As a mortgage broker, you’re always feeling the urgency to find mortgage leads. But now with digital mortgage, the pressure multiplies. And rightfully so! If you’re not doing any digital marketing (and no, just having a website is not enough), then you are missing out on mortgage leads.
With the right digital marketing strategy, you can move your online lead generation beyond purchasing leads into one with a continuous flow of quality prospects.
As a mortgage professional, we get that you don’t have a lot of time to dedicate to online mortgage marketing. If hiring a company is also out of the question, we suggest that you focus your efforts on these top digital marketing strategies for mortgage brokers.
These 4 online marketing strategies are some of the most effective across the board, yet are simple to set up and maintain.
But before you get started on any digital marketing campaign, you want to make sure you’ve narrowed down these 3 areas:
- Who are you talking to?
- How will you follow up and nurture the lead?
- Be patient
There’s a difference between a first-time home buyer with less than perfect credit and a first time home buyer who is also a veteran. This means that any message you put out there, from pay-per-click ad to Facebook post, needs to be very clear as to which sort of buyer you are talking to.
The part about following up and being patient is where many marketing efforts fail. Many times, a broker will think that their strategy wasn’t working when in reality they didn’t give it enough time to see the results or there wasn’t a plan in place to continuously nurture the mortgage lead until it converted.
Kill It With Content Marketing
Creating and sharing valuable content to your target loan prospect is one of our favorite ways to increase both mortgage leads and referrals.
With content marketing, you:
- Establish yourself as a local authority in the types of mortgage you target
- Use social media and your blog as a lead generator
- Provide your prospects with valuable, helpful information
- Increase your brand awareness
When you consistently offer helpful mortgage-related and home-buying content, prospects will naturally start to use it as a learning resource and see you as a trustworthy broker. Plus, it’s the number one way to help boost your search engine rankings!
See this article to learn how to write SEO mortgage content.
Level-Up Your Facebook Ads
Despite Facebook reporting a loss in users for the past 2 years, advertisers don’t see it affect their ads. Facebook has pretty much perfected the ability to reach a specific audience with a highly relevant ad right into their news feed. The hardest part about getting the right people to see your ad? No problem with Facebook ads.
But unlike other brokers, YOUR ad is going to be unique and helpful content (see above) that will result in many more click-through’s rather than a traditional “image+text” ad.
Consider sharing a blog post like, “Smart Ways to Come Up With a Down Payment –Fast!” and advertise it to a first-time home buyer audience. Offering valuable information is the best way to introduce your mortgage services to a cold audience.
Master Re-marketing
Did you know that only about 2% of web traffic converts on the first visit? That means that if you want that first time visitor to convert, you have to keep on making yourself known. And that’s what re-marketing does.
Re-targeting ads keep track of who has visited your mortgage website and display your mortgage ads as they browse online. That 98% of users who don’t convert the first time are never actually lost — they are still seeing your ads and are keeping you in mind until they finally convert.
Setting up a re-marketing campaign is pretty simple. Just insert a tracking code on your mortgage website and create the ad that will follow your visitors as they explore the web.
Take this even further by re-targeting even more precisely. For example, for prospects that read your blog post on, “ Smart Ways to Come Up With A Down Payment – Fast!” but did not convert, you can create a re-targeting ad that talks about first-time home buying programs.
You can do the same thing with Google AdWords. Depending on the article or page they visited, you can feed relevant ads to your prospects based on what they were reading on your site.
Use Your Email List!
Your email list is where it’s at! Even though social media marketing seems to be at the top of everyone’s mind when it comes to digital marketing, email marketing still has one of the highest rates of conversion.
By sending weekly or even bi-monthly emails to your email list, you can have their complete attention (no Facebook notifications or Tweets to distract), and offer them personalized mortgage content.
With highly relevant articles, potential borrowers are more likely to open your emails, take time to read them, and even share them because they know your content is useful.
Speaking of useful, did you find this article useful? Let us know and please share with a colleague!
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