Tuesday, February 10, 2009

You gotta get their attention

Some say that with the right marketing message, well targeted to the right market segment with the right value proposition, you can sell anything. Ice cubes to Eskimoes. That might have been true at one time. But that was a quieter time.

Today, there is so much noise in the marketplace, it's impossible to sell anything if you can't first find a way to get your target market's attention.

In the mortgage lending space, the loans are sold off from wholesale lender (who bought it from a broker) to Wall Street conduit to mortgage-backed securities investor. No one along that chain had ultimate responsibility for the value of that individual deal. At least that's the way the business was run until the subprime mortgage crisis melted down the industry.

Today, most loans are sold to the federal government, in one way or another. No investor wants to buy fraudulent loans, so it's important to screen all applications for fraudulent information. But getting lenders to buy the reports requires vendors to get their attention.

Enter Interthinx, Agoura Hills, Calif. To raise interest in the company's offerings, it recently launched a series of web-based video programs, or webisodes. Based loosely on the old Mystery Science Theater 3000 model, the videos are fun to watch, even if they do provide some real information lenders can use. Check out the first in the series here:

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