As a mortgage loan officer, you’re well aware of the competition you face. 

Regardless of location, experience, or past success, you must have a marketing plan in place to help you reach or maintain your spot at the top of your market. 

There’s no right or wrong way to approach mortgage loan officer marketing, but there are techniques and strategies that work better than others. 

With the right approach and a little bit of help, you can implement a strategy that helps you connect with your audience, close more transactions, and boost your earnings. 

In this article, we provide you with a blueprint for creating a successful mortgage marketing plan. We provide you with everything you need to shore up your marketing pitch and better connect with your audience. 

Create a personal brand

A mortgage loan officer marketing plan isn’t something you “wing and hope for the best.” 

There are potential clients out there, but they’re not always going to find you. You need to find them. 

Forget about relying on your employer’s reputation. Sure, this can generate mortgage leads for you — and there’s nothing wrong with that — but it’s critical to create a personal brand.

Your personal brand follows you everywhere. If you leave your current company, you take it with you to your new employer. If you decide to branch out on your own, it’s there to help you get off the ground.

Below, we discuss some of the better ways to create a personal brand, including:

• Build a personal website
• Get involved with content marketing
• Get involved with social media marketing
• Define your audience
• Get recommendations and testimonials from past clients
• Create and share case studies online

Monitor and clean up your online reputation

As a service professional, there will be times when you get a bad review. There’s no way around it. The best thing you can do at that point is to address the review head-on and take steps to avoid the same in the future.

It’s important to closely monitor your online reputation. There are services that can do this for you. You can also do it yourself by:

• Monitoring review sites
• Monitoring social media
• Googling your name a minimum of once per month

If you find that your online reputation is clean, take steps to keep it that way. Should you run into an issue — such as a negative review or article about you — take steps to rectify the situation. 

Remember this — 85% of consumers trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations.

A poor online reputation can hinder your ability to grow your business. 

You can also ask your past clients that you know had a good experience to share their feedback online and generate some good reviews for you.

Create a personal website

This goes along with creating a personal brand. 

Even if you have your own page on your employer’s website, it’s not good enough. You need to create a personal lead generation website — a space of your own — that’s dedicated to you and you alone. 

Choose a niche to focus on

Neglecting to choose a niche is one of the biggest mistakes that a mortgage loan officer can make. 

If you try to be everything to everyone, it’ll eventually catch up with you. And that’s especially true when it comes to marketing your services.

For example, you could decide to focus on one part of the mortgage process, such as mortgage refinance. 

This doesn’t mean you can’t help home buyers secure a first mortgage. It simply means that your primary focus — especially when marketing yourself — is your specialty in the area of refinancing. 

Go heavy on content marketing

With 82% of marketers actively using content marketing, it’s easy to see that this is no passing fad. It’s an effective and efficient way to reach your audience — and that’s not going to change any time soon.

While content marketing is commonplace in many industries, that doesn’t necessarily hold true in the mortgage industry. Sure, there are mortgage lenders and loan officers taking advantage, but most are neglecting it. 

If you go heavy on content marketing, you have the opportunity to do something that the majority of your competitors are ignoring. 

Start a blog that offers free resources

A personal website is a step in the right direction, but combining it with a blog is the total package. This provides the opportunity to create unique and valuable content for your target audience. 

When you offer free resources — resources that are helpful to consumers shopping for a mortgage loan — you take a big step forward in building your personal brand. 

These resources could even double as downloadable for lead generation. Create helpful how to guides all about refinancing that visitors can download in exchange for their email. Their contact information then gets put on your email marketing list and you’re able to stay on their mind. 

Don’t let the thought of starting a blog scare you away. Once it’s set up, it’s time to create. 

Write about anything and everything related to mortgage loans and the niche you choose to focus on Answer your customer’s common questions. The more you publish, the more you’ll realize what resonates with your audience. 

Conduct a little keyword research to find out what exactly your audience is searching for online. They may be searching for “Refinancing an FHA loan.” 

That’s your cue to put together some blogs about that topic. You’ll start showing up in Google search engine result pages and you’ll become an authoritative voice to your audience. 

Use email marketing and build a quality database

How many email addresses do you have access to right now? How would you like to multiply that list? 

An email marketing list is something nobody can take from you. It follows you from company to company, allowing you to maintain contact with your list no matter who you’re working for.

At first, it’s not the fastest mortgage lead generation tool. But once you have a system for regularly adding new emails, it has the potential to become a top contributor to your bottom line. 

This is another way to get your content out there and in front of prospective borrowers.

There are several marketing automation tools available that allow you to customize and schedule your emails to your list. Email marketing doesn’t have to consume all of your time with websites like MailChimp.

Be active on different social media platforms

There’s a good chance that you already use social media channels for personal use. For example, Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. You can also use these — among others — for business purposes.

LinkedIn is the best social media website for reaching a business-oriented audience, but don’t let that stop you from experimenting with others. 

Facebook, for example, is a platform that allows you to cultivate relationships with people in your personal network. And as you know, some of them may be in the market for a new mortgage or refinance.

They also have an Ads Manager function where you can craft targeted ads and reel in potential clients.  

Invest in video marketing

Yes, it can be intimidating to put yourself in front of a camera. And yes, sharing videos of yourself online is never easy. However, the more you do this the more comfortable you’ll become. 

Comfort with this form of marketing is a good thing, as a growing number of consumers are interested in video content.

Ideas for video marketing include:

• Product videos
• Testimonial videos
• Educational videos

Video marketing allows you to make a personal connection with your audience, and that alone will help you generate interest and make more sales. 

Jumpstart your mortgage marketing strategy

So, there you have it. 

This is the playbook you need to create a high-performing mortgage loan officer marketing plan. Or at least the basics to get you started. 

As you develop your mortgage loan officer marketing plan, you may run into scenarios or have questions that you need help with. Contact Kaleidico. 

Kaleidico is an experienced mortgage marketing lead generation agency. We’ll answer your questions and show you how to refine that marketing plan.

Schedule a discovery session to learn how our proven process can generate a consistent flow of leads for your company. 

Photo by Christina Morillo from Pexels