Mortgage marketing is evolving into a deeper and more complex specialty every year. As buyers become more sophisticated, loan officers and their leaders demand more of the marketing team. Competitors from large online lenders use marketing to occupy the mind space of borrowers and make it difficult for consultative lenders to help them find the best loan for their goals. The ultimate goal of any marketing team is to help the lender close more loans. But getting there is not easy, so be sure to address all of the major stages of mortgage marketing.
The backbone of mortgage marketing is the mortgage marketing CRM. This system should combine lead management, automation, creative content, multi-channel engagement and critical integrations to help lenders market their services. While these systems vary, Surefire CRM from Top of Mind Networks can help your team close more loans with all of the processes in this article.
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Generating new leads is critical and can be done in many ways. Creating the right message on your website and using landing pages to capture lead information in a usable format (inside your mortgage CRM, versus a generated email or a difficult to access spreadsheet). Social media marketing has become a central strategy for lenders as well. And of course, purchasing leads is still very popular and is the main source for many originators today. Integration is key with your lead sources through partners like Zapier for example, to again drive the leads into your mortgage CRM.
Capturing these leads in an accessible, compliant, and highly effective CRM like Surefire CRM is more important in the mortgage industry than other similar industries because response time is so important as buyers move from “just looking” to falling in love with their dream home and expect to immediately secure pre-qualification for a mortgage.
Of course, borrowers are not the only focus in lead generation. Partners, such as real estate agents, need attention as well. Sharing important market and neighborhood updates, as well as showing these partners regularly how valuable it is to work with you through demonstrations of your technology to improve the borrowing experience drives more referrals as well.
Once the prospective borrower has connected through a landing page, the loan officer enters them directly into the CRM (rare with automated lead capture), or identifies them from a purchased list, the engagement begins. Speed to lead is so important to stress here, so marketing responses in the first moments with engaging emails or texts drive lead conversion rates significantly higher.
Once the first engagement is complete, enroll (or more likely use the rule engine to automatically place) the borrower in a well planned automated workflow in Surefire CRM to provide education, timely content, invitations to download additional materials that guide them in their borrowing journey, and offers to help them through the application process. Modern marketing CRMs accomplish this through mortgage email marketing, texting, phone, mortgage marketing flyers, and a number of other channels.
Once the prospective borrower applies for a loan, the mortgage marketing team should launch into a series of educational outreaches that are triggered by each funding milestone. Informing the borrower about issues that could negatively impact their application, such as taking on additional debt, help to both increase the close rate for the lender and also improve the likelihood that the borrower will recommend the lender in the future. Surefire CRM includes an award-winning set of in-process videos to humanize the loan experience and help them stay away from critical mistakes during the loan process.
When the loan is closed, the mortgage marketing has really just begun. Many loan officers shift their focus to the next loan, but the marketing team needs to step in and continue to nurture and elevate the relationship with the borrower, now client. Clients respond positively when the loan officer offers consultation, informs them of changes in the market that they can take advantage of, provides timely news content, and generally educates and engages them.
Simple reminders of the relationship, like holiday and birthday greetings, make a major difference in helping the client remember the lender first when a live event occurs that turns them back into a prospective borrower.
Creating a client for life pays massive dividends for lenders. Being there to fund future loans, including refinancing, second homes, moving, upsizing, downsizing, and more is much less expensive than generating the same number of brand new leads. In fact, many originators set a goal to establish and maintain a base of clients for life to avoid the need to prospect at all.
But the mortgage lending market is extremely competitive, and just generating a few emails or postcards will not work to engage your clients. To succeed, mortgage marketers need to build automated but human-like touches with their clients. These need to be maintained long after the deal closes, for years into the future. Quantity is not enough either though, you need spectacular creative content and to stand out of the crowd, it better be award-winning!
Follow the detailed tactics below to drive up your engagement with your borrower and convert them to a client for life. Lenders using Surefire CRM can simply enroll a borrower on a client for life workflow. Your client for life will automatically receive the contacts and touchpoints necessary, at the right frequency and using just the right mix of communication channels. You’ll earn repeat business and deserve referral business by putting each closed loan on this proven workflow.
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Knowing the goals is important, but getting there is just as critical. The best and highest achievement of your team’s sales goals relies on marketing executing at the highest level as well. A modern mortgage CRM, such as Surefire CRM, is an absolute necessity to get there.
Finding stock images and slapping them into emails and postcards is neither difficult nor is it very creative. In today’s marketing-saturated world, this type of content will just add to the noise in the borrower’s busy day. Most loan officers and even larger lenders are essentially doing exactly this without even knowing it. If there was no competition for the attention of the borrower and the opportunity to be their source for mortgage consulting for life, this would be acceptable. But competition in mortgage marketing is fierce with multiple lenders approaching borrowers when they indicate interest. This is where mortgage industry marketing creative provides significantly higher value to lenders than stock content.
Modern mortgage CRM systems develop content from the ground up with a focus on the needs of lenders. And not just static, reusable content but also timely and market responsive content. Key interactives, videos and creatives designed for mobile distribution enable lenders to stand out. Of course Surefire users can truly stand out, with award winning content at their fingertips and a powerful marketing platform with which to distribute it.
Lenders are B2C marketers and therefore require sophisticated approaches to developing engagement with borrowers. Their mortgage marketing CRM is the engine driving this engagement in a way a single loan officer would be unable to replicate without automation and access to all types of content.
Seeing something more than one time increases engagement but seeing it across different distribution formats adds dimension and understanding. To become a household name it is critical to build logo awareness and recognition. The same is true for personal branding, your face becomes your logo, and loan officers need to put it out into the market as frequently and in as many ways as possible.
Repetition is not the only value of multichannel marketing. When borrowers tend not to open email, or they change jobs leading to a bounced email, or they change cell phone numbers, or even switch home addresses, lenders cannot afford to lose touch. Consistently connecting with prospects and clients through phone, email, SMS, print, and social content is critical in this fast moving environment.
Of course content on its own has little value to lenders. Mortgage CRM platforms like Surefire must also provide efficient automation that ensures the content is delivered on task, on time, and looking great for the borrower to consume. But not all mortgage CRMs are created equal and the application of years of experience to the automation process is critical. Surefire has been awarded for content but also proven to work twice as well when loan officers utilize its automated workflows to market to borrowers.
Recruiting and retaining loan officers is a challenge for lenders. Using the team that you have to their highest value to the organization will help you reach the common goal of closing more loans. Manual tasks can often be automated to allow loan officers to focus on getting borrowers through the application process and building close relationships with referral partners.
This leads to two schools of thinking when it comes to mortgage marketing. Some lenders view their CRM as a set-and-forget tool to automate marketing. These lenders load in prospects and closed loans and let the automation handle the rest. Often there is a Loan Officer Assistant or Marketing Manager that handles data entry and upload in these situations. Other lenders view the CRM as an interactive hub for loan officers, and use it to generate daily task lists and contact points. The best strategy is typically a combination of these two methods, with the level of CRM adoption driven by the specific goals of the loan officer and their role in marketing for the lender.
Integrations save time here as well. CRMs like Surefire CRM can integrate to key systems like the LOS, POS, social media, lead generation, media creation tools, and more. These integrations and support for a single sign on can work together to create a single hub for all marketing activity for the loan officer. This drives engagement with and utilization of the CRM.
Mortgage marketing requires a deep understanding of the mortgage industry and marketing methods. But even with both of those backgrounds, years of experience blending the two will drive better decisions in where to invest. For example, any company can create a campaign to send emails to clients, but getting the mix of digital, print, social, text, and phone correct takes years. Finding a consultant, like Top of Mind Networks, will help make sure your marketing investment goes to driving your business and not to experimentation.
Smaller lenders (anyone smaller than the top handful of digital first lenders that push high-fee loans online and on television) need guidance to make sure their marketing investment pays dividends.
In the end, borrowers are people. They are mothers and fathers, uncles and aunts, grandparents and neighbors. They need assistance and education about securing financing for a home or other property. Treating them well, consulting with them as trusted advisors, and ultimately helping them through an exciting yet stressful event in their lives is both the business goal and the marketers goal. This generates a WIN-WIN scenario and helps ensure you create Clients for Life.
Individual loan officers can harness the power of Surefire to perform like a large enterprise while maintaining the personal touch their clients appreciate. Like an extra employee, Surefire CRM will gather leads, nurture them, help you close more loans and earn more repeat and referral business. Open and solidify referral relationships by truly standing out to real estate agents with professional property sites, co-marketing materials and more.
Larger organizations with multiple team members will benefit from the organizational structure of Surefire as you’ll be able to assign users to branches and centralize your marketing and communication from one system. Plus, you can easily deploy award-winning marketing messaging on behalf of your LO team members without them needing to lift a finger.
Larger enterprise organizations benefit from key integrations to their technology stack, including their LOS, POS, and more. This seamless integration gives them a leg up against the competition. The system structure also makes it easy to manage branding throughout the organizational hierarchy. Plus, improve hiring and retention by offering LOs easy-to-use tools that will want them to stay part of your winning team.
Top of Mind's CPO David Orsini has been recognized as an outstanding mortgage technology leader through the MBA Tech All-Star Award Program.
In this episode of The Trending Mind, CRO Nick Belenky recaps our launch of Surefire's Power Video feature and our integration with MBS Highway.
Rick Webster, VP of client strategy at Top of Mind, is welcomed as a resource for clients to achieve better outcomes and meet their goals.