The most common form of lead generation in the mortgage industry is building relationships with real estate agents, businesses, and past clients to keep a steady stream of mortgage prospects coming your way. But that’s not as consistent as you’d like it to be. In reality, it takes time to build such relationships. And oftentimes, potential clients will fill out your forms and call you, only for you to find out that they aren’t qualified and there’s no point in working with them.
Luckily, this can be avoided and you can make it so that you ONLY work with qualified and relevant leads. Best of all, they can qualify without you having to call them
If you’re ready to generate more qualified leads and close more sales, you’ve come to the right place.
Top 5 lead generation tactics for mortgage brokers
what exactly are mortgage leads?
A mortgage lead, by definition, is a term that refers to a person interested in a mortgage loan or a potential mortgage customer for a mortgage lender or broker. In other words, mortgage leads are people who are interested in taking out a mortgage and doing business with you. Below we’ll explore a number of ways you can start generating relevant and qualified mortgage leads for your business.
1. Educational potential leads
By offering authoritative and educational content, you’re positioning yourself as an expert in your field who knows what they’re talking about. Leveraging practical and relevant content has many advantages for generating leads. Here are a few ways you can pull this off:
Creating different kinds of educational content – video, images, articles, infographics, presentation slides and more.
- Get social – publish short videos on YouTube, offer advice via Facebook groups, promote your content on Twitter, create relationships on LinkedIn, and more.
- Niche down – if you have expertise in a specific loan program, make sure you’re promoting that and how you stand out from your competitors. The market is crowded of mortgage brokers, so if you have a special type of solution that you can present with valuable content, you’ll have a great chance of attracting attention which can convert into leads.
To generate qualified mortgage leads, your visitors should recognize that you’re an expert when reading your content. From there on, while they might not buy immediately, they can subscribe to your newsletter and when the time is right, buy later.
Lead generation magnets are resources offered free or in return for personal information like an email address and/or phone number. Offering lead magnets can be particularly useful for mortgage brokers as buyers tend to study a lot of content/ offers anyway before making a decision to take on a mortgage loan. Also, most people aren’t going to say ‘No’ to a free e-book that helps first-time homebuyers avoid potential mistakes.
2. Categorize leads
As more and more mortgage leads come in through various acquisition channels, you’ll find that not all of them will be relevant.
That’s okay. However, if you want to keep your sanity, you should qualify it so you don’t waste time and money.
Consider categorizing your mortgage leads into:
- MMS – Marketing Qualified Leads. These are leads that signed up through your website (e.g. your downloaded lead magnet). These are people willing to get more information from you (see Tactic #1). However, you may not be ready to buy just yet. So make sure you provide them with information that will help them identify and solve their problem. Present this information in a way that they see is a potential problem that they CAN solve. OR you can help them solve it personally.
- SQLs – Sales Qualified Leads. These are leads who have already completed the research phase, have been in contact with your sales team and are ready to explore their buying options. These leads are almost ready to close. You must follow them continuously and pay close attention.
Realistically, leads fall into categories beyond the two options above. So consider moving into a CRM tool like Pipedrive. Once you have your leads in a neat and organized CRM, you can integrate it with your other marketing tools and shorten your sales cycle via powerful marketing automation.
For example, if you move a lead from one CRM stage to another, they will receive an automated email with a calendar schedule and can schedule a free consultation with you.
3.Local Listings
This is the easiest tactic to implement if you haven’t done so already.
When homebuyers are looking to buy a home or apply for a loan, what’s the first place they look?
That’s right – search engines and local listings. If you’re not doing SEO lead generation , you can start here. If you’re a local business, it’s much easier to start building relationships based on the fact that you’re also local and people might be more open to working together.
4. Personalized Landing Pages
One of the best ways to generate mortgage leads is through personalized landing pages, which are 1-page websites that are fully optimized for your service offering.
The purpose of a landing page is to encourage visitors to take specific actions, usually related to your lead generation or sale. It’s the next step in becoming a customer.
While landing pages are nothing new, they are a cornerstone in lead generation and will be effective as long as you present your information properly.
The easiest way to generate leads for mortgage brokers is to convince someone that you fulfill what they are looking for and it’s well worth having a 5 minute conversation with you.
Landing pages are characterized by the fact that you can present your information and your offer in a variety of ways. This is just an example of a mortgage compensation landing page. But already on the first page it does a lot right:
- Non-binding, free damage assessment.
- It’s hard to say no to a 60-second complaint review.
- Social proof that other people also trust the brand.
5. Online Web Forms
Online forms are ideal for opening up new business potential.
You can use them in conjunction with your landing page (see above) or even use lead generation forms without having a website. Landing pages are designed to get traffic from one or more sources, and they have one clear goal – conversions. And to increase that conversion rate, you can use web forms to drive engagement and get visitors to convert.
For example, for a mortgage deal landing page, you can create a mortgage affordability calculator, loan approval survey tool, and more.