Smart Mortgage Marketing

If I had to choose one marketing tip for mortgage loan officers to put above all others, I think it would be the following:

In a time when consumer trust toward mortgage companies is in the toilet, you need to work extra hard to encourage trust from your audience.

Why do I stress this loan officer marketing tip above others? Because there is an enormous lack of trust among the public right now, with regard to lending institutions, mortgage companies, etc. Every time you turn on the news these days, you hear about the mortgage crisis in this country, and how it can be traced back to the “easy lending” practices of the subprime boom.

Of course, you and I both know that consumers bear some of the blame in all of this, but John Q. Public does not see it that way. John Q. Public thinks a mortgage company will do anything to sell him on a particular mortgage product, even if it’s going to bite him in the butt five years from now.

So my marketing advice for loan officers is to focus on rebuilding trust with your ideal audience. This loan officer marketing tip should be on the top of your list in the coming months. I’ve offered some tips on how to encourage trust in a related mortgage marketing article on the site.

I hope this loan officer marketing tip helps you grow your business in the new year. Happy holidays.

If you are a loan officer trying to expand your business, then you cannot ignore the need for a strong Internet presence. In fact, I would argue that a highly visible web presence is the #1 key to success with mortgage loan officer marketing these days.

After all, roughly 90% of your audience is online. So how can you reach your full marketing potential without a strong web presence? The answer is, you can’t.

Let’s look at a hypothetical scenario…

Let’s say I am a mortgage loan officer working and marketing in San Diego, California. A few short years ago, there may only have been a dozen mortgage loan officers in San Diego who had websites. Back in “the day” websites used to more expensive than they are today, and they took longer to build. On top of that, few mortgage companies felt the need to go online ten years ago. There wasn’t the “Internet rush” that we see in today’s mortgage industry.

So let’s say I put a new website online as part of my mortgage loan officer marketing program. If I were one of only thirteen San Diego loan officers with websites, that would make it really easy for people to find me online. Less Internet competition, right?

But now let’s flash forward to the present.

It’s 2007, and thousands of San Diego mortgage companies and loan officers have marketing websites. In fact, when I search the phrase San Diego mortgage loan officer in Google, I get more than 250,000 results!

What does this mean to me? It means that my mortgage loan officer marketing program just got harder, because my target audience is exposed to a lot more “noise” when searching for mortgage loans an loan officers in the area.

The point is that’s some stiff competition!

The Loan Officer’s Web Presence

This scenario shows us why it’s crucial for loan officers to have a highly visible web presence as part of their marketing program. Sure, search engine optimization (SEO) can help you climb up the search engine ranks. SEO is the act of improving a website for better search engine visibility and ranking.

But even if you do everything right from an SEO standpoint and reach the top two pages of search results, there is still only a 1-in-20 chance people will click through to your website (over the other 19 listings on those first two pages of search engine results).

Here’s what it all boils down to. In the very near future, all mortgage research (and even many of the transactions themselves) will be conducted online. So as a mortgage loan officer you have two choices from a marketing standpoint. You can pretend the Internet isn’t that big a deal, and then later on wonder why your business isn’t growing. Or you can embrace the Internet and grow your business to exciting new levels.

If you choose the latter, you’ll need a strong Web presence as part of your mortgage loan officer marketing program. You need to give people more ways to find you online, and you need them to be thankful when they do find you. By increasing your “findability,” you will turn your one-part website into a multi-part web presence.

Here’s the best news of all. I teach you exactly how to do this, in step by step fashion, in my book about the Mortgage Web Presence.

You can also get a mortgage quote online these days, which is a sign of the times.