You’re reading this because you want or need more leads to fuel your business, and somebody once told you —“You need to look into SEO.” 

Am I right? 

With enough knowledge and time, I believe anyone could master digital marketing to achieve whatever their goals are — whether it’s bringing more customers to your mortgage website, or finding more home buyers that need a hom. 

To get started, you’ll need to know the building blocks of mortgage content marketing. 

I’ve created this article to be a higher-level guide. I’m only going to brush up on each topic, since each topic is a whole world in itself. 

However, I will leave links to Kaleidico’s more in-depth blogs throughout this article for additional reading and research.

I will try to provide simple, concrete steps of mortgage broker strategies you can take today to improve your online presence and generate more leads.

Why Mortgage Websites are So Important

Your mortgage website should be your primary lead generator — the central hub where your online audience funnels into and fills out a contact form.

When users Google for mortgage brokers or mortgage advice, ideally, they’ll land on your website. Because you’ll be regularly blogging on mortgage advice and mortgage scenarios, for example “How Do I Get an FHA Home Loan?” or “How to Get My First Mortgage.” The idea is to use keywords of products you’re selling in the headlines of your articles, and throughout the copy of your blog post.

In addition to blogging (a form of content marketing), you’ll also need to focus on SEO — adding searchable keywords throughout your website’s landing pages that makes it easy to find in a Google search. 

So, a no-brainer would be to add a bio page for yourself so when people Google you, they’ll go straight to your company’s website where they can reach out to you directly.

Be sure to include separate landing pages for each of your loan products to further increase your SEO —a page for FHA loans, Fixed-Rate, VA Loans, etc.

The more keywords your website has, the easier it is for Google to find it. 

But you must be careful not to do spammy approaches, like typing in the same keywords multiple times on each page. That’s why blogging is so special, it gives you more opportunities to sprinkle these attractive keywords into your site legitimately.

Get Found Online, Grow Your Social Network

Facebook pages are a free way to market your mortgage business and increase your social media presence among potential clients. Over 221 million Americans use Facebook, so you’d be hurting yourself by not forming a page. Why not create one?

If you’ve begun blogging about mortgages (which you really should be doing) then you can post these blogs as engaging content on your business page. 

Or you can share your opinions on the latest mortgage news to become an influencer or thought leader. These kinds of posts can really spread your reach, particularly if they’re shared by numerous people.

Over time, your followers will begin recommending you to their friends and family, further boosting your page likes and your post’s impressions to meet a larger audience.

Once you’re ready for paid advertisements, Facebook Ads manager makes it pretty simple to set up advertising campaigns. You can target people specifically by geographical location, their interests, demographics and income information, and basically any other demographic you want to narrow down. 

Learn Copywriting

Copywriting isn’t that hard, but it ain’t that easy either.

Being a good copywriter requires you to be thoughtful and to always think of your audience. After all, you’re writing for your audience, which means you need to figure out the right tone that will resonate with them.

Learn to speak your audience’s language, and maybe brush up on your grammar skills too.

There are tons of helpful copywriting tools out there, like Grammarly, and other online writing assistant apps that can proofread your content to make sure there are no embarrassing grammar mistakes.

Good copywriting is just sales in writing. If you improve your writing skills, you’ll attract more people through engaging content and can improve your profitability.

I can’t stress how much loan officers know about mortgages and how little the average person knows about mortgages — so keep your content relatively simple and explanatory.

Personally, I respond better to conversational articles that simplify the confusing jargon surrounding mortgages. Don’t feel like your writing needs to be academic or overly impressive — you’ll just confuse your readers. And be sure to use lots of examples and story problems to illustrate your points. 

If you’re not sure where to start, look at your competitors’ websites and look for well-written articles, and try to emulate and copy them in your own style. 

Create SEO Content

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the biggest buzzword you’ll read in online marketing — it means adding keywords to your website so you’ll appear in more Google searches.

Google primarily finds answers to search queries by matching keywords on your website with keywords in the user’s search. The idea is to have lots of these keywords on your site so Google says, “This must be the right place for answers. I’ll show this in the search results.”

Content then would comprise of all the written words, videos, and images on your website. Don’t forget about naming your uploaded photos using important keywords. This is how pictures appear in Google image searches.

As I mentioned before, the true trick to adding more SEO content to your website is through blogging or creating other forms of content that inhabit your website, such as:

• Lead magnets, usually free eBooks or downloadable PDFs, “Ultimate Guide to Understanding Mortgage Types”
• Embedded videos that use important keywords in their video titles, “How to Get Your First Mortgage”
• Images that have been renamed with important keywords (mortgages-first-time.jpg)
• Add separate web pages for each of your loan products, Conventional Purchase page, Conventional Refinance page, Mortgage Rates page, etc.
• Writing a bio page that has your name, qualifications, and company name
• Having a home page with a detailed description of your company, your products, and your industry

Use Email Marketing to Impact and Grow Your Audience

Past mortgage broker strategies included sending out bulk direct mailers and sitting back and waiting for a week or two until the leads came in. 

These days, email marketing is the better route, and I’ll tell you why: It’s so much cheaper, quicker, and gives you way more information about who’s opening them!

You’ll need to invest in an email marketing platform such as MailChimp, Constant Contact, or Drip. By the way, these platforms can also send out automated text messages!

When you send out mass emails using these platforms, they’ll tell you when somebody opens up an email. If you send an email and notice several people have opened it, you can call those leads right away because you’ve already warmed them up.

This open rate information is also pretty useful because it can let you know which emails are more popular, and unpopular, so you can refine your approach. 

If you notice you’re getting traction with certain email headlines or titles, double down on producing more emails like that to ensure more people will open them.

Another bonus of email marketing platforms is they allow you to send multiple emails without getting your work email address marked as spam — you don’t want that.

Inside your emails, you can embed video links, send out PDFs, or add links to your website’s new blog posts. Each of these actions is trackable to inform you of your email’s success rate.

Closing a mortgage takes many points of contact between the broker and borrower, and with every email you send, you’re creating more touchpoints. 

Maybe your lead filled out a form on your website two months ago and has been getting emails occasionally from you. Several months down the line when they’re finally ready to buy, they’ll remember you and contact you via your emails. That’s the goal, anyway. 

Produce Videos

You know who I want to do business with? 

Somebody who shows their face and voice and has some personality. Somebody who proves they’re a real human being and not a bot posting information about mortgages.

The quickest way to do this is to post a video of yourself! 

Record a short clip introducing yourself and put this on your website, YouTube channel, and other social media pages. You can embed it into your automatic welcome emails once people fill out a form on your website.

Your production value doesn’t have to be spectacular, but it should be adequately decent. Make sure your camera isn’t smudgy, shaky, or crooked and you’ll be fine.

Mortgage sales, and all sales, are a people-to-people business. If you can show your face and voice to your audience, they’ll feel more comfortable reaching out or talking with you for the first time. 

Sometimes posting a quick video on social media is all it takes — a 30-second clip of you explaining something about the mortgage process.

If you really want to fuel your video marketing efforts, try hosting free webinars and see what kinds of leads you attract. Or start creating mortgage how-to videos and posting to YouTube. 

Videos posted to YouTube stay there indefinitely, and if your video is particularly good, it can attract thousands of views. Just make sure to put a good description below your title (using good keywords) and put your contact info so it’s easy for people to reach out after watching your video.

Share Your Expertise and Be the Trusted Advisor

Maintaining a blog and social media are the obvious choices for sharing your expertise and getting attention online. But have you considered guest blogging on another popular website?

Guest blogging is a form of cross-promotion — you get something out of it, and the guest blog gets something out of it. It’s a win-win. But it doesn’t have to be blogging either. 

Partner up with a local real estate agent on social media and run cross-promotional content, sharing their content and having them share your content. 

You can also begin answering questions on Q&A sites like Reddit, Quora, and popular websites in their mortgages forums. A well-written answer might take 20 minutes to write, but it can get thousands of views over the years (again, just make sure to link it back to your website). 

If you’re so inclined, you can even create a podcast on mortgages and bring in influencers with their own large followings to improve your reach.

Showcase Your Reviews and Build Trust

Instead of having people go to Yelp or other review sites to get more information about you, post your reviews on your own website. There are a couple of good reasons why you’d want to do this:

• It keeps users on your website longer
• It provides “social proof” that you’ve helped real people and that you can help your prospective borrower too
• When people Google reviews of you, your website will appear in the search results and they’ll end up clicking on your website anyway
• You have more control over the reviews you show

Once people have gotten to your website, you need to keep them there before they bounce off. Bouncing off just means you land on a website and immediately leave it (usually within a second or two).

Everybody needs social proof or else they’ll be scared off before they submit their contact info. 

Would you want to submit your contact information to a nameless, faceless website with no proof that it’s a real company? Neither will your web visitors unless you can establish some trust and reliability!

Kaleidico — A Reliable Lead Generation Agency Helping Loan Officers Get More Leads

Kaleidico is a lead generation agency for mortgage lenders, law firms, and fintech.

Our founder, Bill Rice, has over 15 years of mortgage marketing experience, being a former mortgage broker himself. He combines his experience in the mortgage industry and as a digital marketer to help more loan officers generate leads online.

Our company is also a full-service marketing agency that specializes in web design, web development, branding, graphic design, SEO, PPC, and content marketing.

Read a case study of how we helped out clients at River City Mortgage grow its mortgage broker strategies and create more consumer-direct mortgage lead generation.

Are you a loan officer needing help with your online presence? Book a discovery session call with us and download our free 90-Day Mortgage Marketing Plan.

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