Lykken on Lending

In this episode of Lykken on Lending we have Steven Cooley, Founder and CEO of Art Vs. Math

Steven will discuss with us …….. Marketing Business Intelligence and how marketing is really the underlying thing that you’re trying to achieve….

Want to know more about Art Vs. Math?

To read more on this episode, click here!!

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Marketing Business Intelligence With Steven Cooley

Thanks to one of our new sponsors, Snapdocs, Amy Moses, who runs marketing there. They had a major sponsorship out at the CMBA at the Western Secretary and I heard from Jennifer from the CMBA, who was at this football game. What I’m trying to get to is that we went to a football game pre-game and watched Trevor Lawrence Thoreau for the Jacksonville Jaguars. They did a great job, very impressive. Of course, they beat the Cowboys. It was a great time.

I got a tour of the Cowboy Stadium, thanks to Snapdocs, and got out on the field thanks to Snapdocs. I had a great corporate suite, thanks to Snapdocs. I had a great time. Amy Moses, I’m giving you a shout-out here at the top of the program. Thanks for a great weekend. Paul King, who is our business manager for DL2 Productions, which produces this show, made us aware of the big announcement and a segment on CNBC where UWM plans to accept cryptocurrency, Bitcoin, in payment. That is raising some interesting issues. We’re going to get Alice’s thoughts on that and what does this mean?

Anyway, it’s good to have you with us. For the Hot Topic segment, we’ve prerecorded them with Steven Cooley, the Founder and CEO of Art Vs. Math. We’ll be talking about marketing business intelligence. Steven is one of the top people in the industry on this topic. I’m looking forward to sharing with you that interview in the Hot Topic segment.

Also, for other pre-recorded topics and podcasts, you could check out IndustrySyndicate.com. They do a great job of posting and helping support and promoting a number of podcasts. Check them out there. I also want to say a special thank you to our sponsors, the Mortgage Bankers Association of America, Finastra, Lenders One, The Mortgage Collaborative, Community Mortgage Lenders of America, and Insellerate.

They do a great job of helping you connect with the consumer, creating a great consumer experience. Also, Knowledge Coop as well as Mobility MMI, as well as Modex, as well as a number of other sponsors, all of which you can see on our sponsorship page on our website. Check it all out. I want to say thank you to Rob, Les, Alice, Allen, and Matt for their contributions each and every week to the show.

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Welcome everybody to the Hot Topic segment of the show. We’re so grateful to have you here. We have, as our special guest, Steven Cooley. Steven is my go-to guy when it comes to market intelligence, how to market on the internet, and how to be found. He is the Founder and CEO of Art Vs. Math. We’re going to be talking about market business intelligence. Without further ado, we have Steven Cooley joining us again. We had Steven on a little bit ago talking about his latest venture. Steven, it’s good to have you back.

Thank you so much. I appreciate it. I’m excited. We have some fun stuff to cover and appreciate you having me back.

Give us a little bit of insight into what you’re doing.

I own a company called Art Vs. Math. We do enterprise-level marketing consulting and we also are building some tech. The big tech push that we have right now is Mortgage Advisor tools. It is a Capterra for mortgage technology. If you are a mortgage bank and you are trying to figure out what technology to implement or fuse into your business to help you grow and scale or solve some of the inefficiencies that you have, go to Mortgage Advisor Tools. We have 20 different categories, over 250 companies and it should be a massive resource for the mortgage industry. We’re excited about it.

It’s free to those in the mortgage industry looking for technology. The vendors that are on there pay for it having access to the platform and you do a great job on it. That’s what we talked about the last time. In this episode, we’re going to be talking about market business intelligence. Steven, you’re a bit of an expert on this, especially as it relates to how to do so effectively on the internet.

Marketing gets thrown into this cure-all for all things. Sometimes your salespersons, your marketing. Marketing to me is the underlying things that you’re trying to achieve. It usually requires a deep dive into a business to identify. This is the why of the why almost, if you will. Usually, you get to know the business that you’re working with.

This isn’t pumping ads onto the internet and whatnot. If you want to do it effectively and efficiently and leverage your marketing dollars, you do have to do quite a bit of work before you get started. That involves getting a deep understanding of the business and then truly connecting it with the audience and their inquiry. We’re going to provide some examples.

 

I love that. In fact, everyone knows I called Steven because he’s a resource to me and a friend saying, “I got this new website and launching it. I want to put in some keywords.” He says, “Do you mean you didn’t start with keywords first and get going on that?” I’m showing some ignorance. Let’s share with our audience. I get you to come on and say if you’re marketing yourself and your products. We’ll use some of the ones we’re working on as examples. Before someone launches a new product or goes out and launches a website, the amount of work that should go ahead of it, I did it in reverse, talk about that. Hours and hours of research going into this is what you recommended.

You have to find out and research what people are searching for and what problems people are looking to be solved. A great example that you provided was to define your services to me. I’ll give one example right out of the gate. You said leadership development. That is fairly broad. If I’m a leader in a business, the question is what would I search online to find David Lykken, his services, his company, and his business? Is it mentoring? Is it coaching? Is it financial? Is it cultural? Is it values?

You have to research and find out what your target market is searching for and the problems they need to address. Share on X

There’s so much that is involved with developing a leader. Fundamentally, understanding exactly how I provide those solutions, what my customer or potential customers or prospect is challenged with, and what they’re going to go online and search for is the basic fundamental way to start developing everything. That’s not just a website. It includes your content. It includes the assets, the videos, and the website, but maybe your social media strategy, and how you hire. It is quite the development that can occur. I’ve been fortunate to get to help quite a few folks with that over the course of the last couple of years.

It starts with identifying their need. It’s pretty basic in sales. We all know that if you’re selling someone and you say, “What are the needs that you have?” You could go in there and search for that. That’s what is so fascinating, how accurate and thorough it is. It’s almost like taking a vote. What are the right words for that, Steven, where you’re going out and determining what services people are searching for?

They’re search inquiries. They’re asking the internet to answer their question. “I need help with being a stronger leader. I can’t get people to do what I say or follow my lead. I can’t get people to do X. I want to improve this part of my business.” There are these fundamental problems that we have in business. It’s all-inclusive. This is not business-specific to mortgage or software or mortgage loan officers. In fact, it gets interesting when you do break it down to those types of entities.

Even if I’m a single mortgage loan officer and I’m one of many, which they are, I have to solve a problem in the most unique way possible and I’m serving a local market. This is why I always say, “It’s never been more important to be very good at what you do and it’s going to be extremely important to specialize in a certain aspect of mortgage lending.”

Realtors are a fun example too. That’s a tough trade. At one point, it’s going to be a tough trade. At one point during the year, there were more real estate listings than there were realtors. If you wanted to stand out, you were going to have to specialize in solving a certain problem around that. An example might be, I am an expert at mid-century modern houses. If you’re trying to buy or sell a mid-century modern house in this area, I’m your guy. Now I’m going to develop my content and everything online around being that expert of mid-century modern. That’s a fun example that is applicable.

I like how you’re going in there and saying, “What is in my market? What am I serving?” Mid-century modern is a great example. That’s a term that I came across when my daughter was talking about housing and houses. I didn’t realize there was that. If there are a lot of those in your home and you’re hoping to get listings of those, why not put yourself up as an expert on that and look at the searches that people are doing? What are the words that you use? Make sure those words are on your website.

The search would be, “What’s the best type of mid-century modern home or what are specific architects that build mid-century modern homes? Where are mid-century modern homes in X neighborhood?” All of a sudden, I’m an expert and I’m going to start to now fall into the categories of these searches and then I get very organic business without truly helping people. I saw that you are an expert in this when I searched this.

This takes some time to develop. You have your initial listings of this and some of these are hypotheses at best. If I were to pull and audit your customer base, it would probably tell the story of how you serve and help people. There is a way to reverse engineer it and get down to the nitty-gritty by even looking at what you’re doing right now and how you’re serving people as it stands. Build a strategy that way as well.

If a loan officer, a branch manager, or an owner of a mortgage company is reading this, it’s like, “What is unique to you?” You say, “Money’s green. We all do the same thing.” That can look like that on the surface. With some research and with some help from someone like yourself, you have the skillset to pull out what is unique about that particular company or that particular individual. Is that correct?

That is the challenge of the mortgage industry. We are a commodity. To be found in a specific way simply is applicable. There are quite a few mortgage products that serve certain circumstances that people search for. “I’m an X, Y, and Z circumstance. I declared bankruptcy. How can I buy a house?”

In the same light, if you were to audit a mortgage business’s actual customer base, there is a likelihood that you would probably find a demographic, an occupational, or a credit score. There are probably patterns littered in their last 180 days of closed loan. All of a sudden, I could fundamentally understand who I’m serving, and why I am serving them and I can double down there.

You’re not saying that that’s the only category you have to specialize in. That’s one of maybe other categories. You can go in and own that category by putting the proper words affiliated and associated beta tag with your website.

Have you ever worked with a mortgage company that’s like, “We can’t sell this X, Y, and Z mortgage product or we don’t do a lot of conventional business or we don’t do a lot of gobby business? It’s not happenstance. If you look at national mortgage sales statistics, you can pull them by state and see that it’s not that they don’t do those types of loans in their location. They just don’t get found for that result.

It’s not that you’re doomed to what you are found in but it lets you know that that’s the work that needs. It probably needs to be done not just by search. Your entire entity is probably conditioned for the customers that you’re currently serving. If you’re only conditioned to do conventional business, guess what? It’s always fascinating to dig into a mortgage business’s backend and its true numbers.

Your entire business entity is probably conditioned for the customers you are currently serving. Share on X

Find out who their customers are because you will very quickly understand how the entire business from the loan officers to the processors to their advertising and marketing and how they’re conditioned. This is where compliance redlining and whatnot issues tend to come up as well. It’s usually the same thing. Not usually bad people that are getting jammed up, that are getting fined by the CFPB but they’re oddly conditioned not to originate or to skew a certain way. It’s usually highly fixable. It’s also been interesting work I’ve gotten to do as well.

Steven, you’re good at this. You’ve been doing this for years. What are the steps that someone needs to take to start discovering how to be found for all the things that they want to be found for?

It starts with product market fit. There are areas of the country with military bases on them, for example. If you don’t sell VA loans in that market, you’re not probably doing something right. There’s probably an opportunity to increase your market share of VA mortgages in that market because there’s a military base and so on and so forth.

That’s one example I’ve run into. It’s like, “We want to sell more VA loans. We don’t know why we don’t do it.” “There’s a military base down the street. You got to get into it. Don’t they just live there like they’re not getting houses, they live on the base?” They’re like, “No.” It’s interesting work but the process is that. It’s product market fit, like what products you have available and you’re willing to sell and you list them out.

What are you found for now? Who are the customers that you’re serving now? Are they men? Are they women? Are they educated? You can look. What are you found for now? Meaning, what are you known for? What is your actual reputation? Start to peel back layers of the onion. Try to understand where you sit in the marketplace.

Right out of the gate, you’re going to develop results. You’re going to understand quite a few keywords, phrases, and reviews that define and provide the true brand that you are now. You can say you’re a VA lender all you want, but if the majority of the business you do is not VA, you’re not a VA lender. Brand is what you do, what you are, not what you say you are. It’s not your logo.

From there, you set up some micro and macro goals of what you want to accomplish, and what you do want to be found for. You start to break down those keywords and that phraseology you get into it. You can provide prescriptions on what it’s going to take for you to start showing up when people do search for that type of keyword or phrase. That’s just the beginning. It’s a lot of work.

It sounds like only the big companies can do it. If it’s a lot of work, it takes a lot of time. Is this something only the big companies are able to take advantage of or can the small guys do that as well?

The small guys have to do it. It’s unlikely there are very few mortgage advisors or small shops that are going to be found for thousands of keywords. You can do this at a micro level and be found and one of the things that you want to be well known for is your name. You want to protect your name. That might be worth buying.

That might be worth making sure that your name is associated with the mortgage, loan officer, and your MLS number. There are a lot of different keywords that are very specific to you and what you do the location you live in that you need to protect and figure out how to make sure that your content is embedded with those things that are very specific to you.

Explain when you say you need to protect. For example, I bought the domain, David Lykken, and all the variations, D. Lykken. I bought all those names and have them. Is that what you’re talking about?

Absolutely. TikTok’s a great one. If you are like, “I’m too old for TikTok,” you need to get on there and claim that handle of your name because somebody else is going to claim it and become super popular. Now all of a sudden, when somebody googles your name, that TikTok persona infamous for dancing cats is going to be the most prominent search result when they look you up. It’s very practical. Not all of this is necessarily intricate work, but yeah, every time a new social media, anytime a name handle is available, a lot of that’s free. You keep in a couple of your domains is maybe $10 to $50 a year. The name-handle stuff is important.

 

When you say name handle, you’re talking about a phrase that could be commonly used. Is that what you’re referring to in the name handle?

I’m talking about like my Twitter account is @StevenCooley. It’s not @StevenCooley1234. I got into Twitter in 2009, a couple of years after launch and I got fortunate and grabbed my handle. There are a couple of instances like that. Some of them I’ve had to skew. You can own that. You want to protect your name as much as possible. Are there any other David Lykkens out there who are painting the internet with things that you might have to battle? That’s the thing. You likely have somebody else out there that’s doing something and they might not be in the mortgage business. Imagine a customer looking you up and somebody else is leveraging your name for something else. You have to protect yourself.

Steven, one of the things you specialize in is doing competitive analysis. You helped me immensely go in and look at that part of it. Talk about what is involved in competitive analysis.

It’s important that I understand who else out there is serving my prospects and my potential customers. Maybe even what they’re doing better than me, what I’m doing better than them evaluates exactly what they look like online and what they’re trying to achieve. What’s beautiful about this in the mortgage space, and I don’t see a ton of it except at the higher levels, is people don’t do this. Therefore, it is what it is.

 

I know this because you can look up advertisements. You can look up keywords against other banks and other lenders, other software companies, and whatnot and you don’t see a lot of competitive bidding on a lot of these terms. Mortgage is competitively leveraged all the time. If I was a consultant and I wanted to battle David Lykken, I could go out and I can buy David Lykken the keyword, so when people look you up, Steven Cooley pops up.

That’s pretty vindictive stuff but a lot of folks do that. It’s important to get a breakdown of your competitors, what they’re ranking for, and why they’re ranking for it. Are they ranking for it because they solve that problem unique way? Did they put out one piece of content and nobody’s competing with it? There’s usually a lot of room to develop content and create strategy to combat your competitor. I don’t want to call it easy, but I don’t see a lot of competitive marketing being done that is thought out and based on information, keywords, web traffic, and social media. There’s a way to do it to increase your business and your potential customers find the right fit.

What’s the next step in this process? Marketing business intelligence.

The steps we discussed are your initial findings. What do I want to be known for and what problems do I want to be known to solve when people search for specific problems, not general problems? We did this exercise. Remember, we looked up mortgage consulting and we found nothing that could even remotely get close to what the services that David Lykken provides.

We have to be very specific. We want to do a competitive analysis and understand what am I up against and whether there are things that I can do to combat my competitors in a strategic way, whether it’s through content development or advertising. The next is going to be ultimately putting out a strategy that is micro and macro that you can optimize and define some key performance indicators.

We hear KPIs get put out. I did a goofy video some time ago and I call them KPIs. Everyone’s talking about how I have to optimize my KPIs and you can I’m always chasing my KPIs and I’m sprinkling the KPIs on my marketing and it’s going to get better. The point of key performance indicators is I want to help leaders grow from regional to national. I want to hire 50 loan officers for specific problems.

I then want to start measuring and analyzing if my tactics, the content I’m developing, the websites, this social media activity, and all the things that I believe that I strategically put together based on actual hard information are actually working. It’s moving the needle and I’m starting to get better traction on those keywords and those search inquiries. That is the next step. I have to optimize.

There’s always a chance that you’re not going to hit the mark on your first go at it. You want to fail as fast as possible and then you want to pivot. That’s what’s great about social media and digital marketing. It is relatively cheap to test. When you miss the mark, you can always pivot within an hour, redesign something, re-message it, throw it back out there, and see how it performs. You have lots of chances at bat for the least amount of money when it comes to digital marketing. Running lots of tests and optimizing these things to see if you can get the performance that you desire is how you track that.

Testing digital marketing in social media is relatively cheap. Even when you miss the mark, you can always pivot within an hour, redesign, and throw it back out there to see how it performs. Share on X

Is it important to be ranked in your Google searches? It seems logical but I’m finding as I get into this that you don’t need to be ranked. It’s ranked for what you want to be known for, correct?

It’s imperative to be ranked, which is why services like SpyFu, Moz, and SemRush should be in the back pocket of any digital marketer that you’re working with. They should be able to tell you, “Where do I rank for this search term for this problem that I’m trying to solve?” That’s another key performance indicator. I want to be found on the first or second page of this. Also, you want to talk about websites and the content pages on your website. The worst place for somebody to end up is on your homepage.

Explain that.

If I have a website, I’m solving, and I’ve built out content on my website, let’s say the three services that you offer. You have leadership development, process dysfunction, we talked about this, and mentorship. You have these three pillars of service that you offer. Let’s say for all 3 of those services you offer, you have 5 different pieces of content. You have a video, infographic, and 3 blogs for each 1 of those 3 services. Let’s say they all have a little different slant to it. They all have a keyword focus on each.

Leadership might be financial or vision. To give you an example, people look it up. It would be better for them to find the blog article and enter your website through the blog article, through the video page, or through the infographic page. That means my content is solving my search inquiry. That’s when you know that your site is doing exactly what a website should.

How do you determine that?

Your analytics? Mortgage Advisor Tools is a great testament to that. It starts on the homepage. Initially, I was forced to drive people to MortgageAdvisorTools.com. I have reinforced that 1,000 times. I have 250 pages of profiles that I need people to discover of various companies. I have 25 different category pages. CRM is oddly my biggest category. We’ve had like 1,500 folks land on the CRM category, unique visitors in 4 months. It’s massive.

That’s 1,500 people who specifically are looking for a CRM solution in the mortgage industry. That’s the part of that. That’s why I get it confidently say that. When I talk to a CRM company, I say, “This is about as filtered traffic as you can get.” That’s where it gets interesting. When you get traffic that’s showing up for process dysfunction variables that occur there, you know that your content is working.

You can see, “People need help with this. We need to maybe double down on this or maybe I need to do another podcast about this and help people understand the fundamentals of how we help people processes and how we provide mass solutions.” If they show up on your website, that’s the easiest way to get them. I can get people the Mortgage Advisor Tools. I have a strong domain that says mortgage in my name, but how about my appraisal category page?

It’s a fascinating topic. There’s so much in this thing. We could go on and on forever, but the best thing for people to do is get ahold of you and connect and start a dialogue. What’s the best way for them to reach out to you?

My email is Steven@ArtVsMath.com. I’m on LinkedIn. I’m on Instagram. I’m on Twitter. You can follow me on Twitter, @StevenCooley. Feel free to email me. If you have leadership process dysfunction and mentorship challenges within your mortgage bank, reach out. We’re going to continue to work on figuring out ways to optimize and provide folks with content and take them through the journey. That’s what this is about.

These are not customers that we’re going to turn on a whim, but we want to be a part of their buyer’s journey. We want to help them fundamentally understand how to improve without selling them anything. That’s the whole point of this. I want to build content and provide resources without necessarily taking a dollar from you. Especially in roles like what you and I have, it’s pretty imperative that we give out as much free advice as we can before it matters and provide resources so we can help people. That’s what it’s about.

 

Art Vs. Math. Where’d you come up with the name?

It’s the battleground of marketing. We talked quite a bit about business intelligence, being tactful, key performance indicators, and analytics and you have all this very complex math-type stuff that we use in marketing. Sometimes, a good creative can combat all that. An awesome video and a polarizing creative perspective, whether it be text, visuals, or pictures, is the source that drives you the most business.

In my experience and the philosophy that I teach marketing under is, is Art Vs. Math. We have to look at all of it. If you’ve seen a Mortgage Advisor Tools video, you’ll see that we’re swinging the bat pretty hard at being hyper-creative, but trust and believe that we are looking very hard at our numbers and driving those results. That is the tactic that we use and that’s why the parent company is Art Vs. Math.

Thank you so much for being with us again, Steven. Great information. I value your wisdom.

Thank you. I appreciate your friendship.

A good friendship it is. Be sure to check out Art Vs. Math website and share this with your marketing people. There’s no doubt we should know this or we ought to know this or we do know this. Sometimes it’s amazing how many people miss, as I did, some of the things that we need to put in place first before we start marketing our services.

Get to know Steven. Encourage you to reach out to him. Next episode, we’re going to have another good friend on, Tony Caico of Affinity Five. Tony does a brilliant job of finding the right talent for your firm. You’re talking about whether you should be developing yourself as you want to expand your career. Be sure to check out the next episode. Tune in for it because the interview with Tony Caico is awesome. You’re going to love it. Special thank you to our sponsors Finastra, CMLA, Lenders One, Insellerate, Mobility MMI, Modex, the MBA, Knowledge Coop, and Mortgage Collaborative and soon coming in is Snapdocs. Very excited about all this. I look forward to having you back here next time.

 

Important Links

• Snapdocs
• Art Vs. Math
• IndustrySyndicate.com
• Mortgage Bankers Association of America
• Finastra
• Lenders One
• The Mortgage Collaborative
• Community Mortgage Lenders of America
• Insellerate
• Knowledge Coop
• Mobility MMI
• Modex
• Steven Cooley – Past Episode
• Mortgage Advisor Tools
• @StevenCooley – Twitter
• Steven@ArtVsMath.com
• LinkedIn – Steven Cooley
• Instagram – Steven Cooley