Google is rolling out a few updates to Google Search to help users find doctors and healthcare providers that are right for them. These updates include being able to see if a doctor or healthcare provider accepts your insurance and if they speak your language.

Health insurance. Google Search can now show you which insurance networks the doctor or healthcare provider might accept. Plus, on the mobile search results, Google will let you filter providers by the insurance plans accepted. This will help users determine if a provider accepts their insurance, including Medicare, private insurance and employer-funded insurance, government-affiliated health programs and more.

Speak my language. Healthcare providers and doctors can also edit their Google Business Profile listing to define the languages spoken at their offices. Google said patients “want to be able to communicate clearly in their language of choice.” Google says there are over a dozen languages represented, including Spanish and American Sign Language.

How to update your details. Google says you can update your healthcare facilities details in your Google Business Profile, so make sure you verify your business with Google. Then you will be able to:

• Add additional insurance providers they accept from a pre-populated list of available insurance providers
• Remove insurance providers and networks that are listed erroneously

Note, the feature will be disabled if all insurance information is removed and for any other insurance related information and issues, providers can submit feedback directly to the Google My Business support team.

Why we care. Finding a healthcare provider or doctor can be intimidating for some, so any way to make it easier to find one is important.

For those of you who have healthcare providers as clients, you will want to make sure the insurance information in the Google search results for your clients is accurate and if not, make sure that the healthcare provider’s website clearly describes which insurance providers are accepted. Also, don’t forget the easiest method is to update the healthcare provider’s Google Business Profile to ensure Google has the latest details on your facility.

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Over the last few years, social media-based marketing has become a valuable tool for mortgage brokers. Social media platforms can help loan officers to bring in a steady stream of high-quality leads.

If you work in the mortgage industry, then you need to be active on social media. But just logging on and sharing an occasional post or clicking the “like” button on a few status updates won’t get the job done. Instead, you need to use proven tactics that produce real results.

Thousands of mortgage brokers are already making the most of social media to market their businesses. You can, too, with a few proven strategies. In this guide, we’ll explore the many ways that lenders can make the most of social media to connect with prospective buyers.

Types of Social Media Marketing  

Before we discuss how you and your loan officers can generate more leads, it’s important to cover the basics of social media marketing. Generally speaking, social media marketing can be grouped into one of two broad categories.

Organic Leads

An “organic lead” is a lead that you acquire without having to use paid advertising. Much like SEO marketing, getting organic leads via social media takes time. You have to create a social media page, build your following, and consistently post interesting content.

However, the work doesn’t stop there. You will also need to remain active on your business account if you want to continue to generate organic leads. Even a few weeks of inactivity can hurt your ability to attract new clients.

Paid Advertising

The other type of social media marketing is paid to advertise. You can create various types of paid advertising campaigns, depending on your preferences. For instance, Facebook allows you to display paid ads in the following locations:

• Newsfeeds
• Stories
• Messenger

On top of selecting the “placement” for your ads, you can also choose what types of content to display. A few examples include written content, images, or videos. As you might have guessed, ads that feature video content will be more expensive to show than written material.

As you’re creating a paid advertising campaign, you’ll find that each social media platform allows you to customize your budget. This approach lets you have total control over how much you spend in total on your paid marketing campaign.

Tactics Loan Officers Use to Generate Leads

If you want to attract clients, you will need an effective marketing strategy. To help, we have identified some of the best tactics that loan officers use for lead generation.

The mortgage brokers who have the most effective social media marketing campaigns are:

Consistent

Perhaps the most important component to social media lead generation is consistency. This is especially true if you want to capture organic leads and minimize expenses. 

When you post erratically on social media, it can be difficult to connect with prospective clients. Each platform uses a complex algorithm to analyze your behavior on the page.

We’ll use Facebook as an example since they are the world’s largest social media platform. Facebook’s algorithm scores and displays organic posts based on various ranking signals. A few of these criteria include how recently the company has posted, the type of post created (picture, text, video), and whether a user is likely to engage with it.

Mortgage brokers who post engaging, consistent content will be more prominently displayed on news feeds. Loan officers who post bland marketing materials once or twice a month may not generate any leads at all.

Diverse

The loan officers with the most effective social media marketing campaigns are extremely consistent, but that doesn’t mean that they’re boring. Successful mortgage brokers also post diverse types of content. 

These individuals do everything from posting compelling videos about homebuyers that they’ve helped to share stats that show off their speedy loan processing timelines. Their efforts keep their audiences engaged while helping them build their following.

As you’re creating your social media lead generation strategy, take advantage of the various features within each platform. Set realistic goals for your company. For example, you might choose to post written content on your news feed twice per week and incorporate one video or image onto your story every other week.

Concise and Easy to Understand

Think back to a few pieces of mortgage-related social media content that caught your eye. What did these ads have in common? All of them likely had a great “hook,” delivered a pointed message, and ended with a gentle call to action.

Marketers designed these ads in this way because they understood that users on social media often have a very short attention span. Remember, most prospective clients are turning to social media to take a break from their daily responsibilities!

With that in mind, you need to keep your marketing content concise. Whether you’re creating a paid marketing video or simply posting an update on your timeline, be brief and purposeful. 

Each piece of content should have a specific goal, deliver useful information to the audience, and end with a call to action. Depending on what you created the content for, the CTA may be simple instructions such as “like our page” or “share this post.”

Genuine

The average consumer can see right through a fluff piece or flashy marketing video. Mortgage brokers who have the most success in generating leads on social media have mastered the art of being genuine. Instead of packing their content with self-promotional materials, they strive to add value to the lives of their audience.

If you want to do the same, focus on creating content that is informative and easy to digest. Everyone knows that you want to earn their business. You don’t have to dedicate every piece of content towards reinforcing this point. Share information, teach a skill, solve a problem — in short, show that you’re an expert in the industry!

Benefits of Social Media for Mortgage Brokers

Social media marketing is an excellent tool for mortgage brokers. This advertising medium offers several significant benefits because it allows loan officers to:

Connect with New Clients

Perhaps the most notable benefit of using social media is that it can help mortgage brokers to connect with new clients. Social media platforms have almost completely replaced traditional word-of-mouth advertising.

In the past, consumers would tell their friends and family if they had a good or bad experience with a company. Now, they post about it, like the business page, or even actively comment on other people’s pages when they ask about mortgage services.

Social media sites also give loan officers the ability to proactively seek out prospective customers through paid and organic marketing. 

Social media marketing can be much more effective than other forms of advertising, especially when you understand that the mortgage industry is heavily focused on building relationships with clients.

Earn Repeat Business

Social media is useful for generating new leads, but it can also help loan officers to earn repeat business. When a mortgage broker provides their client with a great experience from start to finish, that person will likely follow the company’s business page. 

If the broker stays active on social media by using the strategies outlined above, that past client will frequently see their content.

When it comes time for that customer to refinance their current loan or purchase another home, they will likely turn to that loan officer for help. 

Loan officers can also send out birthday messages and refinance alerts to increase their chances of retaining customers for future deals. 

These types of correspondence are typically sent via email, but they can also be delivered in a social media message. Remember that staying in contact with people is the best way to build an ongoing relationship. Even if they don’t require your services right now, they probably know someone who might! 

Build Your Brand Image

A strong brand image is an integral part of lead generation. Ideally, you want your company’s name and logo to be highly recognizable. Social media marketing is a great way to reach this goal.

Every time you post on your company’s social media accounts, your followers will be exposed to your brand. Over time, this will leave a lasting impact on your audience. As a result, they might just turn to your company the next time they need mortgage services.

Save Money

Another significant benefit of lead generation via social media is that it is extremely cost-effective. This is especially important for independent loan officers and small mortgage firms that do not have massive advertising budgets. 

Mortgage professionals can start a business page on the top social media platforms for free. They can also begin to build their audience using organic marketing tactics until they have the funds to start using paid advertising.

Marketing Made Easy with BNTouch

As you can see, social media can be a powerful tool for mortgage brokers. When it’s used properly, social platforms can generate quality leads and grow your business.

With that being said, we understand that you may not have time to build marketing campaigns from the ground up. That’s where we come in! 

BNTouch provides our clients with cutting-edge mortgage CRM software. This technology includes several features, including pre-built marketing content that can help you to get more leads fast. If you would like to learn more, request a demo today!

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“When I talk about the metrics that will help you get and secure and keep buy-in, I come to you with a perspective of operations,” said Jessica Bowman, CEO of SEOinhouse.com, in her presentation at SMX Next. “How do we get other people involved in SEO as well?

SEOs are constantly searching for new ways to prove their work’s value to higher-ups. And, many prefer to let the results speak for themselves. But, as Bowman argues, it’s often more effective presenting executives with actionable metrics that get them involved in operations.

Here are three metrics Bowman recommends SEOs hone in on to secure that coveted buy-in so that they can continue to improve the visibility of their brands.

Metrics that can change the conversation

“SEO operations . . . is focusing on how you go about getting the SEO strategies and tactics done,” Bowman said. “Dp that well and you start setting yourself apart from the competition because most companies don’t address SEO operations.”

“Now we can take this framework and kind of shrink it down and make it [into] a strategy scorecard,” she added.

The SEO strategy scorecard framework gives executives and other departments a clear look into your tactics and what they’re designed to achieve. In her version, Bowman links these strategies to one of two categories: those that grow SEO traffic and those that accelerate SEO through operations.

Bowman says you can add more insight by featuring metrics such as estimated revenue. Highlighting these numbers can be pivotal in getting executives talking about SEO’s value.

Metrics that can get executives to recognize SEO’s value

“What I find is that SEO teams spend a lot of time fixing SEO problems that other teams introduced,” said Bowman. “And when you’re working on this stuff, it is time not spent on growing SEO revenue.”

Bowman recommends SEOs start reporting on time spent fixing SEO problems stemming from other departments. The goal should be to get executives to realize that prioritizing SEO training and department accountability will prevent these issues.

The point isn’t to create animosity between departments, but rather to identify roadblocks in SEO operations and show why they’re valuable.

Here are specific issues Bowman suggests SEOs identify:

• Changes in core web vitals metrics;
• Changes in page speed metrics;
• 4xx URLs in tags;
• 3xx URLs in tags; and
• Schema errors.

Metrics that can forecast SEO success

Executives and other higher-ups want to know your SEO projects are on track to meet specific goals. That’s why Bowman suggests marketers report on the most pertinent metrics — these are the campaign’s critical drivers.

“It is not uncommon for project managers and executives to talk about critical drivers,” Bowman said. “What is uncommon is to report on critical drivers.”

“These are metrics that tell you, and executives, if you even have a chance of reaching the SEO goals,” she added.

As Bowman says, critical drivers are well-known to the leaders of any organization. But when SEOs lay these out in their reporting, it gives decision-makers a clear roadmap and proves their worth that much more.

“The important thing to think about these critical drivers is that they are reports on the activities that must happen to achieve the revenue goals,” she said.

“When you communicate it in this method, this will get executives focusing on the right teams to do what needs to happen to grow SEO,” she added.

Watch the full SMX Next presentation here (registration required).

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Demographic audiences delivered nearly twice the reach (+99%) of interest audiences in campaigns with the same budget when the selected interest audiences were too narrow, according to a study of consumer packaged goods (CPG) campaigns published by Facebook. However, both types of targeting performed comparably when interest audiences were broad enough.

The analysis included 50 CPG campaigns in the EMEA region, measured using Facebook Brand Lift.

Why we care. The big takeaway from Facebook’s analysis is that some interest audiences are too small to generate scale when compared with demographic audiences. Advertisers should assess their interest audiences and decide whether the higher impact is worth potentially diminished reached and higher CPM.

If interest audiences are broad enough, they can perform comparably with demographic audiences. In that case, advertisers should select the strategy that best matches their campaign goals.

While these findings make sense, they’re also convenient for Facebook, since Apple’s App Tracking Transparency doesn’t affect demographic targeting.

Demographic outperforms interest audiences that are too narrow. Interest-based targeting is inherently more limited than demographic-based targeting. To overcome that difference, the campaign with the lower reach needs to compensate with greater efficiency. Interest targeting does deliver greater efficiency, but it’s unlikely to make up the difference.

“Among the campaigns with significantly reduced reach due to interest targeting, the effectiveness was slightly higher compared to the demographic audiences (+22%),” Facebook said, “However, this increase was slightly below the required threshold and was unlikely to sufficiently compensate for the lower reach. As a result, demographic strategy was 1.6 times more likely to be the winning strategy and drove more cost-efficient brand outcomes compared to the interest strategy in these campaigns.” When interest audiences were too narrow, demographic audiences also delivered 99% more reach than interest audiences on the same budget.

Both demographic- and interest-based targeting can deliver reach. The two strategies achieved comparable reach with the same budget when interest audiences were broad enough to provide sufficient reach. When both could deliver comparable reach — within 20% of the other — for the same budget, Facebook’s analysis showed that they were equally likely to be the winning, cost-effective strategy.

“This finding implies that some broader interest audiences can generate scale of reach comparable to demographic audiences and marketers can select either of the strategies while maximizing the alignment to the category buyers,” Facebook said.

Your objectives should dictate your strategy. Demographic targeting was the winning strategy 1.6x more often at the top of the funnel, while interest targeting was the winning strategy 2x more often at the bottom of the funnel, according to the analysis.

This means that interest audiences may be better for lower-funnel objectives, like driving purchase intent and consideration, while demographic audiences might be more likely to drive upper-funnel objectives, such as brand awareness. Advertisers should select the strategy that best matches their campaign’s specific goals. Using both strategies appropriately can enable brands to drive both upper and lower funnel outcomes.

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IndexNow has now been turned on by over 60,000 websites that use Cloudflare in less than two months after IndexNow was announced by Microsoft. IndexNow is an open protocol that any search engine can participate in to enable site owners to have their pages and content instantly indexed by the search engine. 

Microsoft and Cloudflare announced today that “more than 60,000 unique websites that have opted-in to Crawler Hints. Those zones have sent Bing about billion Hints for when specific assets on their websites have changed and need to be re-crawled.” I turned it on for the Search Engine Roundtable, my personal search blog, when it was announced.

How to turn it on. It literally is controlled by the flip of a switch in Cloudflare under the crawler hints section that you can access under the cache tab, then under the configuration section:

Microsoft said once this setting is enabled it, IndexNow “will begin sending hints to search engines about when they should crawl particular parts of your website.”

Google may adopt it. Google said recently that it too will test the IndexNow protocol for indexing. So while Microsoft Bing and Yandex are the only two who have fully adopted it, if Google adopts it, you can expect other search engines to as well.

Why we care. Like we said before, instant indexing is an SEO’s dream when it comes to giving search engines the most updated content on a site. The protocol is very simple and it requires very little developer effort to add this to your site, so it makes sense to implement this if you care about speedy indexing. Plus if you use Cloudflare, it can be turned on with the flip of a switch.

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“Everyone has annoying tasks in their job that you wish you could hire someone else to do, and at this point, you could automate it,” said Colt Sliva, SEO Engineer at iPullRank, in his presentation at SMX Next. “Additionally, you can be effective even when you’re not available.”

Many SEOs, however, lack the programming knowledge to set these systems up themselves, which is why automation tools are on the rise. Choosing one may seem daunting with so many automation resources, including no-code, low-code, and maximum-code options. But, as Sliva points out, there is always a tool available, no matter your technical literacy.

Selecting a marketing automation tool is just the first part of this process. Here are some actionable steps Sliva recommends marketers take to automate their SEO tasks.

Create a data storage space

Every marketer has their tool preferences, but Sliva recommends using Google Sheets and its macro scheduling when setting up SEO task automation. “What it will do is run a crawl in your site on a schedule and then write that straight into a single excel sheet,” he said, “You get a summarization of all the features of the crawl, and that data is saved in a sheet.”

Craft data visualizations

Whether you want to focus on missing HTML elements such as title tags, meta descriptions or H1 tags, or more technical components like orphan URLs or XML sitemap issues, creating visualizations can help marketers better analyze their data.

Sliva shared some helpful SEO data visuals from Dan Sharp of Screaming Frog, highlighting different ways marketers can display their automated crawl data.

Develop a feedback loop

Once the data storage and visualization elements are in place, marketers will want to ensure their automation systems can detect significant crawling issues on a regular basis. SEO should use tools that highlight these problems.

Sliva pointed to a significant indexability issue shown in his own automated report: “I can see that there’s been an issue in the past here with total internal non-indexable URLs, where the number of indexable URLs completely flip-flopped and most of the site was non-indexable. That is a clear problem that we would want a feedback loop for.”

Build SEO alerts

Automation systems that fail to notify SEOs of issues aren’t helpful, even if they can identify them properly. Sliva recommended using a script that pings specialists when a set number of issues arise — in his case, non-indexable URLs.

“It grabs the active spreadsheet of the current sheet and then it gets the range of data and grabs the last column and last row. So we have a complete section, and then it grabs the 11th column, which just happens to be the non-indexable column.”

SEOs can use scripts of this sort to set automated alerts for a variety of issues, allowing team members to begin working on solutions as soon as problems arise.

Automate SEO processes with programming tools

Here are some additional tasks SEOs can automate with their chosen tools, according to Sliva.

• Automated segmentation;
• Internal link analysis; and
• SEO data extraction.

“There are endless automation opportunities,” he said. “And that is exciting once you start to track these patterns and these simple programming concepts to get this work done.”

Sliva offered a caveat to automation implementation: “If you could spend 10 minutes doing the task manually and then you decide to spend 10 hours writing the code — and you don’t do that task very often — you probably don’t need to automate that task.”

But often, the advantages outweigh the costs. It all depends on your campaign goals and workload. “The benefits are speeding up your tasks, removing obstacles, and lightening your workload,” said Sliva.

“It’s just a fun problem to solve. If you enjoy solving problems, this is for you,” he added.

Watch the full SMX Next presentation here (registration required).

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