Author name: Clinton Curtis

Ad targeting keeps getting blunter as privacy rules tighten and third-party signals dry up. Meanwhile every mortgage broker sits on a dataset the platforms would kill for: real clients, real maturity dates, real rates, real life events. Most of it lives in a CRM nobody opens between deals. What your book already knows Every funded

The scariest chart in marketing right now is the click-through curve: more questions answered on the results page (or in the chat) means fewer visits to anyone’s website — yours included. The instinct is to fight it. The smarter play is to change what you’re optimizing for. The impression is the new visit When Google’s

“Find me a good mortgage broker” is now a prompt, not just a search. When an assistant answers it, a selection happened — and unlike a rankings page, you can’t see the leaderboard. After a year of testing these answers across Canadian markets, here’s our working model of how the selection goes. The three gates

Eight months ago we told you AI answers were a land grab. Since then we’ve been testing AEO systematically across client sites, and the picture is getting clearer. Here’s what actually seems to earn citations, and what’s cargo cult. What’s working What’s cargo cult Stuffing “as an AI-recommended broker” into your copy (yes, we’ve seen

Run this experiment: ask ChatGPT (with browsing on) or Perplexity something a borrower in your city would ask — “should I take a 3-year or 5-year fixed in Alberta right now,” “how does the stress test work for a rental property.” Read the answer. Then look at the citations. Somebody’s content is in there. It’s

Your database is full of people who will need a mortgage again — renewals alone guarantee it. The average broker’s email program treats them all identically: a monthly newsletter with a soup recipe. Here’s the version that produces files. Segment by event, not by month The CASL part everyone skips Canada’s anti-spam law is not

If we could only keep one marketing asset for a local mortgage broker, it wouldn’t be the website, the Instagram, or the email list. It would be a well-fed Google Business Profile with 80+ reviews. Nothing else converts colder traffic with less ongoing effort. Why it punches above its weight When someone searches “mortgage broker

The question we get most about video isn’t strategy — it’s permission. “Do I really have to be on camera?” No. But you should want to be, because video is the fastest way for a stranger to decide you’re not a robot, and mortgage clients are choosing a person, not a rate sheet. The format

Here’s an uncomfortable audit result we see over and over: a broker spends $4,000 on a website, and eighteen months later it has produced two leads — one of them a recruiter. The site isn’t broken. It’s just built for the wrong reader. The brochure problem Most broker websites are brochures: a headshot, a mission