One of the most significant challenges facing mortgage lenders today is understanding how their marketing strategy is doing from an absolute standpoint. Quarterly comparisons can only tell you so much — and while benchmark comparisons to other institutions can give a more holistic view of a lender’s marketing performance within their service region, not every lender is equipped to manage such broad marketing data.
Retail mortgage lenders often have a large contingent of marketers whose sole duty is developing effective communications and tracking marketing performance. This centralized marketing team can support busy loan officers (LOs) as they evangelize their own activities — either by sending birthday well-wishes and loan anniversary congratulations to past borrowers or by conducting partner outreach.
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Because they have mortgage marketing specialists providing ongoing support to LOs, mid-to-enterprise level mortgage lenders have a far easier time measuring campaign performance. They have more internal key performance indicators (KPIs) and other marketing success metrics at their disposal, which they can leverage to measure the effectiveness of their outreach strategies and identify areas for improvement.
On the other hand, smaller mortgage organizations typically lack a dedicated mortgage marketing team. As a result, local community banks and credit unions generally do not have sufficient data to reflect marketing campaign performance accurately or reliably.
A better choice for these lower-budget organizations is to roll out an automated performance marketing strategy that has already proven effective. If a lender launches a campaign and then waits to accrue internal comparative metrics, any incremental improvements to their marketing strategy can take years to fine-tune.
How does your outreach measure up in the marketplace?
A solid understanding of your internal mortgage marketing performance is not enough to outpace competitors with expansive marketing budgets. In a cutthroat market environment, it is important for lenders to know how their communications strategy is performing compared to other lenders in their area.
Just because you are satisfied with your marketing campaign’s performance does not mean you aren’t missing out on opportunities. By quantifying how the deliverability, reach and volume of their communications measure up to that of other institutions, lenders can more accurately set performance expectations and improve their marketing plans.
Of course, most mortgage lenders are unlikely to divulge internal marketing data to their competitors. Even if they would, it would require loads of manual data crunching for those KPIs to be a helpful resource because every lender’s approach to marketing is different. So, how can lenders confidently implement marketing activities that will effectively grow their business?
It is essential to know your performance marketing goals to determine what performance data will most accurately reflect a marketing campaign’s performance. You may want to improve your lead generation and management, in which case you will need to focus on KPIs like speed-to-lead and application pull-through. Loan pull-through and fallout rates are the best KPIs to measure the effectiveness of in-process mortgage marketing workflows, and customer retention and referral rates help lenders assess post-close communications.
Performance marketing made easy
A comprehensive mortgage marketing engine can give lenders all of the performance marketing automation and KPI reporting they could ever want — from the first point of contact to several years after a loan has closed.
You should choose a marketing technology provider that offers a robust, user-friendly toolset and comprehensive guidelines to streamline the implementation process. The ideal marketing automation platform for lenders will offer mortgage-specific marketing campaigns that users can implement as-is or tweak based on their unique goals. With an automated performance marketing engine delivering engaging, educational content to borrowers quickly and consistently, lenders can earn borrowers’ trust and future business by helping them make better financial decisions.
Nobody does performance marketing quite like Surefire CRM and Mortgage Marketing Engine by Black Knight. With our turnkey mortgage marketing engine, robust customer relationship management (CRM) platform and award-winning creative content, lenders have been able to close twice as many deals and double revenue.
What’s more, Surefire has been powering lenders’ performance marketing campaigns for decades, so we have all of the KPI data needed to craft unique, proven-effective marketing strategies that encompass all of the critical touchpoints in the loan lifecycle. Request a demo to find out more!