The overwhelming majority of mortgage companies work on the corporate website directory model for their loan officers. This process usually includes navigating to the corporate website, selecting the “Find a Loan Officer” button and then being directed to a map with locations in or around your area. You then choose a location, search through the loan officers in the branch or select a loan officer by name. Upon clicking the LO’s name you’re then viewing their individual page which typically includes a paragraph about them, apply, phone and email links along with some other verbiage about the company.
This model will at the very least, drive loan officers who are serious about marketing to fend for themselves with a 3rd party solution to provide very basic things like a personally branded website, landing pages, custom integrations & content which they will need to generate new business and at the worst(for the company anyways) let the loan officer know how little support they’re provided and start exploring the independent broker route which is gaining real momentum and for good reason.
CRMs are for Nurturing Leads, Not Creating New Ones
That process starts with your website. Whether you’re advertising on Google, Facebook or even doing direct mail, consumers need somewhere to go and enter information inquiring about your services. Making sure these destinations are professionally designed/branded, routing leads to their appropriate campaign and being tracked from an analytics and conversion standpoint is critical. This data will allow you to fine-tune your existing campaign(s) as well as inform decisions for future marketing campaigns.
That is the secret sauce to scaling a business in the mortgage industry in 2019 and beyond for those loan officers that want to grow much quicker than possible organically.
As the technology advances and becomes more widely available in the mortgage industry, the retail lenders who don’t invest in ways not only for their loan officers to grow their business but actually do a lot of the heavy lifting for them, will be left behind because there will be virtually no other major reason for the loan officers to stick around.
A company that we’ve observed currently an aspect of this is loanDepot. While they aren’t heavy on the LO branding, what they are doing is investing in ways to drive customers to their sites and then going the much cheaper advertising route with retargeting to personalize or stalk as some call it, users that have visited their sites and loan officer’s pages in particular with personalized ads.
We are in no way affiliated with nor do we currently work with the company referenced above, simply stating what we’ve seen in researching the space. Implementing campaigns like these and others at scale isn’t difficult with our enterprise platform and should be something every retail lender should be consider with the remarketing as a very basic first step.
As always, if you have questions about marketing your mortgage company, don’t hesitate to reach out, we’re here to help any way we can.
