The mortgage market is famous for booming and busting with economic cycles. If you’ve been around long enough, you remember the Savings and Loans crisis of 1996, and even if you weren’t in the mortgage industry at the time, you felt the mortgage meltdown of 2007-2008. And now, as I write this at the beginning of 2020 we’re headed into a mini-refi boom triggered by the Coronavirus and an Oil pissing match between OPEC and Russia.
Why am I leading with panic scenarios? I want you to feel the urgency of upping your mortgage marketing game.
Developing a strong mortgage marketing plan is the best way to smooth out the volatility in the mortgage market (even taking advantage of panic scenarios) and keep your business steadily growing as others struggle. Here are 21 mortgage marketing ideas, you probably haven’t tried that you can layer into your current marketing program.
Looking for an even bigger list of mortgage marketing ideas? Get my 50+ mortgage marketing ideas to generate more leads for your sales team.
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1. Add an Email Signature to All Your Emails
Start using your business email as your primary email and add an email signature that clearly explains the insurance products you have to offer. Now, when you’re sending emails back and forth to friends, family, fantasy football leagues, soccer and baseball teams, band boosters, church groups, and community activities you’re marketing!
2. Make an Everything-We-Sell Sheet
People love to browse the menu and ask about new things. No matter how thorough we are in servicing our book of business, there is a good chance we won’t stumble across a need that you offer, but that the client doesn’t know you offer. Send this sheet out at least once a year. You never know when someone is thinking about refinancing, buying a second home, downsizing, or taking out a home equity loan.
3. “Put Me in Your Phone”
You’ll be shocked at how willing people are to do this. Tell them to label you in their phone a “the mortgage guy/gal.” Then remind them that the next time someone asks about buying or selling a home they can impress them by texting them “their guy/gal.”
4. Get a Website or Freshen Up an Old One
Websites are the modern storefront and yellow pages. Whenever anyone is looking for anything, you can bet that the first thing they will do is Google it. So, if you don’t have a website, you’re missing a lot of business. And, if you do have a website and it doesn’t look like anyone – including yourself – has looked at it since the ’90s, that’s just as bad. You know the sites. Ones that look like these classic websites that are still up and running.
5. Write on Your Blog
Many home buyers are looking for answers. You have a wealth of knowledge you could be sharing, such as tips on what to expect from the mortgage process and how to choose a broker. You can establish trust and familiarity by educating customers even before you make contact.
If you’re not sure which information to share, start keeping track of the questions that new prospects and customers are asking when you meet for the first time.
Make your website or blog the go-to source for these frequently asked questions.
6. Go Live on Facebook
Another great place to educate customers is on Facebook. You can, of course, do a Facebook post on your Page, but I’ve found that going Live and posting that quick video is the best way to engage and grow your audience of potential customers.
Cover the same content as you would on a blog. Answer commonly asked questions and cover topics, like improving credit, that always draw in curious customers.
7. Teach Financial Advisers About Mortgages
Financial advisers are one of my secret weapons. Financial advisers spend a lot of time doing deep dives into people’s personal finances. These professionals are trained to help people save and invest money. They are also usually well versed in insurance products to help protect against catastrophe and protect those savings and investments. But, they are notoriously uninformed about what tends to be the biggest asset in their clients’ portfolios – their home, and more specifically their mortgage.
This section isn’t a dig on advisers, but it is a big blind spot for these smart professionals. Here is the win-win offering: By teaching advisers a thing or two about mortgages you can help them ensure that their clients are wasting money on higher than necessary mortgage interest, PMI, homeowner’s insurance, or property taxes – adding to the funds that the adviser can place under management. And you get referrals!
8. Send Out Home Maintenance Tips
One of the best ways to keep in contact and add value is to educate your book of business. Considering that all of your prospects have a home – owned or rented – you can add a lot of value by educating them on how to maintain their home best.
Remind them to change the batteries in their fire alerts, so they don’t get that dreaded # AM low battery chirp. Teach them how to change HVAC filters, prevent dangerous lint build up in dryers or leaks in aging washer hoses.
The tips and tricks you can share about homeownership are nearly limitless.
9. Wrap Your Car
You’re probably claiming some part of your vehicle as a business expense. Why not leverage your vehicle by making it a mobile billboard. Wrapping your car is a great way to get your face and brand in front of everyone in your community.
10. Buy Mortgage Leads
We’re not all marketing wizards. One of the easiest ways to fill your sales pipeline and keep focused on selling is to outsource the marketing to professionals. Buying mortgage leads is the simplest way to jumpstart your mortgage marketing. There are hundreds of Internet mortgage lead providers. Take some time to try a few providers, with small tests, and see if internet mortgage leads are a good fit for your mortgage business.
11. Buy Aged Mortgage Leads
Real-time mortgage leads can be expensive, and many of them don’t convert quickly for a variety of reasons. However, most leads do close, just not necessarily on the first call or even in the first month. Statistically, 45–48% of mortgage leads that do convert often convert weeks and months later – these are aged mortgage leads. This behavior creates an opportunity to not only save a fortune on leads but also try internet leads for a few hundred dollars a month instead of a few thousand.
12. Sponsor and Attend Local Events
So much of marketing is just getting your logo and face in front of as many people as possible, in the best possible context. That is why sponsoring and attending local events is a great strategy. For relatively small investments and the cost of a bunch of company t-shirts, you can show off your commitment to your community.
13. Teach Financial Peace University or Other Personal Finance Courses
Teaching and educating consumers is always a smart way to generate referrals and bring yourself a better client – one that is financially prepared and well-qualified for a mortgage. Financial Peace University and other similar courses are a great way to add value and improve people’s lives long before they become a client.
14. Educate People on How to Improve Their Credit
Credit is often the biggest hurdle for borrowers. Offering credit education through your email newsletter, Facebook Live, webinars, or even a partner is a great way to provide value and develop well-qualified borrowers from leads you’re nurturing.
15. Get Yourself on Billboards
Billboards are a great way to etch your brand into the minds of commuters and residents. You probably have never considered this because you assume it requires big budgets. But, there are cheap but effective opportunities by buying remnants or gaps as advertisers rotate on billboards.
16. Teach Clients How to Generate Referrals
Don’t be shy – ask clients to refer you. Train and remind your clients how to refer you to new clients. After all, if they care for their friends and family why would they risk them going to an incompetent mortgage broker?
17. Update Your Email Strategy
With email marketing, you can keep potential customers up to date on changes in the market, rates, news, and tips, all while they continue their home search, investigate refinancing, or are even out of the mortgage market from time to time. Email is as powerful as ever for staying top of mind with your book of business, but too often we neglect to consistently and frequently send valuable emails to customers.
18. Gather and Promote Customer Testimonials
Your satisfied customers are a fantastic asset that could help you promote your business to future customers. Make it a habit of asking your current customers for feedback on their mortgage experience and creating a feedback collection system that’s easy for customers to use.
A simple online form or a link to your preferred review site are both excellent options. Another tip is to ask for a review shortly before or just after their closing date. The experience is fresh in their minds, and they’ve just given you their business.
You can show your appreciation for their feedback with a thank you card or small gift.
19. Getting Involved in Your Community
Trust, familiarity, and shared interests are opportunities to connect with your prospects and close sales with your customers. You can build trust and establish connections during your client consultations and through your marketing, but community involvement lets you take it a step further.
You can get involved with passions and projects individually — participating in charity events, neighborhood civic groups, getting involved in sports or hobby communities. You can also get your organization involved as well — sponsoring charity events, creating a local scholarship prize, sponsor a community little league team or event. Any of these events will get you big points with your community. Become known for being involved as well as for your profession, and when folks need a mortgage, they’ll come to find you.
20. Work Your Network
You know more influential people than you think you do. Your friends, neighbors, church, and more can all be yet another source of potential customers and referrals.
Your customers value that trustworthiness and connection, and there’s no reason you can start building those relationships before you become broker and customer. And for referrals, a recommendation from a personal friend has a strong influence over your potential customers. Likewise, connecting with your network can complement your community involvement.
21. Use the News
One of the most common excuses I hear for not marketing is: “I don’t know what to talk about.” Just tune in to the news, and you’ll have unlimited talking points.
The mortgage market, which is impacted by real estate, interest rates, the stock market, the unemployment rate, consumer confidence, and any other kind of economic news you can think of should give you a ton of things to talk about.
Watch CNBC for an hour, and you’ll have a half-dozen, “the sky is falling” news stories you’ll need to alert your client database about.
It’s that simple. Watch the financial news channels, browse your Twitter news feed, and visit a few of your favorite industry news sites and you’ll have a few links that you can pass along to help your clients – every week.
Get Started!
Before I leave you with all of these great ideas, I want to strongly encourage you to take at least one or two of these and do them today. If you’re even more ambitious check out my 90-day Mortgage Marketing Plan from Kaleidico, my mortgage marketing agency.
As you might have noticed, many of them assume that you are marketing to a database of prospects and past clients – a book of business. Managing and working a database is the secret to building a long-term, sustainable business that will support you through any market – good or bad.
If you don’t have that database built out yet, aged mortgage leads can be a great place to start. For a few hundred bucks you can add hundreds of customers that have inquired about a mortgage within the last couple of months. Treat them like clients, and they will become your clients.
Happy selling!
