Loan Officer Marketing Tools - And How to Choose

Which loan officer marketing tools should you use in 2009? There’s only one way to find out. You have to experiment with several of them and see what works for you.

Everyone has an idea about which marketing tools work best for loan officers, and which ones should be avoided. And if you listen to all of the opinions out there, you’ll just end up driving yourself crazy:

“Print ads are dead. Search engine optimization is the way to go. No, search marketing is a waste of time. Loan officers should use direct mail marketing. No, direct mail is a huge waste of money. It’s all about referrals. It’s all about networking. It’s…”

You get the idea.

As you carry your marketing program into 2009, let me offer you a bit of advice that might help you keep your sanity. Nobody can tell you which loan officer marketing tools are going to work the best for you. Only you can discover that truth, and the only way to find out is through experimentation.

When it comes to marketing, people love to share their personal opinions and experiences with others. To a certain extent, this is valuable to the aspiring marketer. By listening to others, you can learn about the different techniques and tools that are out there. But you must also take these opinions with a grain of salt. There’s a unique phenomenon I’ve encountered in the marketing world, and it goes like this. John will try out a certain loan officer marketing technique (let’s say email newsletters, for example). He executes it poorly and, predictably, his results are not very good. So John forever after proclaims that “email newsletters are dead … they don’t work as a marketing tool anymore.”

But what if you tried to use this marketing technique. And you did it much better than John. And it ended up growing beyond your initial expectations. And you began to get a steady stream of business and referrals from the newsletter program. Et cetera. You never would have enjoyed all of this success if you had taken John’s words as gospel. The same can be said of every loan officer marketing tool imaginable. For every marketing technique or tool, there’s a person who has done extremely well with it, and a somebody who has failed miserably with it. In between, there’s a broad spectrum of success.

So don’t let anybody tell you that direct mail doesn’t work … or email newsletters, or print marketing, or pay-per-click, or networking, or any other form of loan officer marketing. All they can tell you is what has or has not worked for them. Don’t take it as gospel. Do your own experimentation. Maybe you can succeed where others have failed.

Marketing Tools to Consider

With that said, here are some of the web-based tools and techniques you might want to experiment with in 2009:

• Online chat programs — Did you know you can install a program onto your website (in about ten minutes) that gives your visitors the ability to chat live with a customer service person or an office manager?
• Search engine optimization — Having good website ranking is a must these days. If your site isn’t ranking well in Google, Yahoo and MSN, then you’re losing a lot of potential business.
• Blogging — You’ve probably heard about blogs as a loan officer marketing tool in the past. This article explains how you can use a blog to generate leads online.
• Landing pages — Quick definition. A landing page is where somebody “lands” when visiting your website, or where you send them after they reach your site. You should have a specific landing page (or pages) for every specific marketing goal you want to achieve.
• A professional website — In 2009 and beyond, simply having a website is not enough. You need to have a well-organized site that offers a wealth of useful tools and information, and it should have a variety of lead generation techniques in place to help you turn visitors into clients.

Clearly, these are not the only loan officer marketing tools you can experiment with. There are just a few web-based tools and techniques you might consider. Follow the links above to learn more about them, and then follow the links contained within each of those pages too. You’ll come out of the process with some good marketing ideas … I guarantee that much.