Welcome back to Lending Leadership: The Creative Brief—your resource for real talk about the mortgage industry’s behind-the-scenes realities.

Today, we’re jumping into a topic that’s critically important for every loan officer: What should your marketing department actually be doing for you? Whether you’re an industry veteran or building your book, this episode is all about evaluating marketing support and how it impacts your business decisions and day-to-day success.

After hearing countless frustrations from loan officers about the gaps and surprises in their marketing support, we’re breaking down what you should be able to expect—from communication, to customization, to accountability (and everything in between). We get granular about the importance of knowing what’s being sent from your CRM, how internal marketing teams should balance corporate initiatives with individualized support, and what excellent service truly looks like in this context.

We also touch on what happens when you don’t get the support you need: the costs (literal and otherwise) of turning to external marketing resources, and how to know if your marketing department treats you as a real client and partner.

5 Key Takeaways:

1. Transparency in CRM Communications: Your marketing department should never send out communications to your database—past clients, realtor partners, or business contacts—without your approval and full awareness. It’s essential that you’re notified and understand what’s being sent so you never feel caught off guard by questions or follow-up calls.
2. Personalized Consultative Support: True support isn’t just about blasting out generic content from corporate. Your marketing team should proactively meet with you, consult on your specific goals and challenges, and help you build custom strategies and campaigns that fit your brand, market, and clientele.
3. Brand and Campaign Ownership: Ask yourself: is your marketing department corporately driven, or are they focused on supporting you, the loan officer, as a brand within the company? You should have the opportunity to create your own branding, run your individual campaigns, and seek marketing guidance that’s unique to your business—not just the company at large.
4. Responsiveness and Ongoing Communication: A supportive marketing team isn’t measured just in creativity, but in timeliness and follow-through. You should never have to wait weeks for support or answers. Quick, reliable communication is a baseline expectation, along with regular check-ins and accountability when you want or need it.
5. Knowing When to Seek (or Avoid Needing) External Support: If you’re not receiving the attention, customization, or responsiveness you need internally, you may end up hiring outside agencies—sometimes at great expense. While there’s nothing wrong with that approach if it suits you, ideally your internal marketing partners are working for you, checking all the boxes, and helping your business grow from within.

We hope today’s episode sparks new questions for you about your own marketing support and arms you with actionable insights to get more of what you need. If you have experience with outside marketing agencies, or thoughts on what works (or doesn’t) in your marketing team, let us know in the comments. And as always—like, share, and stay tuned. We’ve got plenty more episodes on deck!

Rach & Rinn

This is a really hot button item. I mean, I think it's in the. One of the top three things that make people go, huh, Is this the right company for me if the marketing support really isn't there? Hey, everybody. Welcome to Lending Leadership. I'm Rach.

And I'm Rin. We're here today to get right back into it. It's the creative brief, and we want to talk to loan officers about their marketing plans. So today. I know Rachel's excited. I'm excited. I think really what we want to dig in today is that juicy topic of what should your marketing department be doing for you? We hear a lot from our loan officers at different companies. We're getting this type of support where another officer might mention a completely different level of support, but we want to kind of go through some of those main points of what you should really be expecting from your marketing department.

Right, Rach?

Yeah. And this is a. This is a really hot button item. I mean, I think it's in one of the top three things that make people go, huh? Is this the right company for me if the marketing support really isn't there? And there's a lot of things that your marketing company should be doing for you and that you should be on the lookout for when it comes to marketing. But we're going to hone in on some. Some things that you might not be thinking about all the time until they happen to you. And you're like, oh, why did this happen? And this is, you know, this is real life story. We're talking with loan officers all the time who are sharing these.

These things with us. And the first thing we want to get into. Corinne, you want to take it away.

I don't know if it's a drum. It might not be the most exciting topic of all or the most sexy topic, but it is definitely important, right? It is one of the most important, and that's your CRM, your database, your customer base, your past customers, your top realtor partners, and then your business partners that you so rely and trust on on a regular basis. How we're communicating with those individuals and what are we putting in front of them on a weekly, monthly, even quarterly basis. You know, I've had so many conversations with loan officers, you know, that come to. To, you know, Tom, Robert, Dave, Rachel, or myself, and. And really just have that pain point of, you know, explaining, you know, my marketing department is sending out things through our CRM, any CRM of choice, but I don't know what they're sending. So I Mean, that's kind of a wild place to be, you know, you know, running your own business and communicating from a sales perspective. But an alert about a product or service goes out to your database and your customer base, and you don't know what was sent out.

I've got a problem with that. So, you know, I know that, you know, when it comes to our loan officers, it's incredibly important from our perspective and Rachel's perspective in our department, that when we are sending out information to anybody's database, they have an alert, and our loan officers are approving the communication and understand what we want to share with their database and with their realtor partners.

Well, that really. Corinne, goes back to the idea and the mindset of we really try to think of ourselves in our company, at HMA as. As a marketing firm, and our loan officers are our clients. You know, it's almost like we're this outside company, but we're internal, which is really neat. And gosh, it really stinks when something goes out on behalf of a loan officer and they get a call from a client and then they have no idea what the client's talking about. Nobody likes to look stupid. And unfortunately, we've heard that story over and over again. And I don't think it's.

It's a company that's trying to be vindictive or take someone's clients. I think people in other companies and other marketing firms are just trying to figure it out. They're trying to stay ahead of things for their loan officers. But in turn, I think that can really hurt them. It can burn them. Because nobody wants to look stupid. Nobody wants to look uninformed. And if a client calls you and you're like, oh, yeah, let me check into that.

That email that went out, and they just don't know. I mean, that. That puts them in kind of a sticky situation.

I think you really nailed it, Rachel. I think really what the larger overarching issue is, which kind of bridges us into a next point here, is that there's a disconnect at some mortgage companies with their marketing department acting from kind of a corporate standpoint of here's some corporate drives and initiatives. There's a disconnect between that and then the loan officer who's working on their personal business day to day. Right. Really, what we take super seriously is that customized approach of communicating with our loan officers on a regular basis to make sure there's a very clear bridge. And we're all driving in the same direction. The corporate marketing department is driving in the same direction as the loan officer who is working on their business in their region day to day. And that is really what you should expect and what you should be looking for from your marketing department that you have clear communication on anything being sent out to your customer database, your realtor or business partner database on your behalf, product related, service related, event related, you should have a clear notification and a clear understanding.

So when a question comes to you, a phone call, call comes in, you know how to answer it, and you know exactly what's going on and why your marketing department sent that out.

So loan officers, really ask yourself what drives your marketing company or marketing team within your company? Are they corporately driven or are they loan officer driven? That's a very simple way to put it. Like, really ask yourself that, because there has to be a balance. Like Corinne said, you have to have both. But you want to make sure that there's so many different angles and ways to go. Right? But if they're really focusing on their loan officers, there is more of a consultive feel. Are you able to have your own branding? Are you able to have your own logo within the company logo? Are you able to go to your marketing team and say, hey, I want to set up this event or this campaign, but only for my little group, not for the entire company. If the company says, sorry, we don't do that, then, you know, maybe those are, I don't want to say red flags, but maybe those are positions and thoughts that would make you go, huh, all right, well, that's interesting because not every company works like that. That's not how we work.

We really try to have that very centralized approach to making sure our loan officers are branded and that we, we are consulting them on a daily basis, not every once in a while.

I can't agree more, Rachel. I think that kind of really just covered really our second point. And you know, just to reiterate, if your marketing department is not setting up personalized consulting calls with you to discuss your business side by side with you, your strategy, the campaigns you're working on, your strengths from a marketing standpoint, your weaknesses, additional help you need and supporting you in that regard, looking at your specific area, the nuances in your state and where you're licensed, the nuances in how you work with your realtor partners and how you understand your customers if they don't sit with you side by side with you on that, to help you develop your business, there's a piece that's missing. So you can expect that that's what I would expect that's what our loan officers at our company expect. And we're happy to have this chat and consult on it through this podcast and continue this conversation with each of you.

And, you know, at the end of the day, I always say, if our loan officers look good, then we look good. If from a corporate standpoint, we look good, then our loan officers look good. So it's that rising tide lifts off ships. It's really true. It's kind of cheesy to say, but, you know, you want the people around you to be at their best. You know, what's. How good is it sitting at the top with, you know, okay, great, you're up at the top of the company, but, you know, nobody else is doing anything. No, we want everybody to thrive.

And, you know, I'll give you a real life example of that. One of the things that I do often, and it's really taken off, is we have a social media audit that I'll do where I'll go through and we'll look at someone's Instagram, their Facebook, their. Their videos, you know, YouTube, TikTok, all the things LinkedIn and. And just give that perspective of, okay, here's what's really working for you. Here's some areas you may want to tweak, but making sure that we're taking that consultive view to really help people. And then also, I don't know about y', all, but oh, my gosh, making sure that you are accountable, that is huge in anything that we're doing. So that's another. Another aspect our.

Our team is taking on where we're just holding people accountable. If they want us to hold us, hold them accountable and say, hey, I promised myself I wanted to make X amount of posts per month, per week, whatever it is. And then our team will hold them accountable and say, hey, do you need help with this? We've noticed you haven't been posting or you haven't done this. Let me remind you of your goals. So little things like that that really push people to the next level, I think is just. It's the difference.

Yeah, it's so important. It's the business planning element that goes with it. Right. It's not just marketing and promoting your business and creative ideas, but it's business planning, it's time management. There's a lot of pieces that contribute to the success in our category. And I think, you know, one other, you know, larger point that I wanted to get into during our session today, Rachel, is also something, something very simplistic that I think our loan officers hopefully take for granted. And that might be, you know, us bragging a little bit about our department, but submitting a question, having a request, needing support on anything from a presentation that you're doing next week or doing a lunch and learn at an office, needing help making a flyer more customized. Maybe you have an idea for a really cool social graphic or you want to dial in and you need assistance with scripting for a video that you want to put online.

These are just some great examples that come to us from time to time. What happens after you ask for that support? I want you to really think about that because I can't tell you I'm thinking of one in my mind right now. We're just going to call this loan officer Joe. Not, not his name, we're just going to call him Joe, you know, mentioned in a call that he has submitted questions and ideas and things that he's needed assistance from his marketing department from. It's not that they never responded to him, but it took quite a bit of time, maybe more than two weeks to even get a response that they were able to take a call or, or start looking at his project. That from my standpoint is unacceptable. So, you know, is your marketing department able to respond and act and help you in a timely fashion? It seems like a simplistic concept that would just make sense, but they really should be client focused and able to help you within, you know, a realistic, you know, service time for what you're asking for. And of course that's going to vary from project to project.

But communication, I think is really what I'm getting to. Communication, Rachel, is key that your marketing department is communicating with you and they're a side by side ally and partner for you for everything that you need.

Absolutely. And you know, we also hear from a lot of people that if they're not getting that communication or support from their internal marketing team that they're turning outwardly and they're hiring external companies and sometimes it can be at a very, very hefty cost because they're just not getting the support and the, the one on one attention that they need. So they're hiring outside companies. Actually love to know loan officers listening in loan partners. If your team uses an outside marketing company, comment down below because I would just love to know, you know, what the market looks like and who's using external companies, who's focusing just on and leaning on their internal team. And hey, this is not a dig at other mortgage companies and their marketing teams. Everyone runs differently. And it really, it's all a matter of preference, you know, what works for you as a loan officer.

If you're someone who really doesn't need that extra support, then that's great. But if you're someone who wants that extra support, hand holding attention, you know, then really ask yourselves these questions that we're posing today.

And really, that was awesome, Rachel. The last thing that I really want to ask everybody is who is your internal marketing department working for? Are they working for you? So that'll wrap us up today as you think about that thought comment.

So good.

Comment. Like share. And we can't wait to see you next time. We've got so many more good episodes to come.

Thanks, everybody. Bye.