A customer-focused marketing strategy is critical for loan officers. Customer-focused marketing is built around gaining an understanding of the customers’ needs and how you can best meet those needs, rather than how doing so helps your business.
Traditional sources of advertising for mortgage marketing and lead generation should always be balanced between professional referral partners, direct-to-consumer advertising and automated marketing to one’s past client database.
Of course, although we use the word “traditional,” marketing has evolved along with the digital revolution. But far from being impersonal, technology should bring you closer to your customers and provide you insights on how to match them with the best products and services for their needs to provide long-term value.
Why Start With Cold Leads?
Advertising in conventional ways (like placing ads in trade magazines or using billboards) is great for building brand awareness, but few respondents will decide to use your business based on that initial exposure. Referral partner marketing is important and more rewarding as leads will come to you based on the strength of referring partner’s recommendation. Still, nervous homebuyers can harbor some doubts and be suspicious of the referring partner’s interest in the referral. For instance, is an agent only referring to a mortgage broker because there’s some financial benefit to be had for them?
Customer-focused Marketing Centers on Those Who Have Already Used Your Services
A referral from a friend or family member comes with a no-strings-attached perception and is valued as being an honest and trustworthy recommendation.
Putting your marketing efforts to work on your own book of business is a sure way of generating warm leads that are primed and ready to use you and your services. Far more rarely will they need to be “sold” on you and your company. Taking an educational approach with these leads right out of the gate can go far in letting them know you care about their questions and needs. That’s a much better way to start a client relationship.
The typical homebuyer questions center on best rates, and costs become secondary to their desire to work with someone who’s already trusted by that friend, family member or co-worker. Putting new buyers at ease by walking them through the mortgage qualification process and assuring them you are competent can erase any anxiety they may have harbored and immediately start to build their trust in you. After all, this is what they were led to expect based on the recommendation from a friend/family member/co-worker.
How to Handle All Those Past Clients
Keeping good client records and, just as importantly, keeping them up to date can be a monumental task. But not if you use a world-class mortgage CRM to do it.
Mortgage marketing, or more specifically automated mortgage marketing, as the basis for a customer-focused mortgage marketing strategy can really only be handled by a system designed to do exactly that.
Maintaining what could be hundreds or even thousands of past client records and details, conversation logs, deal-specific information, current valuations, and loan balances to project equity levels, etc., would be difficult without such a system. Better yet, having one that keeps track of current market conditions and provides notifications to you of opportunities that exist for your clients (and you) can be like having a 24/7 marketing assistant that doesn’t miss a beat.
The Good News is That All This Exists, And Then Some
Marketing automation built into a mortgage CRM with advanced triggers and corresponding workflows can provide your clients with dynamic, animated, deal-specific videos to provide consistent touches at whatever pace you deem to be best suited to your clientele.
Successful loan officers know their time is valuable. A customer-focused mortgage marketing strategy coupled with a robust mortgage CRM minimizes the time you need to spend on marketing. The ease of doing business with past clients vs. the time spent winning over cold prospects is an oft quoted but important observation, nonetheless. Hands down, there’s just no comparison. Working smart and with warm leads is always the way to go.
Where to Find the Right System
Surefire℠ CRM and Mortgage Marketing Engine by Black Knight is about as robust and all-inclusive of a mortgage CRM that you can find. Packed with workflows providing your prospects with videos, landing pages, calculators, and other award-winning, self-servicing content, Surefire can prepare and motivate your clients to just click and apply. There’s little better as a loan officer than getting that notification that there’s a new application. With Surefire, it’s sure to happen. If you’d like to see it in action for yourself, just click the link to a Surefire demo.