The Top Mortgage Marketing Trends

Mortgage companies are facing challenging times. The rise of the internet has brought about changes that are difficult to adjust to. These days, simple in-person networking and being friends with realtors isn’t enough for most loan officers. There are whole swathes of the population who are mortgage-ready, but who either aren’t on the radar of mortgage companies, or aren’t reachable with the traditional mortgage marketing tactics. The trends we’ve broken down below are an actionable response to those mortgage marketing challenges.

Mortgage Marketing to Millennials

Be Helpful To Millennials

Right now, 30% of millennials plan to purchase a home within the next 5 years. That means a lot of millennials are looking for information about the house-purchasing process in general and the mortgage process specifically. But this doesn’t mean that millennials will fall head over heels in love with the first company to tell them how to get a mortgage.

Millennials don’t like to be told what to do, but taking a consultation role and allowing them to communicate with you in their preferred channel can set your company up as a useful, reliable, and convenient source of information.

Millennials grew up in the age of the internet, and so they both respect high-quality information sources, and know where to find them. If your company isn’t the ones providing them with the information they want and need, they will find someone else.

Trust, Transparency, Honesty and Altruism

Millennials are idealistic and ethical, and they’re very savvy when it comes to who to do business with. They’re the most educated generation and came of age amidst internet scams, Ponzi schemes, the bursting housing bubble, and the brutal recession that decimated the economy. They’re also struggling through the issues of student loans. All this history has developed a determination not to fall prey to some of the mistakes and misfortunes they saw their parents experience, particularly when it comes to housing, and mortgages. Trust, transparency, and honesty are enormously important to this generation, and a mortgage company that does not conduct itself with those traits – or doesn’t appear to do so – isn’t going to attract millennial clients. It goes beyond just being guileless as well. 75% of millennials think it is important that the companies they give their business to to give back – not necessarily to them, but to society as a whole instead of just making a profit.. This isn’t just a wish, it actually drives their purchasing decisions. More than nine-in-10 Millennials would switch brands to one associated with a cause. To bring in millennial clients, it would behoove a mortgage company to get involved with the community – whether by sponsoring local events, running fundraisers, or starting its own program to give back to the community. Promoting these actions on social media will ensure that millennials see and remember it.

Social Media

– Market on Social Media

Social media advertising is expected to generate as much as $11 billion in revenue by 2017, and while some might not think that mortgage marketing is particularly suited to social media, they’d be wrong. Or rather, misled. Many people seem to think that social media marketing is only for fun, exciting products with high shareability. The reality of social media is that it is, indeed, social. People post about, discuss, relay, and otherwise share an enormous amount of their lives on social media. Vacations, new jobs, relationships, bad days, good days, Halloween costumes, and things like decisions to relocate, buying a house for the first time, or buying a vacation home – behaviors that are incredibly useful for those in mortgage marketing to know about. On Facebook alone, you can advertise the to an audience you want in a specific area, filtering based on behaviors like “likely to move.” If you write helpful posts like “10 Ways To Save Money When You Buy A New Home,” you can promote them directly to this audience of likely to move folks, some of who will appreciate the useful information, and some of whom will also be in the market for a mortgage. You can also leverage Instagram to engage with your shoppers. Post useful mortgage stats, your happy customers, pictures of your community outreach programs in action, and remember to use hashtags like #mortgage, #househunting, #realestate to get your posts a wider audience. Remember millennials being a major trend in mortgage marketing? Well, social media applies to them too. 62% of millennials say that if a brand engages with them on social networks, they are more likely to become a loyal customer. It is 2017, it’s time mortgage marketing got social.

Networking

Another aspect of the social media trend in mortgage marketing is one that may be more familiar and comfortable for most in the mortgage industry – networking. As social media becomes more professional, mortgage companies have the opportunity to reach out to strategic business partners like real estate agents and builders and develop relationships that can turn into actionable leads. Think about social media like LinkedIn – if you see that a realtor in your area has just started their career with a company you are already familiar with or associated with, you can reach out to congratulate them and offer yourself and your company as a resource for them. The same goes for someone who has just celebrated an anniversary at a company – set up a coffee date to congratulate them and develop your relationship more. These are just a couple examples, but the overall trend is that mortgage marketing networking is moving online, and that’s a good thing – more contacts, less time.

Online Marketing

There’s no reason for mortgage marketing professionals to shirk PPC. 93% of all online experiences start with a search engine like Google. People use search engines when they are hunting for information they don’t immediately know where to find. PPC ads allow your company to be at the top of the list for results – the first sources of that desired information available to the user. There’s a lot of hesitation when it comes to mortgage marketing and PPC, and it’s partly due to the fact that many people think that people don’t click on PPC ads, they skim right by them and click on the organic search results. Those people would do well to remember that 41% of clicks go to the top 3 paid ads on the search results page. People want information, and in the age of convenience, they want it as fast as possible, and they’ll click on the top 3 paid ads if they seem relevant. A mortgage is a big decision, a huge moment in our lives, something we will carry for literal decades, so shoppers are likely to spend a while shopping around, but PPC can help you capture your audience when they are readying to take the plunge. When consumers are ready to purchase, 65% of them will click on a paid ad.

Content Marketing

Content marketing is a wonderful thing. It allows you to market to your audience while still actually helping them – like we’re doing right now. We would love to provide you with our exceptional advertising services, but we’ll also settle for just helping people do their business more efficiently and profitably by offering valuable industry insights. You have an absolute wealth of information about mortgages: the secrets, the problems, the tricks and the mistakes. With content marketing, you can use this knowledge to create content – blog posts, ebooks, whitepapers, brochures, podcasts, videos, and much more, that has real, helpful information for people looking to get a mortgage. Good content positions you as a helpful and useful resource in the marketplace, and careful SEO work and other tactics can also ensure that you get interested eyes on your content. Content marketing ties into nearly all of what we’ve already discussed in this blog post. Well-written and useful content can help win over millennials, internet information hunters who trust and respect good sources. Your content can also be disseminated via social media, and can be promoted directly to your targeted audience.

Mortgage marketing is not easy. A viral video or a cute tagline isn’t going to do the trick. Mortgages are a serious business more most people, and the process of getting one isn’t a frivolous or spontaneous purchase, which makes marketing in the age of the internet less than simple. The trends we’ve laid out above are how mortgage marketers can meet that challenge.