Achieving sustained success in the mortgage brokerage industry requires a diverse marketing strategy. Unfortunately, this is often easier said than done. After all, digital marketing is a constantly evolving, complex field.

With this in mind, the team at BNTouch has outlined several digital marketing tips for mortgage brokers. These tactics can help you generate more leads, stay connected with clients, and grow your business. Plus, your loan officers will have an abundance of quality prospects to target with their marketing efforts! 

Read on to find out how you can revitalize your digital marketing efforts in 2021.

Identify Your Ideal Audience

Whether you are a relatively new loan officer or have been involved in the industry for years, the first step to digital marketing is to identify your ideal audience. 

Even if you think you know who you should be targeting, reassess your current practices. As your organization grows, your ideal customer base may change as well.

A great way to ensure that you focus your energies on the right clients is to create “customer personas.” 

These personas list out characteristics that you would like to find in a quality lead. You can also create personas for buyers who aren’t quite ready to purchase and low-quality leads. After you create these templates, your loan officers can easily sort through prospects and identify quality leads.

Guest Post and Acquire Backlinks

Guest posting is the practice of submitting blog content to other companies to publish it on their sites. Focus on companies related to the mortgage industry, including lenders, real estate agents, and title agencies. A great place to start is the companies that you already work with daily.

As you’re crafting these guest posts, make sure to include links to your page. Discuss the type and quantity of links with the host ahead of time to prevent unforeseen disagreements. 

Links from another site to your page are known as backlinks. Google uses these types of links in the ranking process. Having high-quality backlinks can help your site reach page one of the search results.

Leverage Various Types of Media

As a mortgage broker, you have to make effective use of various types of media. While optimized blog content is a core part of any digital marketing strategy, it will not generate enough quality leads on its own. You must also incorporate videos and images into your digital marketing campaigns.

Videos are particularly appealing to modern consumers. You do not need to flood your website with videos or reach a million YouTube followers for this strategy to work. A few carefully placed pieces of media content go a long way. 

For instance, placing a video on your “About Us” page makes your team seem more personable, which can draw in quality leads.

Create a Captivating Website

If you don’t have a website, creating one should be a top priority. Every mortgage broker needs their site if they hope to be competitive in the modern marketplace. 

While you may still receive your fair share of phone calls, many consumers search for mortgage services online. If you don’t have a website, a high number of leads will immediately move on to the next loan officer — one who does show up online.

Even if you have a website, it is important to review it from time to time. You should access it from your smartphone to ensure that it is optimized for mobile, too. If it is not, reach out to a web development firm to remedy the issue immediately. A large percentage of consumers browse the web primarily from their smartphones.

If your website is not attractive and engaging or fails to work well on mobile devices, you’ll drastically limit your reach. Revitalizing your online presence starts and ends with a great site.

Engage on Social Media

In addition to a website, social media pages are must-have marketing tools that every mortgage broker should be using. 

Social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram offer a ton of free advertising opportunities. Once your platforms are live, begin to post quality content regularly. Your content might include success stories, links to recent blogs, and other materials that will encourage consumers to visit your site.

We recommend focusing your energy on a couple of social media platforms. Create accounts on the platforms that are most popular with your target audience. As previously mentioned, identifying your ideal audience is an essential first step to rejuvenating your digital marketing strategy!

Start an Email Marketing Strategy

In the mortgage industry, email marketing is an incredibly useful tactic. Sending past clients periodic emails to celebrate birthdays or notify them about refinancing opportunities can pay off over time. 

These messages will keep your company at the forefront of customers’ minds when it comes time to buy another home or refinance. If possible, offer them the opportunity to work with the same loan officer, too.

Email marketing can also be used to turn prospects into qualified leads. When your team receives information about a prospective client via a contact card or phone call, add their emails to your list. 

Sending relevant email communications that are concise and engaging can draw customers deeper into the sales funnel. This allows your loan officers to close the deal.

When you have a top-quality mortgage CRM, it’s easy to send out effective marketing via email. Add dates and tags to buyers so that you’ll never forget to celebrate the anniversary of their home purchase. Then, your system can send out custom messages when the dates arrive!

Retarget Quality Prospects

Retargeting is the practice of directing specific advertisements at users that have previously visited your site. This strategy is very effective because most clients do not select a mortgage broker after a single visit to their website! 

Clients that have provided you with contact information clicked through multiple pages on your website, or interacted with your content are prime candidates for retargeting.

You can set up your retargeting campaign through Google Ads. If you aren’t familiar with the platform, the best mortgage CRMs often offer tools designed to make it easy to create new campaigns with popular platforms.

Obtain and Highlight Client Reviews

Consumers are wary about advertising content. However, they are much more receptive to information provided by other consumers. This concept holds true in the mortgage industry as well.

Encourage your clients to review your business online. The more positive reviews you have, the better. 

Reach out to past clients and politely encourage them to leave you a review through a survey or Google. You can easily do this with a CRM that sends out automated requests about a month after a loan is closed.

Once you have accumulated several positive reviews, highlight this customer feedback on your website or share some success stories in an email marketing campaign.

You can also use this feedback to improve your customer service. These reviews can help you identify what your loan officers are doing well and what they need to be doing better.

Network

The mortgage industry is founded on relationships. You have to work with buyers, realtors, title agencies, and other industry professionals to close a loan. Instead of simply using these relationships to close mortgages, leverage them to market your services.

Partner with experts in the mortgage industry. Devise a mutually beneficial agreement that will help you generate leads while also helping their businesses. 

If you are a new loan officer, consider working with a more experienced broker. They may be able to help you develop your lead generation skills and teach you how to better serve your customers.

Work with Influencers

Much like generating organic traffic, building a social media following can be extremely time-consuming. If you want to reach a large audience fast, consider partnering with social media influencers. These individuals are social media personalities that have thousands or tens of thousands of followers.

An influencer can help to market your services on their social media page. This relationship gives you access to their massive audience. In exchange, influencers receive payment, free services, or both.

As you’re searching for an influencer, don’t focus entirely on the size of their following. Instead, make sure that the influencers you work with are a good fit for your mortgage brokerage.

Take Advantage of Mortgage CRM Technology

Implementing these tactics can help you massively increase your lead generation capabilities. But you still need to track and distribute your leads effectively. 

So what’s the best way to do it? Use an innovative mortgage CRM, like the BNTouch platform.

Our versatile software includes a full suite of tools. With it, you will be able to automatically distribute leads, track team performance, and analyze key metrics. You will also be able to automate marketing strategies so that you can focus on serving your clients.

BNTouch offers scalable solutions for mortgage brokerages of all sizes. Whether you are an independent loan officer or manage an entire mortgage enterprise, our platform can accommodate your needs. 

Contact us today for a free demo and see our technology firsthand! 

The post 10 Digital Marketing Tips for Mortgage Brokers and Loan Officers in 2021 appeared first on .

After 18 months of heartbreak and hardship, business owners are ready to bounce back.

Eight out of ten small businesses are fully recovered from 2020’s recession, and 94% are looking to partner with agencies to fuel long-term growth. Join growth expert Jen Spencer, chief revenue officer, SmartBug Media, who will share how SMBs position themselves for growth and where they need help, including tactics like paid search, SEO, website development, blogging and attaining customer reviews.

Register today for “Growth Strategies for SMBs and the Agencies That Serve Them,“ presented by CallRail.

The post Strategies to fuel your long-term growth appeared first on Search Engine Land.

Nothing brings people together like watching their national team compete on the world’s stage. The excitement unites a diverse set of fans, each with their own stories to be told.

In the martech world, a tool unites customer data just like fans at a national sporting event: a Customer Data Platform (CDP). A database often used by marketers and CX teams to ingest customer data from relevant platforms and channels, CDPs provide a single, unified view of your customer.

The U.S. Soccer Federation was looking for a solution to revamp its antiquated digital infrastructure, including an outdated website, lack of mobile app and plenty of tedious, manual tasks to keep track of customer data. Before investing in Treasure Data’s CDP solution, U.S. Soccer mapped out three business challenges:

1. Create a mobile-first experience, including a robust, personalized mobile app and tailor its website for mobile device traffic.
2. Achieve a 360-view of the customer and keep that data in one place to ensure each customer has their own ID/profile for business intelligence and personalized marketing campaigns.
3. Create an infrastructure that scales. As a small organization with millions of fans, U.S. Soccer needed the technology to deliver personalized but automated campaigns, including:
   • Tracking account status (active, lapsed, renewal date, upgrade amount, etc.)
   • Creating a digital hub for users to manage their account
   • Building journey orchestration and personalization

To learn more about why U.S. Soccer decided to invest in Treasure Data’s CDP to address the above challenges and more, join Ross Moses, senior director of analytics and insights at U.S. Soccer Federation, and J.T. Wash, senior account executive at Treasure Data, in their informative MarTech session. 

This exciting, data-rich case study highlights how U.S. Soccer improved its fan experience and increased member loyalty by creating a unified view of its customer journey. 

After this session, you’ll be able to:

• Understand how a CDP can help you optimize your marketing efforts
• Identify opportunities in your business to increase LTV and customer loyalty
• Create a unification strategy that breaks down data silos and drives meaningful insights about your customers

Register and attend the session here and learn how to drive relevant, real-time customer experiences throughout the entire customer journey with a CDP.

The post U.S. Soccer unifies the fan experience with Customer Data Platforms appeared first on Search Engine Land.

In September, I put up a poll here on Search Engine Land to see if readers would like to have an instruction in robots.txt to mark pages for No Indexation. Today I’ll present the results along with a review of what the key issues are (and why Google won’t be adding support for this).

• Why would this be of interest?
• What are the downsides of this idea?
• Overall robots.txt poll results

Why would this be of interest?

In the current environment, robots.txt is used exclusively for guiding the behavior of web crawling. Further, the current approach to marking a page “NoIndex” is to place a tag on the page itself. Unfortunately, if you block it in robots.txt, Google will never see the tag and could still potentially index the page even though you don’t want that to happen.

On large sites, this presents some challenges when you have different classes of pages that you’d like to both block from crawling AND keep out of the Google index. One way that this can happen is in complex faceted navigation implementations where you have pages that you create that have significant value for users but end up presenting way too many pages to Google. For example, I looked at one shoe retailer website and found that they have over 70,000 different pages related to “Men’s Nike shoes.” This includes a wide variety of sizes, widths, colors, and more.

In some tests that I have participated in with sites with complex faceted navigation like the example I shared above we have found this large quantity of pages to be a significant problem. For one of those tests, we worked with a client to implement most of their faceted navigation in AJAX so the presence of most of their faceted nav pages was invisible to Google but still easily accessed by users.  The page count for this site went from 200M pages to 200K pages – a thousand to one reduction. Over the next year, the traffic to the site tripled – an amazingly good result. However, traffic went DOWN initially, and it took about 4 months to get back to prior levels and then it climbed from there.

In another scenario, I saw a site implement a new e-commerce platform and their page count soared from around 5,000 pages to more than 1M. Their traffic plummeted and we were brought in to help them recover. The fix? To bring the indexable page count back down again to where it was before. Unfortunately, since this was done with tools like NoIndex and Canonical tags the speed of recovery was largely impacted by the time it took Google to revisit a significant number of pages on the site.

In both cases, results for the companies involved were driven by Google’s crawl budget and the time it took to get through enough crawling to fully understand the new structure of the site. Having an instruction in Robots.txt would rapidly speed these types of processes up.

What are the downsides of this idea?

I had the opportunity to discuss this with Patrick Stox, Product advisor & brand ambassador for Ahrefs, and his quick take was: “I just don’t think it will happen within robots.txt at least, maybe within another system like GSC. Google was clear they want robots.txt for crawl control only. The biggest downside will probably be all the people who accidentally take their entire site out of the index.”

And of course, this issue of the entire site (or key parts of a site) being taken out of the index is the big problem with it. Across the entire scope of the web, we don’t have to question whether this will happen or not — it WILL. Sadly, it’s likely to happen with some important sites, and unfortunately, it will probably happen a lot.

In my experience across 20 years of SEO, I’ve found that a misunderstanding of how to use various SEO tags is rampant. For example, back in the day when Google Authorship was a thing and we had rel=author tags, I did a study of how well sites implemented them and found that 72% of sites had used the tags incorrectly. That included some really well-known sites in our industry!

In my discussion with Stox, he further noted: “Thinking of more downsides, they have to figure out how to treat it when a robots.txt file isn’t available temporarily. Do they suddenly start indexing pages that were marked noindex before?”

I did also reach out to Google for comment, and I was pointed to their blog post when they dropped support for noindex in robots.txt back in 2014. Here is what the post said about the matter:

“While open-sourcing our parser library, we analyzed the usage of robots.txt rules. In particular, we focused on rules unsupported by the internet draft, such as crawl-delay, nofollow, and noindex. Since these rules were never documented by Google, naturally, their usage in relation to Googlebot is very low. Digging further, we saw their usage was contradicted by other rules in all but 0.001% of all robots.txt files on the internet. These mistakes hurt websites’ presence in Google’s search results in ways we don’t think webmasters intended.“
* Bolding of the last sentence by me was done for emphasis.

I think that this is the driving factor here. Google acts to protect the quality of its index and what may seem like a good idea can have many unintended consequences. Personally, I’d love to have the ability to mark pages for both NoCrawl and NoIndex in a clear and easy way, but the truth of the matter is that I don’t think that it’s going to happen.

Overall robots.txt poll results

First, I’d like to acknowledge a flaw in the survey in that question 2, a required question, assumed that you answered question 1 with a “yes”. Thankfully, most people who did answer “no” on question 1 clicked on “Other” for question 2 and then entered in a reason for why they didn’t want this capability.  One of those responses noted this flaw and said, “Your poll is misleading.” My apologies for the flaw there.

The overall results were as follows:

In total 84% of the 87 respondents said “yes,” they would like this feature. Some of the reasons offered for wanting this feature were:

• There are no situations where I want to block crawling but have pages indexed.
• Noindexing a large number of pages takes a lot of time because Google has to crawl the page to see the noindex. When we had the noindex directive we could achieve quicker results for clients with over-indexation problems.
• We have a very large cruft problem…very old content…hundreds of old directories and sub-directories and it takes seemingly months if not years to de-index these once we delete and ergo 404 them. Seems like we could just add the NoIndex rule in the robots.txt file and believe that Google would adhere to this instruction much quicker than having to crawl all the old URLs over time …and repeatedly…to find repeating 404’s to finally delete them…so, cleaning up our domain(s) is one way it would help.
• Save development effort and easily adjustable if something breaks because of changes
• Can’t use always a “noindex” and too many pages indexed that should not be indexed. The standard blocking for spider should also “noindex” the pages at least. If I want a search engine not to crawl a URL/folder, why would I want them to index these “empty” pages?
• Adding new instructions to an .txt file is much quicker than getting Dev resources
• Yes, it’s hard to change meta in head for enterprise CRM so individual noindex feature in robots.txt would solve that problem.
• Quicker, less problematic site indexing blocking 🙂

Other reasons for saying no included:

• Noindex tag is good enough
• New directives in robots.txt file are not necessary
• I don’t need it and don’t see it working
• Don’t bother
• Do not change

Summary

There you have it. Most people who responded to this poll are in favor of adding this feature. However, bear in mind that the readership for SEL consists of a highly knowledgeable audience – with far more understanding and expertise than the average webmaster. In addition, even among the yes responses received in the poll, there were some responses to question 4 (“would this feature benefit you as an SEO? If so, how”) that indicated a misunderstanding of the way the current system works.

Ultimately though, while I’d personally love to have this feature it’s highly unlikely to happen.

The post We asked, you answered: Should Google add noindex support to robots.txt? Poll results appeared first on Search Engine Land.