7 Digital Marketing Strategies That Will Skyrocket Your Mortgage Acquisitions
You are not reaching your full potential.
As a lender, you are constantly feeling the pressure to find more efficient ways to acquire and process loans.
One of the best ways to increase the amount of loans you are acquiring is investing in digital marketing.
Sure, you can purchase a list of leads and give those a call, but we all know how most of those calls end.
Wouldn’t it be nice to be able to generate leads on your own without having to continually purchase leads’ lists?
With the correct digital marketing strategy, you can pinpoint your target audience and move it into a strategic online sales funnel.
The right mortgage marketing campaign will turn a potential borrower from a cold lead into a processed loan.
We’ve outlined 7 different online marketing strategies you can use to fund and close more loans.
1. Choose Your Target Audience
Every digital marketing campaign must target a primary audience. Having too broad of an audience will negatively impact your campaign.
You must choose to either target new homebuyers or refinance customers.
If you want to go after both types of customers, you will have create two separate campaigns.
Wondering about the difference between the two? Here is an overview:
Refinance Shoppers:
- Rate-sensitive
- Willing to shop around for quotes
- Know what they are doing
New Homebuyers:
- Looking for someone to guide them through the process
- Willing to pay more for helpful advice
- Referral driven
You can use the characteristics of each audience to craft a tailored marketing message that speaks directly to their needs or concerns.
2. Take Advantage of Content Marketing
Creating and distributing valuable content targeting your primary audience is a great way to increase leads and referrals.
Content marketing is an important component of any digital marketing strategy. It serves several purposes for your business:
- Positions you as an authority in the mortgage industry
- Assists in lead generation from social media
- Provides prospects with valuable information
- Increases brand awareness
The content that you are writing must be original, meaning that you are not purchasing pre-written content that hundreds or thousands of other websites may have.
This content should be unique to your brand and company.
When you consistently add unique and helpful home-buying and mortgage-related content to your website, people will start to use it as a learning resource.
Further, posting content relevant to your industry will help with your search engine rankings.
Pro Tip:
You will also want to publish any blog post or original content that you create to LinkedIn Pulse.
The Pulse is LinkedIn’s self-publishing platform, which helps you gain visibility in your industry and among your connections.
Every time you publish a post, LinkedIn sends out a notification to all of your connections notifying them of your new published article.
Your article will stay under the “Posts” section of your profile, located directly under your profile picture. It has prime real estate on your page.
The article is also distributed into the Pulse feed, where people who are interested in real estate or mortgages can view your content.
Did you know that businesses that maintain a regularly updated blog generate up to 400% more leads than those that do not?
3. Start Using Facebook Advertising
In Spring 2015, Facebook reported that it has 1.44 billion active monthly users.
People who are thinking about refinancing their home, and people who are about to move are on Facebook.
Facebook’s advertising platform allows you to directly target these people and place highly relevant ads straight into their newsfeed.
Want to see proof?
Let’s say you are located in Orange County, and you want to target people who live within a 50-mile radius of Irvine.
As you can see below, using the Facebook Ads platform, you can target 270,000 different people living within 50 miles of Irvine who are likely to move.
There is a good chance that most of these people will need a new mortgage.
Pro Tip:
The unique and helpful content you are going to be creating is perfect for Facebook advertising.
You could write a blog post titled “7 Ways to Save Money on Your Move” and advertise it directly to that audience.
What a perfect way to introduce you and your brand to a cold audience. Since you are providing them with extremely useful information (how to save money), they are sure to remember you.
4. Don’t Be Afraid of Pay-Per-Click Advertising
Who doesn’t want to be ranked on the first page of Google?
Did you know that 93% of business decisions begin by consulting a search engine?
This means if you don’t appear as one of the top results, you are only selling to 7% of your market.
Using Google AdWords can help your company reach its full market.
Bidding on keywords such as “Orange County mortgage brokers” or “Orange County loan officers” can get your company to the top of the search results.
Depending upon the keyword and the level of competition, prices per click can range from a few cents to a couple of dollars.
With a bit of math, you can calculate how much you are willing to spend to acquire a lead and then set a budget accordingly.
The right Google AdWords strategy can have an immediate impact on traffic to your website and calls coming into your business.
Pro Tip:
Make sure you use keywords that are specific to your ad groups as well as negative keywords when setting up your account. This can easily save your company thousands of dollars.
5. Set Up Remarketing
For most websites, only 2% of web traffic converts readers on the first visit.
Retargeting keeps track of people who have visited your website and displays your ads to them as they browse online.
This brings back 98% of users who don’t convert right away by keeping your brand at the top of their mind.
Setting up a remarketing tracking code on your website will allow you to target past visitors who did not convert or take the desired action on your site.
In online marketing, we consider this group of people warm traffic.
After people have been to your website and are familiar with your brand, you can market more aggressively to them.
On Facebook, for example:
Let’s say you wrote the blog post “7 Ways to Save Money on Your Move” and advertise on Facebook to people who are likely to move within 50 miles of Irvine.
With retargeting, you can then serve an ad directly to people who read that article, asking them to fill out a lead form or providing them more information about your lending services.
Since these people are already familiar with you and your brand, they are more likely to engage and convert with your advertisement.
You can learn how install a Facebook Retargeting pixel on your website by reading this Facebook article.
For Google AdWords:
Google AdWords also allows you to retarget past website visitors.
One of the most useful ways to retarget them using the Google network is through display advertisements.
This means that after people leave your website, you can target them on other websites or when reading articles that are related to the real estate or mortgage industry.
This helps you and your brand stay top-of-mind with potential customers when they are educating themselves about your industry.
You can learn more about Google’s retargeting features on its website.
6. Use Your Email List Wisely
Your email list is one of the most important assets of your business.
Email marketing converts potential customers better than any other marketing channel on the Internet.
It allows you to engage with your audience in a creative and personal way that tweets and blog posts cannot.
Sending weekly or bi-monthly emails to your list can have a huge impact on your business, as long as you are doing it in the correct way.
You must be providing relevant and valuable content to your list in order for this to work.
This way, potential customers will look forward to your emails and take the time to read them because they know you can improve their current situation.
Another way to harness the power of your email list is to use it with Google AdWords and Facebook Ads.
This works great if you are purchasing leads’ lists that come with email addresses.
You can upload these lists directly to Facebook or Google, and each platform will find users on that list that use its platform.
Once the platform has matched your email list to its users, you can serve them highly relevant ads.
This technique will send your conversion rate through the roof.
7. Mortgage Marketing Strategies
All of the strategies above work great on their own, but they are extremely powerful when they are part of a cohesive digital marketing strategy.
You need to take each component above and put it into an online marketing strategy that effortlessly moves traffic through each stage of the sales cycle.
You can do this by creating a digital marketing campaign strategy.
BONUS: Check Your Website
FACT: More than half of the people visiting your website are on their mobile device. Pull up your website on your smartphone right now and examine how it looks.
A mortgage is a huge decision for homeowners. They want to do business with a mortgage broker that they know, like and trust. If your website is outdated, not mobile-friendly or optimized for generating conversions, you are losing customers.
Website design and conversion rate optimization are extremely overlooked in the mortgage industry. The mortgage companies that have custom websites and are using design as a competitive advantage are thriving in 2017.
If you are interested in getting a custom design website or landing page that will turn website visitors into leads, then contact us today to see how we can help.
Our base pricing for a custom designed website is $4,500 and all landing pages start at $850. Fill out the form on our Get Started Page to receive a free 15 minute consultation to see how we can help grow your business.
Interested in having Root Marketing run your Facebook marketing for you? Fill out the form on the Get Started Page and we’ll let you know how we can help you acquire mortgage leads.