Using a Customer Focused Marketing Strategy to Attract and Retain Clients

A customer focused marketing strategy is critical for loan officers. Traditional sources of advertising for mortgage marketing and lead generation should always be balanced between professional referral partners, direct to consumer advertising and automated marketing to one’s past client database.

Why start with cold leads?

Advertising in conventional ways is great for building brand awareness, but few respondents will come to you having already made their decision to use you. Referral partner marketing is important and more rewarding as leads will come to you based on the strength of referring partner’s recommendation. Still, nervous homebuyers can still harbor some doubts and be suspicious of the referring partner’s interest in the referral. For instance, is an agent only referring a mortgage broker because there’s some financial benefit to be had for them?

Customer focused marketing centers on those that have already experienced your services.

A referral from a friend or family member comes with a no strings attached perception and is valued as being an honest and trustworthy recommendation.

Putting your marketing efforts to work on your own book of business is a sure way of generating warm leads that are primed and ready to use you and your services. Far more rarely will they need to be “sold” on you and your company. Taking an educational approach with them right out of the gate can go far in letting them know you care about their questions and needs. That’s a much better way to start a client relationship.

The typical homebuyer questions centered on best rates and costs become secondary to their desire to work with someone that’s already trusted by that friend, family member or co-worker. Putting new buyers at ease by walking them through the mortgage qualification process and assuring their relative ability can erase any fear they may have and immediately confirm their trust in you. After all, this is what they were led to expect based on the recommendation to use you.

How to handle all those past clients

Keeping good client records and just as importantly, keeping them up to date can be a monumental task. But not if you use a world-class mortgage CRM to do it.

Mortgage marketing, or more specifically automated mortgage marketing, as the basis for a customer focused mortgage marketing strategy can really only be handled by a system designed to do exactly that.

Maintaining what could be hundreds or even thousands of past client records and details, conversation logs, deal-specific information, current valuations, and loan balances to project equity levels, etc., would be difficult without a system. Better yet, one that keeps track of current market conditions and provides notifications to you of opportunities that exist for your clients (and you) can be like having a full-time marketing assistant that never complains, never takes a vacation, and never calls in sick.

The good news is that all this exists, and then some

Marketing automation built into a mortgage CRM with advanced triggers and corresponding workflows that provide your clients with self-service, and even dynamic, animated, deal data specific videos can all be set to provide consistent touches at whatever pace you deem to be best suited to your clientele.

Successful loan officers know their time is valuable. A customer focused mortgage marketing strategy coupled with a robust mortgage CRM keeps your marketing time invested to an absolute minimum. The ease of doing business with past clients vs. the time spent winning over cold prospects is an oft-quoted but important observation nonetheless. Hands down, there’s just no comparison. Working smart is always the way to go.

Where to find the right system

Surefire CRM from Top of Mind is about as robust and all-inclusive of a mortgage CRM that you can find.  Packed with workflows providing your prospects with videos, landing pages, calculators, and other award winning, self-servicing content, Surefire can prepare and motivate your clients to just click and apply. There’s little better as a loan officer than getting that notification that there’s a new application to be had. With Surefire, it’s sure to happen. If you’d like to see it in action for yourself, just click the link to a Surefire demo.