up against the big guys in consumer direct, you’re going to have to buy leads at the end of the day because your ability to accurately be able to figure out how to buy ads at the price that makes sense on Google is not going to happen against the big guys but the way that the world is changing, if you have a branch network, this is what you should be doing. You should be making sure that you show up in the 3-Pack, on Apple Maps, and in other places too. This is so encouraging. I can't wait to share this with so many people. When someone signs up with your company, walk us through the journey a little bit. How quickly does it take to get the results when they're showing up on the first page? It's not overnight. It does take a few months. When someone signs up with MomentFeed, we move into an onboarding phase like every software company does. Essentially what we're doing is taking all of the local information that someone has about their company. For each location, what facilities does it have with telephone numbers, addresses, and geolocation? We work on that thing. Once we have all the correct information and it's optimized for a keyword strategy that we've defined with the client, we then push all of that information out, not just to Google but to hundreds of other websites so that all of the information everywhere on the internet is the same about each location. We enact a local social strategy so you end up with a Facebook page and a social presence for every single location. It's no good to have one big Facebook page for your entire business. You have to have individual Facebook pages that have postings on them for every location. We also work on the online reputation piece as well. Is this company getting reviews on Google, places like Yelp, and other more relevant rating websites? How do we respond to those reviews? How do we get more of those reviews? Our software automates a lot of that but we go into probably a 3 to 6-week process of getting everything right. It all starts to broadcast out. Depending on how well set up the company was before they started with us, we typically see within about three months if the company starts to have good results. They start to appear in the 3-Pack. One of the interesting things about the banking industry, in general, is it's many years behind in terms of doing these things to the restaurant industry or general retail. There is a gigantic opportunity. Even some of the big brands are not doing a good job of doing the things that are necessary to appear in the 3-Pack. It's pretty much an open blue ocean opportunity. I'm going to tell people to go out to your website, get to know you, and meet you. How can people reach you? The website directs folks to a form you can fill out and one of my salespeople will call you. You can also reach me directly at Nick@MomentFeed.com. I'll direct you to the right place. I want to give a shout-out also to Wendy Barber who reached out to me. She's with the BPR Group Communications. Wendy, thank you so much for doing a great job of setting this up. It’s good and fascinating. I'm going to be getting the information and sending it on to a number of our clients. This is a valuable piece of important information on how those smaller guys can compete with the bigger guys. That's where we're always wanting to help our clients and audience prosper. You've been a great Christmas gift to our audience with some great information. Thank you so much. Would you keep us posted on where you're at with the developments? We're going to be launching another show and it's called Innovation of Mortgage Lending. I'd like to have you on that and talk more in the future so please keep us posted. It's easy to get out. We have nearly 100,000 regular audiences so bring it on. We'd love to have you. Yes, I've enjoyed it. We've had as our special guest, Nick Hedges, the CEO of MomentFeed. Be sure to check it out. Get a hold of Nick and this company. We went way over but wasn't it worth it? I thought it was fascinating. I could go on and on with the topic. It’s one of my favorite topics. In the next episode, we're going to have Jessica Peterson on. She's a friend. She’ll be talking about things you could do to set your goals and meet your goals in the New Year. Jessica has been a guest in the past. You'll enjoy her episode. A special thank you to our sponsors, Finastra, as well as the CMLA, the Community Mortgage Lenders of America, Indecomm, Insellerate, MobilityRE, Modex, and all the others. Check all of our advertisers out on our website, LykkenOnLending.com. I appreciate you all being here. It's been a great interview. It’s so much fun. Have a great time, everyone. Merry Christmas. Be sure to come back next time. We wish you a Happy New Year. Thank you for being here and sharing this show with others.  

Important Links

• IndustrySyndicate.com
• MortgageMedia.com
• MomentFeed
• Mortgage Bankers Association of America
• Marina Walsh – Past Episode
• Finastra
• Lenders One
• The Mortgage Collaborative
• Justin Demola – Past Episode
• Tom Gallucci – Past Episode
• Indecomm
• Linda Bomar and Narayan – Past Episode
• Insellerate
• Josh Friend – Past Episode
• Celebrity Home Loans
• Innovient
• Ted Kramer – Past Episode
• MobilityRE
• MODEC
• Velma
• Vendor Surf
• Vidyard
• Joe Tyrrell – Past Episode
• Nick@MomentFeed.com
• Jessica Peterson – Past Episode
• Community Mortgage Lenders of America