7 step mortgage broker marketing plan

The 7 Step Mortgage Broker Marketing Plan: A mortgage broker marketing plan is a marketing and sales system that is tailored to the unique goals of brokers. From strategy to implementation, this marketing plan will act as a guide for brand development, competitive analysis, and marketing campaigns. Too many mortgage brokers are using outdated tactics that do not align with customer expectations. Thankfully, we put together a marketing plan that is effective in today’s tech-driven world. 

1. SWOT Analysis For Mortgage Brokers

Our mortgage broker marketing plan starts with a simple SWOT analysis. A SWOT helps emerging companies assess their strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. The reason why a SWOT is step one of this plan is because of the unique nature of mortgage brokers. Brokers are not loan officers, therefore, they do not work for a company. Instead, mortgage brokers are entrepreneurs. Therefore, brokers are creating their own brand, sales infrastructure, and marketing plan. Furthermore, emerging companies use SWOT analysis to create a roadmap for future success – mortgage brokers are no different. 

The first step in this process is writing your company’s strengths. This section of a SWOT is used to outline your competitive advantages as a mortgage broker. Specifically, this can be a strong realtor relationship, an extensive database, or digital assets like a website or popular Facebook page. This section will act as a guide to reference when developing the strategy behind your mortgage broker marketing plan. You will want to lean into your competitive strength to gain an edge in the market. 

The weakness section is just as important as the strength section. Understanding where you will suffer business losses is vital to long-term success. Ideally, you should spend the most time writing a list of areas needed for improvement. This can be a lack of budget, no digital marketing skills, and the list goes on. This will be used to strengthen areas in your business that are suffering. Ultimately, the goal here is to turn weaknesses into strengths over time. However, many mortgage brokers do not take the time to understand areas that need work in their business model. 

The opportunity section is not to be confused with strengths. The strength section is an internal look at business practices, resources, and infrastructure. However, the opportunity section is more of an outward look at the market. A great example of opportunities for mortgage brokers is underserved markets and lack of competition. Ultimately, take time to look at the external factors that impact your business. 

The threat section exists for mortgage brokers to understand what factors could pose harm to their business. This will act as a road map to avoid things that you cannot control but navigate around. A great example of threats is increased regulations, hyper-competitive markets, and negative PR. Take time to outline what things could threaten your business both long term and short term. 

2. Target Audience For Mortgage Brokers

A functioning SWOT analysis will give your brokerage a compass to navigate the market. Additionally, a good SWOT can outline a target audience that fits your business model. A target audience is a group of potential customers that have similar demographics, location, socio-economic status, or even behaviors. 

By honing in on your target audience, you can cater marketing efforts towards like-minded individuals. A great example of a brand with a focused target audience is Veterans United. This mortgage giant has focused all its marketing efforts on homebuyers with a military affiliation. This one target audience can be dialed into several niche audiences like active duty, veterans, and military spouses. 

All in all, using a target audience is a great way to focus your marketing strategy and explode your referral business. Specifically, people with similar buying patterns, socioeconomic status, and location tend to form communities. People within these sub-communities commonly refer businesses they trust to each other. By dialing in on a target audience, you have the chance to spread like wildfire among close-knit communities. 

A few common target audiences besides the military are first-time home buyers, investors, millennials, growing families, and more. Each group of people has different motivations that bring them to homeownership. Focus on why your target audience is looking for a home. From there, research where your audience is located and market heavily in these areas.

3. Create Value Proposition 

When building your mortgage broker marketing plan, understanding the unique value proposition is vital to winning business. A value prop is a unique offer that only your company can offer. This can be top-of-line service, reduced closing costs, partnership with top agents, and the list goes on. Another common way to look at your mortgage brokerage’s value proposition is thinking about what industry problem you are solving.

 A common problem within the mortgage world is a slow and arduous closing process. Because of that, many brokers work on expediting the process. If you fall in this category, quick closing for homebuyers is a major benefit. Therefore, make this a headline on your marketing message.

Building credibility and dialing in on your target audience brings people into your funnel; while a value proposition is what pushes people to do business with you. 

Without a value proposition that stands out, your mortgage broker marketing plan will land flat. You may have a lot of people in your sales funnel, but your conversion rate will suffer long term. Specifically, a value proposition is like an enhanced call to action. Instead of just asking someone to fill out a form, a value prop gives people something in return. The following call to action, ‘talk to a loan officer about a 10-day closing,’ performs much better than simply asking someone to fill out a form. This example shows how to incorporate a unique value into your marketing efforts. Once you have built out your SWOT, defined the target audience, and created a value proposition, it is imperative that you define your long-term business goals. 

4. Long Term Mortgage Broker Marketing Goals

Defining your business goals as a mortgage broker is vital to long-term success. Anyone can create a strategic plan, audience, and customer value. However, if there are no legitimate goals, it is impossible to grow a business. Creating a mortgage broker marketing plan without trackable performance metrics is shooting in the dark. However, what separates great mortgage brokers from average mortgage brokers is simple: successful brokers track long-term goals while average brokers track short-term goals. 

Specifically, everyone is going to track their sales data. But not every mortgage broker is going to track blog posts, organic traffic, or social media posts. The long-term goal is to build a brand that generates exclusive traffic. However, this is not an overnight ordeal. It may take years to build a successful brand. Because of this, you need monthly goals that support the long-term vision of your company.

For example, if you want to build a proprietary CRM for your sales team, create monthly goals that get you to the finish line. At the end of the day, you cannot build a successful company overnight. You need strategic goals that work towards brand development and scalability.

5. Brand Identity In Your Mortgage Broker Marketing Plan

At this point, you have SWOT, target audience, value prop, and understand your goals. However, have you thought about what your mortgage broker brand identity is? Whether you know it or not, you already have a brand. However, it is time to take control of your company identity by clearly defining what you’re about and controlling the narrative thereafter. If you do not take the time to define your brand, consumers will do it for you. 

When defining your brand, answer the following questions: 

• How do I help my customer?
• What is special about my process?
• What value do I add to the community?
• What are my organization’s core values? 

These four questions will give your company a mission, vision, and brand to lean on in every avenue. Understanding how your help customers will exude in your marketing and sales channel. Finding out what is special about the process will guide your operation staff. The value you bring to the community will enliven leadership to continue to grow. The core values will amplify company culture and improve recruiting.

Every one of these questions helps solidify your brand internally so that customers can easily identify who you are externally. Lastly, utilize your brand’s identity as a compass in your mortgage broker marketing plan. 

6. Mortgage Broker Marketing Channels

Once you have created a marketing strategy and developed a brand identity, it is time to break down your marketing tactics going forward. Your first goal should be brand awareness and audience development. Your second goal should be lead generation. Your final goal should be developing loyalty among your past clients. 

Brand Awareness & Audience Development: This stage of marketing is really just letting people know who you are and what you do. The best channels for brand awareness are social media, blogging, and video marketing. Start with creating social media pages and a blog on your website. From here, develop a year-long content schedule of blogs, videos, posts, written content, and the list goes on.

The key to creating a coordinated content strategy is creating content that can be cross-posted. For example, the blog you wrote is used as a loose script for your YouTube video. From there, cut up your YouTube video into small bits and post them on Facebook, Tik Tok, and Instagram. This will allow your content marketing team to work effectively and efficiently. Remember, creating an audience takes time so do not get discouraged with low engagement in the first few months. Commit to your content schedule, bring value, and your audience will grow. 

Lead Generation: Once you have digital brand assets like a website, Facebook page, and your content marketing campaigns are running in the background, you can focus on generating active leads. Lead generation is the process of finding the hand-raisers among your engaged audience. The best lead generation channels are pay-per-click and SEO. PPC and SEO give your team control, scalability, and sustainability. Unlike buying leads from Zillow, Realtor.com, or Lending Tree, you control the entire lead process. From what zip code you are targeting to the referral process, a lead that comes in through PPC/SEO is in your sales web forever. 

Customer Loyalty: A true mortgage broker sales funnel is less of a funnel and more of an hourglass. The top of the hourglass is audience development and brand awareness. The middle of the hourglass is lead generations, conversions, and closings. The bottom of the hourglass is loyalty, social shares, positive review, and ultimately customer referrals. 

 

If you provide great service a customer will give you a five-star review. If you provide value after the traditional sales lifetime, a client will advocate for you among friends, family, and community. This is how your mortgage broker marketing plan can explode in revenue with little to no marketing cost. The best way to create advocates and brand ambassadors beyond a sale is using effective email marketing to provide value.

A great value-add tool for past clients is Homebot. Homebot sends branded monthly equity reports to past clients. These reports have an expansive home and market data that homeowners love. For more on this post-closing advocacy tool, read our expansive Homebot Review. If you do not want to use a service like Homebot, it is still important to keep in touch with your past clients through birthday or anniversary emails. All in all, it is vital to have coordinated marketing campaigns that create an engaged audience, not just a one-and-done client. 

7. Optimize and Scale Mortgage Broker Marketing Plan

Once you have developed a strategy and implemented coordinated marketing campaigns, it is time to optimize your approach. No strategy is perfect. Therefore, there will be campaigns that are not as successful as originally planned. In these scenarios, it is important to make adjustments or tweaks to improve overall performance. Sometimes, these ‘tweaks’ are small changes like ad copy, geo-targeting, or budget shifts. Other times, you will need to adjust the overall strategy or approach. Take a hard look at the data and see what marketing efforts are producing value versus campaigns that are draining resources. 

With this said, when strategy and implementation are aligned, campaign performance will hit all-time highs. When this is the case, it is important to scale this approach with budget and manpower. For example, if your first-time home buyer campaign is generating traffic and leads at profitable numbers, continue to add budget to this campaign until your market share is capped out. Once you hit market cap, begin to expand your campaign across other regions and audiences.

At the end of the day, data does not lie. You will be able to pick out high performers versus low performers. However, ensure your expectations are accurate for lead volume, audience size, and overall cost. Conduct a market report to understand where your benchmarks should be, instead of just pulling a number out of your head. 

This mortgage broker marketing plan should be a great road map for long-term success in your business. Create a strategy, implement a campaign, and optimize your results – it’s that simple.