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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