When it comes to reaching new clients, most lenders understand the value of digital marketing. Unfortunately, it can be hard to come up with new ideas for social media posts, emails, videos, and referral requests – especially when your day is filled with loan processing tasks!

You might understand that it’s important to post new content on a consistent basis. But how do you actually plan out your campaigns?

A content calendar is a perfect tool for mortgage brokerages that want to plan out content to publish all year long. Rather than spending hours each week trying to come up with a fresh approach, you can craft a marketing plan to cover every season.

In this article, we’ll give you some tips and tricks to craft a content calendar for your mortgage brokerage. 

What Should a Content Calendar Contain?

While it may be intimidating to try to organize your content ahead of time, once you put in the effort to plan your online feeds and releases, it will make your entire year’s marketing much easier. 

A content calendar usually includes some of the following items:

• Date and time that content will be published
• Social media channels and accounts where posts will be published
• Relevant descriptions, photos, and videos
• Associated links and tags

Your content calendar should be an accurate overview of all upcoming and scheduled social media posts. It can be organized on an Excel spreadsheet, an online calendar, or using your CRM. 

Building a Calendar as an Individual Lender or a Brokerage Team

You can build an effective content calendar as an individual agent, especially if you take advantage of powerful tools, like content libraries from your CRM.  

If you work with a team, you can meet together once a year or once a quarter to plan out your content. This can help you to bring new ideas to the table to promote your brokerage.

You can even build flexibility into your content calendar. Want to address hot topics in the mortgage market? Set aside one slot in your calendar each week or each month to shoot a video on current events or newsworthy updates! 

Check Out the Results

Once you have your content calendar in place, make sure to set aside time to review it. It’s a good idea to set aside time to do this once a month. 

For example, you can set a regular appointment to go over your content at the end of the month. Review the month to see what kinds of content got your audience engaged and what didn’t. Then, you can update the next month’s calendar accordingly!

Make It Your Own

When it comes to digital marketing as a lender, planning makes all the difference. Consistent posts are better for catching the attention of potential clients than random, sporadic ones.

The more you plan, review, and reevaluate your social media content, the easier it will become to deliver consistent content that yields results. 

Whether you create posts from scratch, take advantage of a premade content library in your CRM, or combine the two styles, a content calendar can help you to make the most of your advertising.

Mortgage Broker Marketing Made Easy

While there are limitless methods, templates, and approaches to take, there are a few essential keys for success when using a content calendar. One of the best options? Using a high-powered CRM!

With BNTouch, you can explore pre-made marketing templates, customize them to your brand, and schedule new marketing campaigns with ease. Generate new leads, review analytics, and nurture potential clients through the sales funnel with ease. Schedule a demo today!

The post Creating a Content Calendar for Your Mortgage Brokerage appeared first on .

Google has created a Data Studio sample template called the Web Stories Insights Dashboard. It provides an overview of how your Google Web Stories are performing. 

Web Stories are visual, tappable full-screen mobile stories that can be found via Google Search and Discover.

Metrics you can view in Web Stories Insights Dashboard. There are two main tabs: Overview and Story Level. Among the metrics you can view on this dashboard:

• Key Metrics: Story starts, page views, time spent and completion rate (number of story completions divided by story starts).
• Audience Metrics: Age, gender and device.
• Top Stories: Your top 10 stories during a selected time period, sorted by Story Starts.
• Traffic Channels: An overview of how users have found and read your Web Stories – organic search, direct (which includes Discover), referral, social, email, or custom.
• Story Level Performance: Key metrics and a breakdown of pageviews for a specific story.

For this template to work, you’ll first need to set up tracking for your Web Stories in Google Analytics (or another analytics provider). For whatever editor you use to create Web Stories, you’ll need to provide your UA Tracking ID. After you’ve done this, you can view performance metrics by navigating to Behavior > Events > Overview.

Then you’ll be able to see metrics including story starts, time spent, story pages viewed and story completions:

What the Web Stories Insights Dashboard looks like. This:

How to get the dashboard. You can access the dashboard here.

Once you get there, simply select your analytics account from the dropdown to see your data. Also, you can copy the template and customize it to your liking. 

For more information, you can check out this blog post. Google also shared a video that walks you through setting up and using the dashboard. 

Why we care. Data is king. This template provides a visual overview to help determine how well your Google Web Stories are performing. You can see how engaging your content is and how people are finding your stories. Tracking the performance of any content you’re investing time and resources into is essential. 

The post Google releases Data Studio Dashboard for Web Stories appeared first on Search Engine Land.

Over the past day or so, there has been an unusual spike in the number of complaints around Google Ads disapproving search ads. The disapprovals mostly seem to be around a policy named the “government documents and official services,” and it is confusing a lot of advertisers.

Google has stated there is no bug with the with its ad policy enforcement and Google has not seen any mass disapprovals of search ads.

Google’s statement. Ginny Marvin, the Google Ads Liaison said on Twitter “safety is paramount and our policies span range of concerns, including the content of ad creatives and advertiser behavior. The issues addressed in this story aren’t related. We also haven’t seen any “mass” disapprovals that would indicate a bug.”

I followed up to ask if maybe there was a step up in policy enforcement and Ginny Marvin said “No, and there’ve been no “mass” disapprovals.”

“The teams are keenly aware that policy flags are disruptive and work incredibly hard to strike the right balance. Safety is critical to a healthy system. Advertisers can request as reviews and/or appeals,” Ginny Marvin added.

The complaints. There does however seem to be an increase in the number of complaints from advertisers. Lior Krolewicz from Yael Consulting posted that they saw widespread ad disapprovals across numerous client accounts. “43 different accounts in our MCC, none of which deal with government documents or services, were seeing ads disapproved for the same reason. Accounts ranging from HVAC companies in California, eCommerce beauty product, to orthopedic insoles, had ads disapproved for this reason. 9 different accounts even had ads in their brand campaign stop serving due to this disapproval,” Lior wrote.

John Doherty from Credo complained on Twitter saying “I’ve had 2 brand new ads accounts for @ninja_editor, that haven’t had the opportunity to spend anything, be suspended for suspicious payments”.

PPCGreg posted on Twitter saying “our accounts were hit, en masse. Support confirmed the error in 1 accouint but said the fix would take 2 days. any chance we can speed that up?”

There is also a large thread of complaints about this on Reddit and numerous ones in the Google Ads help forums, which I covered here.

Why we care. So there does seem, at least anecdotally, that there is an increase in ad disapprovals and suspensions but Google is saying there is nothing to see here.

If you were impacted by ad disapprovals in the past 24-hours, you should know you are not alone. But Google is telling advertisers to deal with these disapprovals or suspensions via this help page.

The post Google denies mass search ad disapprovals or bugs with ad policy enforcement appeared first on Search Engine Land.

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