Keeping that pipeline filled with new qualified leads is one of the biggest challenges that brokerages face daily, and marketing plays a critical role in making that happen. However, many mistakenly hand this crucial task to their LOs or office staff, thinking that it’ll be just as effective (or cost-efficient) to do so. 

But having your LOs take responsibility for mortgage marketing could be costing you more than you realize. 

If you want your LOs to increase their loan volume, you must take marketing off of their plate and pass it on to a professional marketer. Here’s why:

1. A professional marketer will free up LO time so they can focus on processing loans
2. A professional marketer will modernize your lead gen strategy
3. A professional marketer is easier to manage and will deliver better results.

In this age, it’s no longer a question of whether a brokerage needs to do digital marketing but rather how serious they are at getting results. A healthy benchmark for effective marketing would be that it accounts for about 20-30% of your total pipeline. Are you near that benchmark? How much time are you willing to have your LOs dedicate to reaching that goal? 

By answering those two questions, you’ll start to get a better idea of how significant and costly the problem is to have your LOs take responsibility for your business marketing. Let’s take a deeper look at why you need to remove marketing from their to-do list, and give it to the capable hands of a professional mortgage marketer. 

Mortgage Marketing Powered by LenderHomPage

A professional marketer will free up LO time to process More loans.

Many business owners have a “Do-It-Yourself” type of mentality. While admirable and essential to business start-ups, requiring your LOs to have this same mentality regarding marketing will end up backfiring, and here’s why. Firstly, marketing takes knowledge of how marketing works, how to design a marketing strategy, and how to execute it. Essentially, when you require your LO to take on marketing, you make them take on a second career. 

How well do you think they’ll execute? 

How long do you think it’ll take them to complete the necessary tasks? This leads us to our second point…

Even with an experienced marketing team at the helm, implementing the strategy takes time. Considering the 40-hour workweek, how many of those hours are you willing to take away from lead nurturing and loan processing to have your LO make a rudimentary effort in mortgage marketing?

A professional marketer will modernize your lead gen strategy.

The rise of the digital age has reinvented many aspects of marketing, and with algorithms constantly evolving, competitors altering their campaigns, market changes, and consumers shifting their online behaviors, your approach must also adapt. 

That includes modernizing every aspect of your inbound mortgage marketing strategy. Below is a partial list of tasks that entail a “modern marketing strategy”:

• Website development or redesign
• Branding
• Graphic design
• SEO/keyword research
• Content development
• Social media marketing
• Email marketing
• Local market research
• Mobile marketing integration
• Print marketing development and production
• Paid advertising
• Metrics and data analysis
• Public relations
• Video creation and marketing

While this is an extensive list, it’s not exhaustive. Remember that innovative technology, apps, and marketing disciplines are constantly being created. It’s challenging enough to train an LO into a top producer –do you really want her also to try to keep up with the latest in marketing? 

A professional marketer is Easier to Manage with better results.

When you hire a mortgage marketing agency, you get access to a team of expert copywriters, graphic designers, social media marketers, SEO professionals, PPC strategists, web designers, plus managers to coordinate it all. Is this something you want your loan officers or business to take on?

While some are tempted to take their marketing in-house, that’s not always the best way to go, especially for mortgage businesses. For mortgage businesses, the cost of recruiting and training a new marketing department could be prohibitive. And that rings true for both individual and multi-branch firms. 

So unless you’re in the business of marketing, it’s best to focus on lending and leave the marketing to the experts.

The Bottom Line

Marketing is both essential and a necessary expense. That’s right –there’s a cost for marketing and lead generation. Some falsely believe that they can eliminate or reduce the cost by their LOs do the marketing. But as you now can see, you’ll end up paying much more. When you shift the responsibility of marketing from your LO to a marketing professional, you’ll have beefed up your revenue streams from both your lead generation side and your lead nurturing side. 

Ready to make that happen? Click here to schedule a conversation with our redesigned mortgage marketing services. 

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Content that engages your audience isn’t about winning a popularity contest. It’s about enticing or activating motivation, making it more likely that the reader will convert into a borrower. Engaging content also makes your business more memorable. So even if the prospect didn’t take action then, your content and business would linger on their mind long after, increasing the likelihood that they’ll return to your mortgage site. 

If you’re stumped on how you can give your mortgage web content a fresh and engaging upgrade, this post is for you. In this post, we will look at six keys for creating mortgage content to drive engagement. 

Use Visuals like Video, Graphics, and Images

It’s well known that humans are primarily visual learners. This study illustrates that idea when it found that a person could remember about 65 percent of visual information after three days versus only 10-20% of written information. That’s not to say that text is irrelevant. Written content is still a preferred way to consume content and the foundation to organic web traffic. But adding a visual element will help to make your content more appealing and memorable.

The other thing about visuals is that they are more likely to be shared around the web, helping to intensify engagement opportunities.

Make Lists

Business blogs are discovering what magazines have known for over a century — readers like lists! Articles with titles like “top ten ways…” or “20 tricks to” instantly pique curiosity and trigger the reader to click more to read the entire article. 

Another benefit of lists is that they break down information into bite-size pieces, making it easy for the layperson to understand complex topics like finance or real estate. 

Use storytelling to share a success story

Humans love a hero story, and sharing a client success case study is how you can do it. The great thing about this method is that you don’t even have to be a great storyteller. Just follow this basic three-act model, and you’ll have an engaging piece of content that your reader will devour.

1. The setting – Offer some background demographics on the client, like age, career, and family. Also, share info on whether the client is a first-time homebuyer, a veteran, or perhaps looking to retire soon.
2. The problem- Describe questions or obstacles that the client is struggling with.
3. The resolution: Bring the story into a climax, describing how concerns were resolved.

Create a how-to guide

When writing a “how-go mortgage” guide for driving engagement, go long. About 1,500 words or more. Substantial guides are more likely to get read and shared. Although a 1,500-word guide or blog post can seem too challenging to create, an easy way to think of them is as a list blog post where you dive deep into each bullet point.  

Here are some additional tips on creating how-to guides for your mortgage blog:

• • Focus on solving a problem for your prospective borrower. A how-to guide is only helpful and valuable if it actually solves a real problem for your reader.
  • Break up large chunks of text. Break up topics visually with checklists, quotes, or infographics. 
  • Include a workbook. A companion workbook adds even more value to your guide and invites engagement. No time for creating a whole separate workbook? Consider adding exercises or questions at the end of each section for the reader to complete. 

Provide resources or tools

Create content that lists tools or resources helpful for the prospective borrower, such as: where to check their credit history, a guide for creating a budget, an affordability calculator, recommended local home repair service providers, local hiking trails, and community activity guides are a few examples of helpful resources that will likely get shared.

Do something unexpected

The purple cow is a method made popular by marketing guru Seth Godin. Godin introduces this idea with an anecdote about going on a car trip and seeing cows grazing on the field. While it excites you at first (especially if you’re a city slicker), you get bored after miles of the same plain cows. Now imagine that there’s a single purple cow grazing amongst the hundreds of typical cows. Not only does it immediately catch your attention, but it keeps it as well –for some time!

This relates to engaging content creation because you want to pivot from the norm to get people talking. Here are some ideas:

• Play devil’s advocate and offer a different perspective on a popular mortgage topic
• Include gifs on your blogs or create memes for shareable content
• Combine mortgage topics with seemingly unrelated subjects (i.e., “Dwight or Jim: The Office Guide to Buying Your First Home”)

Ask for engagement

A simple way to increase your content engagement is to just ask for it! At the beginning of the post, ask your reader to bookmark it for future reference. At the end of the post, ask your reader to comment and share the post on social media.

Be sure to include a social media plug-in to make it super simple for the reader to share with their followers. 

Did you find this article helpful?

Check out past articles on related topics like top ten online courses to grow your mortgage business and ways to drive more traffic to your mortgage website.

The definition of a brand can be boiled down to how the public perceives you, so a personal brand isn’t necessarily built around a business or even with the goal of building a business. A personal brand is built around you -encapsulating your strengths, your expertise, and your style. Because a personal brand is essentially created from scratch and is unique to you, you can leverage this power to support your mortgage business and act as a brand ambassador to the business brand.

An example of this can be found in Richard Branson. The billionaire adventurer has a well-known personal brand and uses it to complement his business brand, Virgin. Another example can be found with Oprah as she uses her personal brand as part of her multi-channel media empire, Harpo. 

The main takeaway is that while different from business brands, personal brands are powerful, influential assets –especially to mortgage businesses.

Personal Brand: Becoming An Ambassador to Your Mortgage Business

Highlight Your Accomplishments

Make an even more compelling case for the company’s expertise in the industry by sharing your experience, certifications, associations, and education. Letting prospects know about your ten years of experience in the mortgage industry or your bachelor’s degree in business administration goes a long way in building your mortgage business’ trustworthiness and professionalism. 

Non-business accomplishments are also great ways to trump up your mortgage business. Items like completing an Iron Man marathon or restoring a classic car to be showroom ready hint at your perseverance and commitment to excellence –admirable characteristics that are subliminally attractive to mortgage prospects. 

Make Social Media “Follow” Worthy

Individuals will follow social media accounts for various reasons, such as for humor, inspiration, advice, news, or connection. A personally branded social media profile can add another dimension to the business’s social media presence and could often hook the viewer much more readily than a business brand might be able to.

You can expand the hero story by sharing the journey on your brand social profile. For example, let’s say that several of your mortgage team decided to do the Iron Man marathon. You might post 1-2 images of them doing the race, sharing how proud the company is of these team members.

However, the personal brand can delve deeper into the journey of getting ready for the race, unfolding a hero story that resonates with followers. Thus, the personal brand compels the audience to invest emotionally, which causes them to invest emotionally into the business brand. 

Reflect Company Culture and Values

Along the same thread, a personal brand allows prospective clients to see the business culture and values in action. Sharing involvement in social causes that matter to you, such as volunteering at a local rescue mission or literacy program, demonstrates true passion and shows that community building is more than just lip service.

A personal brand also reveals true enthusiasm in providing mortgage services. A mortgage business comprised of earnest, joyful, and savvy professionals draw positive attention from all fronts.

A personal brand also reveals true enthusiasm in providing mortgage services.

Choose Both Personal and Business Brand

Having a personal brand doesn’t mean it needs to compete with the business brand. They are complementary and extend one another’s reach. So instead of thinking you need to choose one over the other, harness the influence of both to boost your mortgage business above the competition.

Check out our new personal brand mortgage templates to co-promote your mortgage business. 

Personal Brand Templates

As a loan officer, know that there’s real value in creating a personal brand. Consider this: if you decide to change to another brokerage or financial institution (or go out on your own), would rather do it building your reputation from square one again, or do it with a reputation you’ve spent years refining?

That’s the value of personal branding –it’s yours, and it follows you your entire career.

Your personal brand also widens opportunities. Every meeting, connection, and happy client that engages with your personal brand is another opportunity added to your career. Building up your personal brand also increases your value as a mortgage professional. A brand that is recognizable and is seen as trustworthy commands more money.

How can you build a personal brand that lasts? That’s what this post is going to show you. Read on and bookmark this page for future reference.

Personal Brand for Mortgage Professionals: It’s More Than Likes and Comments

If you’re on social media, you may think that you’re well on your way to building a personal brand. But if you haven’t taken the time to define your brand and create a foundation for it, all those likes and comments are in vain. Here’s what you need to do instead:

Phase One: Define Your Personal Brand Identity

Be very clear about who you are and who you are not. What are your values? What’s your purpose? Who are you trying to reach? It’s critical that you know precisely what image you want to portray lest the public defines it for you and possibly create one that you never intended. 

Phase Two: Create Personal Brand Awareness

Creating brand awareness and associating it with mortgage services is the goal of this next phase. The more your brand becomes well-known, the easier it will be for the consumer to remember and trust it. Here are top ways to build awareness for your brand:

• Partner with real estate agents or other industry professionals that have successfully built their personal brand.
• Use referrals and build up your online reviews.
• Create different forms of content (video, blogs, infographics, podcast)
• Be active on social media
• Use paid advertising and remarketing

Phase Three: Engage With Your Followers

When we say engage with your followers, we mean doing so purposefully and actively. When someone leaves a comment, don’t just reply with, “Thank you!”. If you’ve noticed a follower liking and commenting on your posts, send a direct message. Did a website visitor fill out your contact form on your mortgage website? Activate a drip email and text campaign. Give them additional opportunities to get familiar with your brand and know what you’re all about.

Phase Four: Create Brand Loyalty

Getting to this phase takes a while –we’re talking about six months to a year. Remember that we’re building a personal brand that will last the life of your career, and that takes time. But that’s okay! In this phase, you want to add more fuel to your authority and trustworthiness. Do this by offering high-quality, high-value products for free, such as ebooks, webinars, and digital mortgage tools like mortgage apps and calculators.

Mortgage Websites Built for Personal Branding

At LenderHomePage, we firmly believe in the power and profitability of your personal brand. That’s why we created websites templates and tools built specifically for showcasing your brand across the web. Check out our three new mortgage templates for personal branding and try it out free for 14 days. Click here to launch one in minutes!

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Mortgage company branding is more than a logo. It’s part of the entire consumer experience, how your customer perceives you and is an indispensable factor in your ROI. Everything from the individual graphics to your website and mortgage app appearance to social media posts to online chats is part of your brand. 

Because branding is a critical element of your business, it’s vital that you know the fundamentals of a strong one. By the way, this is true about personal branding as well. Whether you’re a team on 1 or 100, your mortgage brand is your DNA and promise to consumers. Here’s how to do it.

Purpose 

A strong brand reflects your company’s purpose. It’s the reason why your business was established and answers the key question: why should a consumer choose your business over others? 

This is the starting point for your entire branding plan. The more specific you are, the more defining the difference between you and your competitors. Answer these three questions, and you’ll have the foundation to your overarching purpose that is part of your brand strategy:

• What is your business best at?
• What is your business passionate about?
• What difference can your business make?

Consistency

Consistent branding increases familiarity. The more a consumer is familiar with your brand, the more they begin to trust –and even prefer– your brand and business. And when it comes to online consumers who are comparison shopping, consistency and trust can tip the scales in your favor, turning a web visitor into a prospect. 

Graphic elements and color schemes are visual ways to create consistency but don’t forget how your mortgage business tech stack works with your branding. A similar and predictable look, feel, and tone should be apparent in the entire Borrower Experience.

Captivate

One of the hallmarks of a great brand is that it grabs the attention of consumers. That’s not to say that it must be loud or aggressive, but optimally, it should contain some pivot –enough to make a consumer do a “double-take” when they come upon it while browsing for local mortgage brokers and lenders.

Keep in mind that the double-take is more than a cool logo. Captivating with your brand also involves offering the “remarkable” with your services, such as instant quotes or self-generated approval letters. 

Personality

A strong mortgage brand also has a recognizable personality that makes it relatable to its target consumer. We can see this in action with well-known brands like Nike (motivational and inspirational) or Apple (innovative and fresh). 

Authentic brand personality permeates everything from running the company to campaign messages, helping to build rapport and loyalty from your target mortgage consumer. 

Emotional Hook

Consumers are often persuaded more effectively by emotion than logic. A recent collaborative study analyzing 35 years of research into emotions’ impact on decision-making revealed that emotions are a pervasive and predictable driver in decision making.

Thus, a strong mortgage brand needs an emotional hook that emphasizes the benefits to the consumer. This emotional hook (the benefits) excites consumers and motivates them to convert into borrowers.

Community

Your current and past mortgage consumers can be your most effective evangelists and be a rich resource for new mortgage leads by sharing their experience and recommending it. A strong mortgage brand is one that your consumer advocates are thrilled to share. It’s professional, clean, and trustworthy -everything they can get behind to share and go viral. 

Authority

When it comes to the lending industry, authority is a must. Anything less than unshakable authority will cost you business. Ways that you can build authority with your branding include:

• Mortgage content like a blog, videos, and email marketing
• Infographics and eBooks
• Digital mortgage tools like a mortgage app and professionally build mortgage website
• Publish content on industry-respected platforms
• Consistent and active presence across the web, including review sites and social media

LenderHomePage Builds Your Mortgage Brand

A strong mortgage brand sets you up for success. It defines fundamentals like your mission and company values, rallies employees around your vision, emotionally hooks prospective mortgage consumers, excites advocates for your business, and overall helps to facilitate a thriving ROI. So when it comes to a digital mortgage partner, choose one that’s built for branding as well as scaling. 

Try us out for free for 14 days and discover why top producers and enterprise originators trust LenderHomePage for all their digital mortgage platform needs. 

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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. 

We’ve compiled a list of the topmost relevant, and useful online courses mortgage professionals need to thrive and grow their mortgage business to the next level. From digital marketing to customer service to branding strategies, these upper-level online courses are taught by professionals at the top of their game and will give you the launching platform you need to grow your business. 

Need more resources for scaling and completing your digital transformation? We got you covered! Explore our stackable and brandable digital mortgage platform that grows with your business. 

Leadership Assessment and Development 

This course by Udemy is a 2-hour deep dive into exploring and developing your leadership skills. More than the typical “business leader approach,” this course is a great foundation for growing a mortgage business and shows you how to create a resilient work culture and leadership mentality within your team to promote innovation, accountability, profitability, and loyalty. Learn more.

Performance Experts 

Taught by one of the nation’s top fifty producers of loan origination, Tim Braheem offers several coaching programs in an exclusive small group, online settings. His Leadership 360 course is open only once a year to 9 members are takes mortgage professionals through a year-long business and life coaching program to teach mortgage professionals how to build a sustainable business model that complements the desire for personal fulfillment. Learn more.

CORE Training 

Taught by trio Rick Ruby, Todd Scrima, and Reeta Casey, this program focuses primarily on leveraging healthy competitiveness within your workforce to elevate the entire team. There are three levels to this program, with the first requiring a 12-month commitment and comes with the promise of doubling your business after successful completion. Learn more.

Social Media and Digital Advertising 2021

Offered by the respected Mortgage Banker’s Association (MBA), this webinar provides upper-level insight into digital marketing and social media marketing for the mortgage industry in 2021 and beyond. With legal compliance, consumer trends, and evolving digital etiquette, knowing how to market your business is challenging. This course can be completed in a single session and will provide a solid foundation for establishing and maintaining a professional mortgage digital presence. Learn more.

Aligning Customer Experience with Company Culture

Offered by one of Linkin’s featured professionals, customers service expert Davide Brownlee provides insight into the customer journey. He shows you how the mortgage professional can add value to each phase to create an exceptional customer experience that results in happier clients, a supportive and satisfying work environment, and increased profit. Learn more.

Marketing Foundations: Automation

Named as one of Forbes 30 Under 30, Jon Chang teaches the foundations of automation in marketing, how to use it to drive efficiency, identify marketing opportunities, and develop retargeting ad campaigns with high conversion rates. The self-directed course has several case studies and can be completed in a day. Learn more.

Sales: Closing a Complex Sale

This 5-module course is a fast-track program for improving sales and closing skills. It helps originators understand the buyer’s dilemmas and offers solutions to simplify the buyer’s journey and value proposition. Taught by Jeff Bloomfield, trusted sales strategist and executive coach to senior executives of Fortune 500 companies. Learn more.

Advanced Mortgage Loan Processor: Essential Skills Training

Gain a more profound knowledge of mortgage processing with this essential skills training course. This program is perfect for the loan officer looking to branch out on his own or work independently alongside banks or lenders. Even seasoned brokers will find the lessons helpful in expanding their practice and training up a top-producing mortgage team. Learn more.

Optimize Your Google Ads Campaign

Go beyond the basics set up of Google ads and learn how to plan, execute, and optimize for mortgage lead generation. Taught by Google, this one-hour seminar will introduce you to the advanced features of Google’s ad platform and prepare you for creating powerful mortgage ads on both local and national levels. Offered on a rotating basis so check the calendar for the next available date. Learn more.

Brand Management by UCLA Extension

This higher-level 11-week course offered by working professionals is part of UCLA’s Extention program. Available in 100% online format, you’ll learn the development and application of a business brand and how to leverage this power to differentiate yourself from the competition. This course is ideal for mortgage brokers who are aggressively scaling their businesses. Learn more.