As a mortgage broker, you’ve probably realised by now that finding the right mortgage for your clients and getting their loans approved is only half the battle.
That’s because, before you can do that part of your job, you’ve got to actually find some clients. And the one thing no-one seems to teach you at mortgage broker school is how to do effective marketing that’s going to get you a regular flow of mortgage leads and new clients.
As a result, I find that a lot of the mortgage brokers I speak to, either on the phone or in my private Facebook group, are all making the same mistakes in terms of their marketing strategy. In this article, I’m going to highlight the three biggest marketing mistakes I regularly see mortgage brokers making, so as you can avoid falling into the same traps as everyone else.
1. Relying on Referrals
The majority of mortgage brokers rely heavily on referrals from existing clients and other professionals such as estate agents as a prime source of new business. While referrals are a good source of leads, they’re certainly not enough to sustain and grow a business on their own.
Relying solely on referrals for mortgage broker marketing can create a feast and famine cycle. Since referrals aren’t predictable, you can easily end up with lots of new enquiries one week and none the next. This makes it hard to plan things in your business because you don’t know what your income and your cashflow will look like from one month to the next. And that can be pretty stressful.
Another problem is that many mortgage brokers are finding they get fewer referrals now than they used to. That’s because, thanks to Covid, word-of-mouth marketing is not as effective as it was a couple of years ago, due to the cancellation of face-to-face networking events during the pandemic and a reduction in the amount of socialising people have been doing.
Looking to the future, relying on referrals alone to market your mortgage brokerage will not be good when you want to start expanding the business and hiring new advisers for the team. Most prospects who come to you as referrals will only want to deal with you, the specific person they were referred to. If you want your prospects to be happy dealing with other members of your team, you’ll need to find other sources of leads..
2. Focusing on Facebook Ads
A lot of mortgage brokers think that Facebook Ads are the best way to market themselves and their businesses online. Whilst it’s true that Facebook Ads can be useful as one of the tools in your marketing mix, focusing purely on Facebook Ads for mortgage broker marketing is a huge mistake, especially if you’re looking for fast results.
The big problem with Facebook Ads is that they are a form of what’s known as interruption marketing. No-one ever goes on Facebook to look for a mortgage. They go there to see what their friends are doing, or to catch up with the local news, or look at pictures of cats. And so then, when your ad appears on their newsfeed, it’s an interruption to what they actually wanted to see. Sure, a Facebook user might click on your ad, but you will likely get a lower response and conversion rate from that than you would from other forms of marketing, because they were not actively looking for your service at that moment.
3. Not using Google Ads
There are a number of reasons why mortgage brokers don’t use Google Ads, but the three most common ones are as follows.
A big thing that stops mortgage brokers from using Google Ads is the presumption that no one ever clicks on the ads. Often mortgage brokers and other business owners have this view simply because they themselves don’t tend to click on ads. But it’s always dangerous to assume everyone else behaves the same way you do.
In reality, according to a survey done by Wordstream, 64.6% of people click on an ad for keywords that have a high commercial intent. People clicking on ads is also the main thing that Google makes money from, with their recent income from Google Ads amounting to $134.81 billion. And they wouldn’t be making that money if no-one clicked the ads.
Many people also believe that using Google Ads as a mortgage broker marketing technique is expensive. It’s true that the cost per click (CPC) can seem high, but to look purely on CPC is a bit shortsighted. What you should look at instead is the cost per lead. So if it costs, for example, £4 per click but you know that for every 10 clicks you will get one lead, and for every five leads you’ll get one new client, then that’s not actually expensive at all.
Finally, mortgage brokers think that Google Ads is complicated. The truth is that it is fairly straightforward - if you know what you’re doing and if you don’t fall into the trap of accepting all Google’s default settings. You just need to make sure that you get some free training from a Google Ads expert beforehand so you know how to set your Google Ads up the right way.
Are you making any of these marketing mistakes at the moment in your mortgage business? Would you like some free advice on how to overcome them? If so, book a marketing strategy call with me. It’s free of charge, there’s no sales pitch, and you’ll come away with some great tips on how to get more mortgage leads and grow your business.
