After a year of social distancing, we’re craving personal interaction. And after a year of Zoom meetings and FaceTime calls, we’re accustomed to getting on camera and seeing others online, imperfections and all.
Now’s the time to take your new comfort level with video and apply it to your business. Include a video of yourself on a mortgage landing page. Add a personal video to your emails. There’s no longer an expectation of professional quality filming every time. Just let your personality, friendliness and helpfulness shine in your video. The professional service you provide will speak for itself.
Mortgage Marketing Tip #2: Move Beyond the Stock Photo.
Mortgage companies have done a great job of including diverse populations in the images we use for our mortgage marketing. But do all of the stock photos of smiling, happy families jumping for joy in front of a Craftsman-style single-family home and professionals in their trendy offices get old to you after a while?
For Surefire’s content marketing messages, the team at Top of Mind is mixing up professional shots with original graphic representations. We’re making a point to add custom colors so that every piece of digital marketing represents the company brand.
Think about how you can take stock photos or the images you have available and make them your own, too.
Mortgage Marketing Tip #3: Introduce the unexpected.
The unexpected is memorable, and you want to be remembered. What’s unexpected in mortgage communications? How about a smile? Or even a laugh?
Whether in your personal videos (see Mortgage Marketing Tip #1), your email marketing or other channels, a little bit of levity can go a long way toward making a stressful and (frankly) boring topic a little more palatable.
At Top of Mind, we’ve found a natural place to add humor is in birthday and holiday greetings. The greetings themselves are typically unexpected, and when they make a borrower laugh, they will be remembered even longer.
The Surefire holiday greeting with the best response as measured by click-through rate has very straightforward messaging: “On this special day, we want to make you smile — really big.” The click-through rate is more than triple the average expected for that type of greeting.
Do you see? People really do want to smile. Really big.
Determine a way to make it happen with your marketing.
Mortgage Marketing Tip #4: Find new targeted audiences.
Mix up your marketing strategy by starting a new topic of discussion with a new group of people. You can do this while using your current database.
Search your database for borrowers who are paying PMI and send marketing materials suggesting ways they can get out of it.
Segment your database by borrower age and target messages to different age groups. For example, borrowers in their 40s are likely to have children who are becoming adults. Let them know you can help them finance college tuition or a wedding with a HELOC or cash-out refinance.
Even if it feels like you’ve said it all before, there are still those who haven’t heard. Find them, and they’ll appreciate the new-to-them information.
Mortgage Marketing Tip #5: Personalize your messages.
Yeah, this has been done, we know. You’re putting the recipient’s name in the subject line of email marketing messages. What else can you do?
Surefire has a long history of personalizing in-process videos with deal data, sometimes in unexpected places — like the borrower’s last name on an image of a mailbox. Recently, we’ve introduced dynamic postcard images, too. You can send a birthday postcard, and the recipient’s first name will be part of the image on the front of the card.
Those personal videos we mentioned? They’re fast and easy to record. When you send a loan update, you can record a quick video with specific deal data. Bonus points if you include personal detail, such as best wishes for their favorite ball team in the weekend playoffs.
Mortgage Marketing Tip #6: Automate
This one isn’t flashy and won’t catch the eye of your borrowers like their name on a postcard or a funny holiday video, but it will help keep you top of mind with consistent messaging.
And it will help you save your sanity.
There’s no way you can do your job writing loans and also send birthday and holiday greetings every day, deploy individualized series of marketing messages over time, and come up with new ways to segment your database regularly.
Automating those processes through triggered rules, recurring deployments and set-it-and-forget-it marketing campaigns will make you look like you’re spending lots of time communicating when you’re really spending minimal time with the initial setup.
Surefire CRM has been helping mortgage brokers and lenders automate their prospect, in-process and post-close marketing for almost 20 years. Request a demo today so you can see it in action. We’d love to help you make your business take off and soar.