Smart Mortgage Marketing

If you’ve read this blog for any length of time, you’ll know I’m a fan of home buying seminars as a mortgage marketing and business-building tool. Yesterday, I stumbled across this article that shows the true value of home buying seminars as a client-acquisition tool.

Granted, the person in this story is a credit counselor and not a mortgage broker. But the technique is the exact same as what I’ve been recommending for mortgage folks for quite some time now. 

Notice how Rodola, the credit counselor in the story, mentions a ”drop” in seminar attendance from 80 people to “only” 50. Fifty prospective clients in a room? Wow! If you can’t grow your mortgage business on an audience like that, you can’t build a mortgage business period.

You’ll also notice that Rodola does a pretty good job promoting the seminar. You don’t get 50 - 80 attendees unless you’re marketing / promotion savvy! Rodola has also engaged the local news in Redding, California, including this website of the local newspaper.

A Show of Hands?
Let’s have a show of hands here. If you think your mortgage business could benefit from having 50 - 80 local home buyers in a room together asking you mortgage questions, then please raise your hand. Two, four, six … ten, fifteen … okay, that’s most of you. Now another show of hands. Who among you has used a home buying seminar in the past?None of you?? For shame! Are you going to let credit counselors like Rodola rake in all the seminar attendees (and future clients)?

Why not give it a try? You have nothing to lose but time out of your day, and think of the potential gains. Here’s some info to get you started with your home buying seminar:

PowerPoint presentation | How-to tips | Seminar handout

Promoting Your Seminar

So, you’ve put together a great home buying seminar to support your mortgage marketing and mortgage PR program. You’ve chosen a location and thought through all of the logistics, and you’re eager to conduct your seminar.

Now what? How do you get the word out about your seminar? In short, any way you can. For example, do you have a prospecting area where you send direct mail pieces? Well that’s an excellent place to start promoting your seminar.

Some other promotional ideas:

• Showcase the seminar on the home page of your mortgage website.
• Mention the seminar to your current clients (who may in turn mention it to friends or colleagues in the market to buy).
• Add a blurb about it after your email signature block.
• Do you have a co-presenter, such as a real estate agent? Then share the marketing. Two promoters are better than one!
• Announce it to the media in the form of a press release.
• Conduct direct mail campaigns to apartment complexes* in the area.

*Apartment complexes can be an excellent place to market your services (and your home buying seminar) for a couple of reasons:

First, the average apartment-dweller would love nothing more than owning a home. But many of them falsely assume home ownership is past their reach. Show them otherwise and they may become your next mortgage client!

Secondly, you can decide which apartment complexes to target based on their average monthly rent. In this way, you can loosely qualify the recipients based on their income (or at least their ability to pay a certain monthly mortgage).

Final Tips

Limit the attendance. Actually, the size of your venue will force you to do this. But you can use it to your advantage in your seminar promotion. For instance, you can strengthen your call to action: “Seating is limited to the first 30 registrants, so sign up today!”

Attach a business card to each of the audience handouts. Place a handout (with business card) in every seat before people arrive.

Have an RSVP plan in place; accommodate as many people as you can, but don’t overdo it. You can always put people on the list for your next seminar!

Set up early and have your materials and presentation in place thirty minutes before the advertised start time. That way, if people arrive early you can chat with them instead of running around to prepare. Clients can come from this.

That’s all there is to conducting a home buying seminar. Now get out there and wow them! Oh, and if you want a shortcut with the presentation, here are some real estate PowerPoint presentations you can adapt

• Home Buying PowerPoint
• Home Selling PowerPoint

Conducting Your Seminar 

Continuing our blog series on home buying seminars as a mortgage marketing strategy, we now get to the lesson on how to conduct your seminar.

The Sequence
With a home buying seminar, it’s usually best to follow a logical time line of the home-buying process. This will make the material easier for you to present and easier for your audience to follow.

Also, if you have a co-presenter (a real estate agent, perhaps), be sure to group all of their slides together. The overall presentation will be more organized that way, because each presenter can take his or her turn and be done (without mixing up slide).

The Delivery
Deliver your home buying presentation consistently, using your PowerPoint slides as cue cards to keep you on track. Don’t let questions throw you off track. Answer people’s questions politely but briefly, reminding them about the Q&A period that will follow the presentation (or at intervals between sections).

I recommend that you have an opening script and a closing script, and then improvising through the middle. There are two reasons for this:

First, the opening and closing are important parts of your seminar presentation. A short script will help you remember everything you want to say.

Secondly, improvising the middle part will make your delivery more natural and keep you from having to memorize large amounts of information. Remember, your slides will serve as cue cards to help you stay on track for the bulk of the presentation.

If you have a handout, be sure to let the audience know in advance. If you periodically remind people that the information you’re presenting is also in the handout, they’ll be less likely to scribble notes the entire time. You want their attention on you, not on their notes. This will help create more of a connection between you and your audience, which will lead to more of them contacting you afterward and possibly becoming clients.

In our next post, we will be talking about ways to promote your home buying seminar to ensure the best attendance possible.

Choosing a Seminar Location 

In the previous post, we talked about using home buying seminars for mortgage marketing purposes. In this post, we will talk about the venue / location factor of the home buying seminar.

One of the first steps in conducting your home buying seminar is to identify a location. When scouting out the location, be sure to ask yourself the following questions:

1. What will the venue cost?
You might be able to find an excellent location for your seminar at no cost. For example, if you happen to know the principal of your local high school, you may be able to use the school’s auditorium for an evening home-buying seminar. Otherwise you’ll have to rent some space. But the potential gains far outweigh the small price you’ll pay!

2. Can the venue support “repeat performances”?
For best results, I recommend that you make your home buying seminar a regular event. Word spreads over time, and your audience will likely grow as a result, especially if you do a really good job presenting your seminar.

Following a regular schedule can also help with the PR and promotion aspect of your home buying seminar. Imagine the great exposure you’d get if your local news did a spot on you for their real estate segment! Conduct home buying seminars on a regular basis and send press releases to the media, and that’s exactly what could happen.

Some places you might look into as a possible venue:

• Local YMCA or community center
• The meeting room at your local library
• The meeting room of a nearby restaurant or hotel
• High school or college auditorium

3. Can the venue support your presentation?
Once you have found a possible venue for your home buying seminar, visit the site to see what it offers. Does it have adequate parking? Does it have a projector for your home buying presentation? How many people can it hold? Is it conveniently located? (Giving directions will be easier if so.)

In the next post in this series, we will talk about how to conduct your home buying seminar.

Free home-buying seminars can be a perfect complement to your mortgage marketing program. Because if there’s one thing home buyers and mortgage shoppers want to know, it’s how to save money on mortgages and avoid costly mistakes.

If you can share this information publicly, you can create an audience of prospective clients. You can then demonstrate your expertise (and, hopefully, your likability) to them. Think of the business-building potential of that scenario! Now you can see why I recommend home buying seminars as part of a mortgage marketing program.

In the next few blog posts, we will talk more about the home-buying seminar as a mortgage marketing strategy. We will talk about the logistics involved, how to promote the seminar, how to inform and delight your audience at the same time, etc.

Other posts in this series:

• Choosing a seminar location
• Conducting your seminar
• Promoting your seminar