Mortgage marketing is constantly evolving as homebuyers have access to more lenders than ever before. The rise of the internet has brought about changes in the marketing world that are difficult to adjust to. Homebuyers now expect faster approvals, complete transparency, and are quick to voice their displeasure of your loan application process if something goes wrong. Therefore, now more than ever, there is a need for you to upgrade your mortgage marketing strategies to stand out among your competitors.
Generating mortgage leads require you to adapt to ever-changing digital marketing strategies. Here are a few ideas we think will help you gain traction over the next 12 months.
1. Take Advantage of Content Marketing
Creating and publishing valuable content targeting your primary audience is a great way to increase leads and referrals.
Content marketing is a really important component of every digital marketing strategy. As it serves several purposes for your business
- Assists in lead generation
- Positions you as an authority in the mortgage industry
- Increase brand awareness
- Provides prospects with valuable information
A good example of content marketing can be a refinance case study that your customer saved money when they refinanced their home mortgage with you. Add some numbers and share them on your social media and email it to prospects.
However, for a content marketing strategy to be successful, your content must offer unique value to your prospects. Your content should deliver useful and latest information that the user is looking for. People will ultimately start to use your website as a learning resource and the website’s domain authority will improve significantly.
Moreover, creating content that is well-aligned with your services will increase the overall traffic to your website, your search rankings will improve, and it will ultimately generate more mortgage leads.
2. Get Creative with Visual Content
Remember, content is not just words. Visual content is eye-catching and shareable, so it not only brings you top of mind but also helps in expanding your reach. Today, more than 80% of online content is visual content (Source: cisco.com). Visual content consists of videos and infographics that deliver relevant information. According to the experts, visual content gets shared four times more than plain written content, as it is easy to read, remember and engage the viewers.
As a mortgage company, you can use infographics to share important information, stats and news about housing, mortgage trends, mortgage prices, and so on. Posting home tour videos for people who do not have enough time to visit houses in person is also becoming a popular trend in the mortgage industry these days.
Apart from that, as a mortgage lender, you can share video emails and messages with the prospective homebuyers, to help build relationships and convey information on the mortgage process that is sometimes hard to relay through text messages.
3. Improve Your Email Marketing Strategy
Email marketing acquires potential homebuyers better than any other marketing channel on the internet. In 2020, the expected average ROI on email marketing is $42 for every $1 you spent on it (Source: snov.io), and is expected to grow further in the coming years. So, if you have not been taking email marketing very seriously, improve your strategy now.
Your email list is one of the most important assets of your business. Sending weekly or bi-monthly emails to your email list can have a huge impact on your business. But for this to work, you must be providing relevant, valuable, and precise content to your list.
Why does email marketing work so well though? It’s because emails can be as targeted and personal as you want them to be. They not only keep you top of mind for repeat business, but also create opportunities for social sharing, email forwarding, and referral business.
That being said, a good email marketing strategy would focus less on promoting the services that company offers and instead provide useful information that fulfill the needs of the recipients.
4. Work on Social Media Marketing
Social Media marketing is expected to generate as much as $102 billion by the end of the year 2020 (Source: sproutsocial.com). While some people might still think that mortgage marketing is not particularly suited to social media, they would be wrong or rather misled.
Social media marketing is continuously evolving and changing. And if you are willing to try some new tactics, there are a lot of opportunities out there for you to reach your target audience and generate new leads. Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter are the most common social media channels to improve your brand awareness.
Posting useful mortgage stats, available housing opportunities, and testimonials from your happy customers is an effective means of reaching beyond your current network and increasing your brand exposure across different social media channels.
5. Take Advantage of Pay-Per-Click Advertising
Did you know that 93% of business decisions are taken after consulting a search engine? This means that if your website does not appear as one of the top results, your leads are limited to only 7% of your market.
Google Adwords can help you to reach your full market. Investing on your focus keywords can get your company to the top of search results. Depending on keyword difficulty and search volume, prices per click may vary from a few cents to a few dollars. With a bit of math, you can calculate how much you will be willing to spend to get a lead, and then adjust your budget accordingly.
Make sure that you choose right keywords that are specific to your services and ad groups. The right Google Adwords strategy results in an immediate impact on your website and new leads for your business.
6. Set Up Remarketing
For most websites, only 2% of web traffic converts on the first visit. To make your marketing campaigns as effective as possible, you need to target the other 98% of visitors. Setting up a remarketing tracking code on your website will allow you to target that 98% of the audience.
Re-marketing also known as “Retargeting” is a marketing strategy that especially focuses on the audience who you know have visited your website before. If you use Google Adwords retargeting, people who have visited your website before will see your ads when they visit websites that are part of the Google Display Network, or when they search for terms that are related to your products or services on Google. You can also use Facebook retargeting strategy to remarket your ads there.
In digital marketing, we consider this group of audience warm traffic. Since these people are already familiar with your brand and services, they are more likely to engage and convert with your advertisement.
7. Optimize Your Website and SEO
Website design and structure optimizations are extremely overlooked in the mortgage industry. But the mortgage companies that have custom branded websites with a user-friendly website design get competitive advantage and are thriving since 2017.
A mortgage is one of the biggest decisions for most homebuyers. So, they would want to do business with a mortgage lender that has a clean online presence. If your website is outdated, not showing up consistently and properly on search engines, or is optimized for generating conversions, you will lose customers.
Make sure that your web pages are properly indexed and categorized so you can achieve your desired search engine rankings. Your web content should be unique and to-the-point so that the bounce rate is minimum.
In addition, more than half of the people visit your website on their mobile phones. So, it is important that your website is mobile-friendly and has a fast load-time, it will help you in increasing user engagement on your site.
Your website should have the top mortgage keywords in your area in the title, meta description and copy of the website.
8. Grow Your Network
82% Americans seek recommendations from their friends and family when considering a product or service. That makes it 8 out of every 10 people. So it’s important to get your mortgage company’s name out there. Networking in person and online is the way to do this.
Although, in this tech-driven marketing world, reaching out to people in person may seem a bit old-fashioned. But when it comes to building relations, there is no substitute.
Mortgages are a serious business for most people, and the process of getting one is not a spontaneous purchase, which makes mortgage marketing less than simple in this tech-driven world. The marketing strategies that we have laid out above will surely help mortgage lenders and marketers meet that challenge.