Smart Mortgage Marketing

This blog post is part of an ongoing series about mortgage lead generation via the web. Click here to access the full list of articles in this series.

So far in this series, we have focused on generating leads through your mortgage website. Don’t worry … we will talk a lot more about that topic. But let’s zoom out the lens for a moment and put lead generation in perspective. There are actually five key components of your mortgage website marketing program. That’s what we will examine in this article.

1. Planning & Strategy

In your mortgage business, it’s never a good idea to rush into things without proper planning. That concept applies to your website marketing program as well. In order to get the best results from your online marketing efforts, you’ll need to have a solid strategy in place. This will come from doing plenty of research and planning — an essential step for mortgage marketing success.

You can jump right into this process by examining three things…

• Your Mortgage Services — Here’s a timeless premise of marketing that you should understand early on. A bad product with great marketing behind it is still a bad product. So your first step to website marketing success is to offer great services. If your services are no different / better than your competitors, your marketing program has already failed. In other words, why are you (and your website) so special?
• Your Intended Audience — Can you tell me three things that your prospective clients have in common? Do you know what concerns them the most? In order for your mortgage website marketing to be successful, you need to know as much as possible about your target audience. How can you provide solutions if you don’t understand their problems?
• Your Marketing Goals — What are the specific objectives of your online marketing program? How does your mortgage website support those objectives? Above all else, what do you want people to do when they visit your website, and what have you done to increase the likelihood of that happening?

There’s a very good chance the questions above will lead to even more questions. That’s the point to this exercise. By asking key questions about your services, your audience and your marketing goals, you will begin to have the framework for your mortgage website marketing program. You will identify strengths and weaknesses. You will set clear objectives for yourself. In short, you will increase your chances for web marketing success.

2. Website Visibility

So let’s say you have answered all of the questions above regarding your online mortgage marketing program. You are now eager and ready to promote your mortgage website and grow you business via the Internet. Now what? Well, now you need to work on your Internet visibility. In this context, I’m referring to the ease with which people can find your website when researching relevant topics online.

Good visibility is crucial for mortgage website marketing success, because consumers today face information overload like never before. For example, there are billions of individual documents online today, ranging from web pages to videos to PDF documents. And this growth is not going to slow down anytime soon.

Obviously, this makes it harder for individual websites to be found. It’s simply a numbers game. So having a mortgage website is enough anymore — these days, you need a website with excellent search engine visibility if you want to succeed online.

Okay, I’ve depressed you enough. Now for the good news. You can increase your website’s visibility in many ways. In fact, there are many articles and tutorials on this website that show you how. Search engine optimization (SEO) can certainly help. But why stop there? You could also publish free information online to increase traffic to your mortgage website. You could start a blog to build up an audience. You could distribute press releases online. You could network with others in your industry for mutual referrals … there’s no end to the possibilities.

3. Website Conversions

There’s no need to go into the topic of website conversions in this article. After all, this entire article series is dedicated to that topic. But website conversions (a.k.a. lead generation) represent one of the five primary components of your mortgage website marketing program. So I’ve included them here to make the list complete.

4. Tracking & Analysis

In order to know what’s working and what’s not with your website marketing program, you have to have some kind of tracking and analysis in place. In this context, I’m referring to an analytics program on your website that gives your information about your site traffic.

You should also keep track of your search engine rankings for important phrases. This is important, because each day more and more people use search engines like Google to conduct mortgage research. So you have to know how you’re doing in the search engines, and make improvements where needed.

One of the things I like most about mortgage website marketing (as opposed to traditional forms of advertising) is the fact that you can get nearly instant feedback on the actions you take. You can experiment with a certain technique, such as pay-per-click marketing, measure the effectiveness for a few days, and then vary your approach for the sake of comparison. It can actually be pretty fun … especially when the results are positive! But you can’t experiment in this way (and learn from it) until you start tracking and analyzing your efforts.

5. Constant Evolution

Here’s a fact of mortgage website marketing you may enjoy hearing. Consumers today are motivated by the same things as five, ten and twenty years ago. Sure, technology changes all the time. And you have new ways to reach and communicate with consumers. But we all still want the same thing. We want products and services that will help us in some way. In this context, that means saving some money on a mortgage loan, getting a good interest rate, having an easy qualification process, etc.

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Would you like another way to connect with home buyers and mortgage shoppers online? Want to broaden your mortgage broker marketing program with a new tactic? If so, Home Loan Pages might be the thing for you.

Home Loan Pages - A Mortgage Marketing Strategy

This is a brand new offering from Home Buying Institute, one of the largest and most highly visible home-buying websites online. It’s a unique idea for many reasons, but here’s the thing that jumps right out at me. There is to be one “Home Loan Page” for each major city, and the website will only allow one broker to sponsor each city. So if that page gets a lot of traffic and search engine visibility, that one broker will “hog” it all to himself, or herself.

For example, here’s a Home Loan Page full of Georgetown, Texas mortgage information. You can see how informative and helpful these pages are. And because they are loaded with keywords, they are sure to rank well in the search engines.

Granted, it’s a brand new service, so the city pages will take time to climb the search engine rankings. But when you consider they are hosted on a website that usually comes up at the top of Google for phrases like “buying a home” … you can clearly see the Internet marketing potential of the service.

I’ve often said that mortgage broker marketing in the future is going to be a contest to see who can be most visible online. I’d like to revise that statement by taking the word “future” out of it. Mortgage broker marketing today is all about Internet visibility. Consumers are going online in droves, to research mortgage information relevant to their city. In fact, this is exactly why Home Buying Institute has created this new mortgage broker marketing service — because the Internet is “where it’s at” from a mortgage marketing standpoint these days.

So if you’re looking to give your mortgage broker marketing program a big boost, look into this Home Loan Pages being created by Home Buying Institute. The current sponsorship fee listed on the website is $699 per year. When you consider the kind of online exposure and potential web traffic you could get out of it, that’s a reasonable price to pay. It comes out to less than $2 per day!

Learn more about this mortgage broker marketing program by visiting:
http://www.homebuyinginstitute.com/cities/benefits.php

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.

Previously on this blog, we have talked about publishing your way to Internet marketing success. One of the ways you can do that is by publishing mortgage articles on popular websites related to home buying, real estate, mortgage loans, etc.

By publishing mortgage articles articles onto such websites, you are advancing your Internet mortgage marketing program in several ways. First, you will increase the number of inbound links coming to your website … which in turn improves the search engine ranking of your mortgage website.

Publishing articles can support your Internet mortgage marketing program in other ways as well, such as providing you with direct traffic to your website. If somebody reads one of the mortgage articles you’ve published on another website (and there’s a link to your website within the author’s note), they can follow the link back to your site for more information.

With these benefits in mind, the best places to publish your mortgage articles are those websites that are (A) well-established with search engines and (B) related to the mortgage or real estate industry.

I happen to own a website that meets this profile. It’s the Home Buying Institute, and it accepts article submissions from mortgage professionals who can offer helpful advice to a national audience. We even allow keyword hyperlinks at the end of the article, which can boost your search engine ranking for that phrase.

However, like any decent website, we don’t accept just any and every article thrown our way. We accept well-written articles that meet these submission guidelines. So if you can write a quality article on some aspect of mortgage loans or home buying, and you’d like a link from Home Buying Institute to your website …. feel free to send us your best work!

You’ll find an email address and other helpful information on the submission guidelines page.

Here’s a tip for marketing mortgage loans that will surprise you with its simplicity. But despite this simplicity, many mortgage companies overlook this online mortgage marketing strategy. 

I just finished watching a news program about the current mortgage foreclosure “crisis” in the United States. So then I went to my home office, fired up the Internet, and began doing researching search engine usage and key phrases.

The results were not surprising. There are a lot of people using search engines to research such topics / phrases as “mortgage foreclosure” … “avoiding foreclosure” … and similar phrases.

What does this have to do with marketing mortgage loans? Simple. If you expanded your mortgage website to include content on these popular topics, you would soon be able to capitalize on all of this Internet activity.

For example, let’s say your mortgage loan marketing program revolves around mortgage refi — a key service offered by your company. If you expanded your website to cover additional topics related to mortgage refinance, subprime mortgages, and other hot topics in the media right now, you could increase your website’s traffic levels, leads and inquiries.

Some of you are saying, “Well, of course I would do that.” But you would be surprised at how few mortgage companies address popular topics on their websites to increase web traffic. Many companies marketing mortgage loans have static websites that were written more than a year ago. How relevant could the content be on a website like that?

The key to marketing mortgage loans is to offer people the information and products they want. And the best way to know what they want is to follow the news!