Mortgage Broker Marketing
Most mortgage brokers don't market any different than a retail loan officer would. However,
there are distinct advantages to mortgage broker marketing that can be leveraged to give
yourself an edge in the marketplace.
SEO Benefits of the Word "Mortgage Broker"
Depending on what state you're in and how strict the regulators are about retail LOs and their job titles, this could be a HUGE advantage or just one worth exploring. In some states, LOs can only market themselves with the title that is reported in the NMLS. So if a Loan Officer has the title "Loan Officer" they wouldn't be able to use words like "Mortgage Broker" to describe themselves in their marketing. Why would this benefit a mortgage broker? Well because according to SEMRush, a tool for SEO research, "Mortgage Broker" has a little over twice the search volume that "mortgage lender" does on Google. And "mortgage lender" has over twice the search volume that "mortgage loan officer" has. Hopefully, if you're a mortgage broker, you have some control over your own marketing. You should have a website, a Facebook page, and a Google My Business listing at a minimum. Use the fact that you're a true "mortgage broker" to your advantage, and use the term whenever appropriate in your marketing.
Leveraging Your Mortgage Broker Role in Your Marketing
Regardless on your opinions on mortgage brokers vs mortgage retail shops, the fact remains that for most consumers, especially more sophisticated ones, having even the illusion of more options is valuable. So use this in your marketing. Educate your audience on the difference between a broker and a retail shop. Explain how frustrating it can be to have to be told no by multiple lenders without knowing whether or not their loan is approvable. Explain how retail lenders make business decisions to increase interest rates for certain products, but you can give them options so they're not subject to one lender's business decisions. Explain differences you don't even think that they care about! Inundate your audience with reasons why mortgage brokers are better than retail lenders because it gives you something that sets you apart and gives you something unique to present in your marketing.
United Wholesale Mortgage Has Great Tools for Mortgage
Broker Marketing
United Wholesale Mortgage is a great partner to mortgage brokers across the country. One of the things they do to support the broker community is offer a suite of mortgage broker marketing tools that you can use to promote your business, for free. Brand 360 is an online hub where you can create branded promotional materials like flyers, emails, mailers, etc. with beautiful templates already in place for you. Client Connect is a monitoring tool that keeps an eye on your clients rate, home listing status, credit score, and mortgage inquiry status in order to ensure you can connect with your borrowers when it matters most. Marketing Calendar allows you to schedule posts on social media for up to 30 days in advance. For our local brokerage, Idaho Mortgage Source, we don't leverage most of these tools as they are great for free options but advanced users may need other functionality not offered through these. But if you're not currently doing any mortgage broker marketing, this is a great way for you to get started.
Rate Table Advertisements Can
Be Used By Mortgage Brokers to Generate Refinance Leads
We almost exclusively focus on purchase mortgage lead generation, although we do have a couple of markets where we're able to offer a refinance option to our existing clients. Why though? Why are refinance leads so difficult to generate with Google Ads? Well for 2 reasons. Google Ads is a marketplace essentially dictated by supply and demand. Search volume for refinance compared to purchase business is relatively low. In addition to that, those that are searching for refinance information are typically interested in one of two things. Rate and/or equity. More often than not, they're rate shopping.
Even if they're not rate shopping, when the first 3 advertisers on Google are showing 5 different below market rate options on the screen, it makes advertising any other way damn near impossible. After all, if your competitive ads on Google are showing 5 different rate options, what are they going to give you their information for? They already got what they went online to get... This is where being a mortgage broker benefits you in your marketing. As a mortgage broker, you can set up your own rate table plugins on your website that are fed information from the lenders that send you daily rate sheets. This isn't an easy task and is definitely something that you wouldn't want to do if you weren't very tech savvy, but it's a very powerful option for mortgage broker marketing, specifically refinance lead generation.
Why Mortgage Broker Marketing Doesn't Change When Trying to Generate Mortgage Leads
Alright, so we've just spent a lot of time explaining why mortgage brokers should differentiate themselves and use the fact that they're a mortgage broker in their marketing. However, when it comes to filling your purchase pipeline with mortgage leads (mortgage lead generation vs. branding/ advertising), your role as a mortgage broker won't do you much good. This is because at the point that most borrowers become mortgage leads, they don't think they've gotten to the point in the process of talking to a mortgage broker or a mortgage lender yet, so they don't care whether or not the person providing the information they're looking for is a broker or a lender. Remember, people don't go online to talk to a salesperson. The people that become mortgage leads more often than not are ready to talk to a mortgage broker but don't know it yet.
They're going online to get their questions answered. The more you can avoid industry jargon and specifics about product/ program offerings in mortgage lead generation efforts the better. You want to capture as many people who have questions like "How much can I qualify for to buy a home" as possible. The more you make it look like they're at the point in the process where they need to decide product/program/lender/etc., the more likely they are to jump off your page and on to someone else's whose landing page seems like it requires less commitment.
Our Mortgage Broker Clients Get
a Better ROI On Our System Than
Retail Clients
Mortgage brokers make great candidates for our mortgage lead generation system. Why? Well, for a couple of reasons. The first one is the most obvious. Mortgage brokers typically have more product offerings and therefore can capture a greater percentage of the leads they receive, regardless of the source. Another bvious reason that mortgage brokers may have more to gain with a mortgage broker marketing system like ours? Brokers typically make more per loan than a retail LO does. The way we generate leads for mortgage brokers doesn't typically result in a lot of rate shoppers. So our mortgage broker clients find that they can hold more margin with purchase leads generated online which makes it an even more profitable marketing campaign for them.
The last reason brokers typically do well with our marketing is a lack of distraction. We pride ourselves in offering a true plug and play service meaning there is no required level of marketing support to be successful with our service. In fact, most of the time our retail clients are distracted by the number of ervices/systems that are offered by their company as the next greatest way to increase their mortgage production. Oftentimes company provided CRMs are clunky and are for the benefit of the lender, not the loan officer. With a mortgage broker, we're typically working with a blank canvas and they're able to plug into our system without excessive distractions and be successful just by following our process.
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