Want to make your marketing more powerful and targeted to your ideal borrower? The key lies in creating buyer personas. A mortgage buyer persona is a semi-fictional representation of your optimum mortgage client. It serves as a guide that ensures you understand your borrows needs, their pain points, and the best marketing message to reach that particular persona. 

Buyer personas reveal what led this ideal borrower to your services and what you need to do to attract others like them.

Even if buyer personas is a new concept to you, you’ve likely used a rudimentary version –for example, using one message for first-time buyers and another for commercial borrowers. However, this post will teach you how to develop mortgage buyer personas like a pro and tactics for implementing them in your marketing and lead generation. 

How to Develop A Mortgage Buyer Persona

To create an insightful persona, start with the general demographic info of clients in your database, like age, gender, marital status, homeownership status, geography, education level, career, income, and other broad categories. 

Once you have basics down, you want to dive deeper. Consider:

• What sort of hobbies or leisure activities do they enjoy? 
• What worries them?
• What pursuits or goals do they have in life?
• Where do they shop?
• How tech-savvy are they?

Now that you’ve completed your research, it’s time to start analyzing all the data.

Analyzing the Data

The first thing you want to do is look for emerging trends and patterns. Once you find the pattern, categorize the data to define your core buyer personas.

Next, go through each persona group and start filling in the averages about each buyer persona, like their educational level, occupation, challenges, goals, etc.

We recommend structuring it in this way for each persona:

• Background (Employment, Career Path, Family)
• Demographics (Age, Gender, Income, Geographic Location)
• Attributes (Demeanor, Communication Preferences, Interests)

For each persona, you’ll also want to include common objections. 

Naming Your Mortgage Buyer Personas

Now here comes the fun part –naming your persona. Personas with names like Veteran Vicky, Millennial Mike, or Commercial Chris are catchy and easy to remember. Here’s what a completed buyer persona profile might look like:

Millennial Mike

• Location: Westcoast
• Age: 32
• Gender: Male
• Education: Bachelors Degree
• Hobbies: Gaming, exercising, cooking
• Job Title: Graphic designer
• Income: $67,000
• Relationship Status: Single and no kids
• Preferred method of communication: Text
• Goals: Purchase first home by 35, move up the career ladder
• Challenges: With no tax breaks and continuing student loan payments, disposable income is limited

Implementing Buyer Persona Into the Borrowers Journey

Once you’ve defined your personas, the next step is to use them in your marketing efforts, particularly their Borrower’s Journey.

As a quick refresher, a Borrower’s Journey is the process consumers go through to become aware of, consider, and decide to complete a mortgage application. 

 Example: Millennial Mike and His Buyer’s Journey

Mike’s awareness is rooted in his goal to purchase his first home by 35. Mike will likely research the homebuying process, asking peers about their experiences buying a home, reading blog posts about first-time homebuying, and use interactive mortgage calculators that help him estimate various scenarios. 

Feeling informed, Mike moves into the consideration stage, comparing lenders, looking up reviews, and getting familiar with the lender’s brand, mission, and digital mortgage tools.

Finally, Millennial Mike moves into the decision stage. Having explored various options, your marketing messages about first-time homebuyer programs, minimal down payments, and online borrower portal nudge him to pre-qualify with you. The ease of application and positive experience then ultimately convince Millennial Mike to continue and complete the full 1003. 

Today’s mortgage consumers expect to be engaged on a more personal level, and buyer personas are another tool in helping you to create that engagement. They allow you to gain insight, focus, optimize, and strategize your communication with current, past, and potential borrowers. While admittedly not full proof (humans don’t always fit neatly into categories), buyer personas have proven time and again to help increase conversion rates and revenue –making it worth the additional effort.