Mortgage Marketing University

Mortgage marketing is the process of educating and motivating potential borrowers to use your mortgage services in lieu of your competition. Mortgage marketing ranges from corporate brand management and advertising to individual loan officer activities such as generating referral partner relationships and calling or texting prospective customers. In 2021 mortgage marketing competition is fueled by historically low interest rates, renewed focus on refinancing, new requirements driven by working from home, and pressure to expand to second homes outside of urban areas.

Mortgage Marketing requires developing awareness and engagement at all stages of the buying (loan origination) cycle. 

• Prospect
• In-Process
• Post Close

During these stages, mortgage marketing strategies evolve. When prospecting, developing awareness of your brand and differentiating capabilities help drive more borrowers into your application process. While in-process, properly shepherding the borrower through a mix of education, nudges, and reengagement workflows generates the highest pull-through rates. And once the loan is closed, mortgage marketing is used to stay top of mind with the borrower, check in with them, educate them further, and earn the right to repeat and referral business.

Start by defining your brand. How should borrows feel when interacting with you and your team? How do you want your site and collator to look visually? Some companies choose to develop their own content from scratch, others choose the best mortgage CRM with award winning content built in. If you are an independent loan officer, carefully select the photo you will use to market yourself and display it on all communications and collateral. Enterprise organizations need to focus on the emotional response to logos, site imagery, and content choices.

Once you have your branding, determine your market differentiation. Why would a borrower choose you as a lender? There are many reasons including:

• Strong online presence
• Educational and engaging mortgage marketing content delivered via email, text, and social media.
• Best mortgage rates and fees
• You are in the neighborhood (use local advertising if you are)
• You close loans faster
• Variety of products and offerings and expert knowledge of how they benefit borrowers
• You answered the phone first (availability matters)

Quality content is the lifeblood of any mortgage marketing strategy. The value of the tools and materials provided to borrowers matters, because this content will drive them to your site and to your loan officers. In content quality matters but so does branding. Performing branding at scale requires your mortgage CRM to have powerful transformation tools that convert content from your Digital Asset Management library into color corrected, logo applied, and data merged flyers, landing pages, interactives, calculators, and more

Digital marketing applies almost universally to Mortgage Marketing, especially in a post-pandemic environment where face to face interaction is tremendously limited and digital applications became the norm. In this world, social media is critical with an eye to trending platforms (such as Clubhouse). Pay-Per-Click and remarketing strategies still work and perhaps work better in a work-at-home culture. And of course search optimization on your lending home page and loan officer pages drives corporate level and local level interest to the people that can help borrowers the most.

An impactful mortgage marketing strategy does not have to be supported by a multi-million dollar budget. By implementing these five mortgage marketing disciplines, any loan origination professional can use to gain massive traction.  

• Employ Visual Content:

Mortgage Marketing Content is not just words. Eye-catching content will help LOs remain top of mind with their leads and help to increase the return on investment for their mortgage marketing goals.  

• Increase Referrals:

Using automated marketing to enhance the customer experience will increase customer referrals.  

• Enhanced Email Strategy:

What makes mortgage email marketing work? The answer is personalization. By incorporating engaging and educational emails incorporating humanistic automation, mortgage marketing professionals can see a greater open rate and conversion rate of their prospects.  

• Get Social:

Social media marketing is constantly evolving and changing. Employing new marketing trends and tactics can generate continued growth year over year.  

• Automate Communication:

When done right, automated marketing can optimize the performance of entire lending teams. By implementing automated workflows that employ personalized customer journeys, lending professionals can spend their time closing more loans without losing new business.