For this week’s episode of the LodeStar Lending Leaders Podcast, Alayna talks with Robert Palmer, Marketing Manager at Byte Software, to discuss the importance of branding, rebranding, and core marketing principles.

Making an Impression

20 years ago, Bobby got his start in the mortgage industry as a graphic designer. He learned early on that marketing is all about being memorable. When he was brand new, he was asked to make a PowerPoint about something called a functionality matrix. As bored by the concept as any newbie designer, he photoshopped his coworkers’ faces—including a senior, high-ranking member—into a poster of The Matrix.

He jokes that could have gotten him fired—but it made an impression. After an acquisition that saw him and his coworkers laid off, that same high-ranking person moved to another company and brought Bobby with him and found him a place on the marketing team.

Core Principles

A lot about marketing has changed in the past few years—especially since the pandemic—but a lot has stayed the same. In the mortgage industry, Bobby cites core principles that will probably always be the same: even tech savvy lenders will always need to go to open houses, grow their realtor connections, and network face-to-face. You can’t replace that.

But at the same time, there are lots of tools out there now for content creation and establishing your brand. Video, audio, you name it. It’s a great time to be a marketer, just by virtue of how democratized things like video production have become.

The Importance of (Re)Branding

Simply put, a brand is a person’s gut feeling when they experience your company, whether that’s online, at a conference, through your product(s), etc. There’s a lot that goes into that gut feeling: your logo, your color scheme, your writing in emails, your presence at a conference, etc. The goal is to take each of these points of contact with clients, leads, industry partners, and others and make them each indicative of the kind of feeling you want people to have when they interact with your company.

Inevitably, as you establish an effective brand, time passes, and maybe your company changes, you’ll need to reevaluate that brand. Maybe that means taking stock of your voice and culture, and tweaking these. Maybe this means opting for a new color scheme, an updated logo, or a new website. No matter what, it’s all about keeping your finger on the pulse of, “How are we presenting ourselves?” and “What experience are people having of our company?”

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