The content you develop will help to educate your prospects and customers and answer questions they have regarding your products and/or services.  Coming up with different content is not hard when you have a list of topics to pull from.  You should always have a list of topics.  If you want help in coming up with topics, we have written a 52 Week Video Planner Guide that will help you create videos, by giving you a topic for each week.  You can find it on Amazon by clicking HERE or on our website HERE.  

Write Down General Topics

If you are a mortgage professional, your topic may be saving money for a down payment, or benefits of buying vs. renting. Write out several topics. The idea is to discover what topics you want to start building your content around.  You don’t have to do anything more than just write down topics. Take a few minutes and write down at least five topics. You may come up with more than five topics. Just focus on your topics. Think about what questions your prospe...

You should always leverage your videos and use them to help build your business with your referral partners. 

Sharing your videos with your referral partners is one of the primary reasons to create videos and you should integrate creating edumarketing campaigns for your referral partners and existing customers. Let’s not forget that your customers are not just those who buy one time from you. Your existing customers can and may be a great referral source for you. They can also be repeat customers, so you will want to look at building long-term edumarketing plans for your existing customers to continue to buy from you in the future. By being that resource and trusted expert, you will build customers for life!

Identifying Referral Partners

Yes, you guessed it—another activity for you to complete. Every business, no matter who you are and the product or service you offer, has potential partners. If you are a mortgage originator, your partners are real estate agents. Why? Because their ...

In the past several tips we’ve identified your expertise, by answering who you are, what problems you solve, and what your customer looks like, now we will move on. Identifying your product offerings. There are a ton of products available in the mortgage industry and you may already specialize in an area like VA, Reverse or Renovation. It’s good to know your product offerings to help your customers know you. Let’s look at what that looks like. 

Edumarketing can bring your business and customers together. Understanding those two elements is the foundation of identifying what your customers want to know about. The first steps to take are to answer the following questions:

1.Who is your ideal customer? (Remember your customer segments)

2.What do they want?

3.What are your products and services?

4.What problems do your products and services solve for your customers?

5.What questions do you answer?

Who Is Your Ideal Customer?

We went through the exercise of identifying your ideal cu...

In Tip#134, you identified your ideal customer. The next step in creating video content is to identify the problems you solve. Your customers have problems. Your customers have questions and guess what? You have solutions and answers for them. Using that information is the key to building your edumarketing plan. First, you need to understand what those problems and questions are, so let’s get started. To drill down on your expertise, answer the following questions:

1.What problems do you solve?

2.What questions do you answer? Let’s answer these questions using our young mortgage professionals as examples:

Question

What problems do you solve?

Answer

The problems that these young mortgage professionals solve is the ability to relate to a young demographic. The average age of real estate agents is over 55. The industry is also seeing delays in young professionals buying homes because of perception of what happened with the mortgage meltdown and high student debt. By being able to re...

In Tip#133, you identified your expertise. The next step in creating video content is to identify your ideal customer. 

To identify what your customers want to know about, you must first understand who your customer is and what are their needs. 

Fact: 86% of consumers say personalization plays a role in their purchasing. 

Knowing your customers’ needs and the questions they may have about making a purchase or doing business with you is the first step in creating your edumarketing plan. 

Let’s start with step one, which is identifying your ideal customer.

Step One: Identify Your Ideal Customer

Here is what that may look like if you are a real estate agent. 

Ideal Customer(s):

1. Someone who wants to purchase a home.

2. Someone who wants to sell their home.

Pretty basic, huh? Now, we will get into more detail about their wants and needs and how to drill down on what they need to have to really qualify as a customer, but at the end of the day, if you are a real estate agent, you...

Over the next several months we are going to be sharing with you information to help you build a foundation of creating educational video content. These tips will help you create more video content. We’re including a handout that you can download, print off and use. Each week we will break out one step to help you come up with topics that will help to educate your borrowers and partners. We encourage you to print off the hand out and follow along each week.

The first step in creating video content is to know who you are and how you help your customers. Simple right? Not really. I’ve worked with several long-time originators who have struggled with explaining all that they do. Take the time to answer these questions and if there is anything we can do to help you, please contact us at [email protected]. We love helping originators create video content!

Discover Your Expertise

If you are a financial planner, your expertise is helping people invest, save and increase their wealth. ...

1. Use lighting to highlight yourself or your subject

2. A key light gives direct source for your production

3. Fill light fills in shadows from the key light and gives even look

In this video we share some tips for adding lights to your videos. If you'd like help editing and producing your videos, let us help you! We can edit and produce your videos and post them weekly for you on YouTube and social media.

It's a great way to build your marketing and expertise!

You’re ready to start filming. Follow these four basic tips to increase the production value of your mobile content.

1. Phone video settings

You’d be surprised how much a few switch-flips can make a difference when it comes to capturing beautiful mobile video. If your phone’s relatively new, we’re willing to bet it’s got the ability to capture video in 4k (fancy!), you just probably need to select it in settings.

Head to your mobile camera settings to check out the recording specs available to you to instantly bump up your video quality. (Heads up, iPhone users — make your videos even more gorgeous by changing these iPhone video settings.) Click HERE for instructions.

2. Lighting for mobile video recording

Always make sure there’s more light in front of your subject than behind them. It’s more important that your subject is lit nicely than your background and if possible, shoot in shady or overcast conditions. That’ll help keep everything lit fairly evenly.

Also: avoid fluorescen...

We know you’re eager to know how to make a video with your phone, but if you want something really polished, you need to think about your content before you hit record. Here are three key things to keep in mind:

1. Start strong

One of the most important things is to grab the viewer’s attention near the beginning of the video. As humans rapidly devolve into goldfish, our attention spans aren’t quite what they used to be. Create a sense of engagement upfront to make people want to continue watching. Want to hold them for the duration of the video? Keep it short and sweet and get to the point.

2. Map it out

To help you get there, make sure you map out your beginning, middle, and end. Making a video is like getting lost in a corn maze, it’s not so bad if you have a plan, but if you don’t, you’ll be stuck in there munching on raw corn until it gets dark and security pulls you out. Okay, so mobile video production isn’t exactly like a corn maze.

3. Think about the finished product

Oh, ...

It is with deep sadness and a heavy heart that I watch the events unfolding in Afghanistan. I’m sure many of you feel the same. While the situations are arguably very different, I can’t help but draw a few parallels between what the people are facing there and the experience of a good friend of mine, Ramy Romany while fleeing Egypt with his family during the 2011 Revolution.

As a Christian Egyptian married to a white woman, Ramy was automatically considered an infidel by the Muslim Brotherhood who were rising up to take control of Egypt. Ramy and his family were lucky enough to make it to the United States unharmed.

Years later, my friend, Nick Nanton, who directed the documentary I co-produced for Folds of Honor, sat down and interviewed Ramy. His story was riveting, and reminded me that we all must have hope.

Although, the stories you have to tell do not hopefully involve as much drama, you do have stories, as do your borrowers. Think about how you can share those stories, because...