Chapter 24
Marketing, Marketing, Marketing
In This Chapter
• Creating and delivering your message
• Internet strategies that carry a wallop
• The (search) engine that could
• Print, radio, and television ads that work
“If you build it, they will come.” That might have worked when Kevin Costner was constructing his Field of Dreams, but you’re going to need more than that when you open your mortgage broker business. Networking and word of mouth are key components, but you’ve also got to advertise to make your presence known in a community.
Spending big bucks isn’t necessarily the answer. A good marketing campaign does cost money, and you need to include that in your company budget. But it’s more important to target your efforts to make sure that you reach the audience you need with the message you want to deliver.
In this chapter, we’re going to touch on a variety of marketing campaigns. Books have been written on each of these topics, so clearly this is just an overview. The purpose is to help you focus on what would work best to market your mortgage broker company. Take the time to think through an integrated campaign.
Planning Is Key
A marketing strategy is well conceived. You figure out who you want to reach, which should include not only customers, but the complementary businesses with which you’ll work, like realtors, contractors, and builders.
You will need timely market information in order to best reach your target audience and develop the right type of message. You need a breakdown of the housing market in your company’s area (if you’ve already been working in that region, this is easier). You need to know population shifts, legal developments, and the local economic situation.
Did You Know?
The Small Business Administration Development Center, www.sba.gov/sbdc, offers expertise on a wide range of issues facing small business owners, including marketing.
You also want to spend time analyzing your competitors. This is not only other mortgage broker companies, but also the lenders in the region—how effective is their outreach to the house-hunting community?
You want to coordinate the look and feel of all your marketing efforts. The online site should complement the off-line print, radio, and TV spots.
Whatever the method of distributing your message—print, radio, signage, television—repetition is the key element. You want the name of your mortgage broker company to become ingrained in the public’s memory. It’s the go-to place for financing. Roy H. Williams, a visionary entrepreneur and founder of Wizard Academy, www.wizardacademy.com, explains, “One of the most common mistakes made by small business owners today is trying to reach more people than they can reasonably afford to reach. Very few readers, listeners, or viewers will take action after just one or two exposures to your message. Would you rather reach 100 percent of the city and persuade them 10 percent of the way? Or 10 percent of the city and persuade them 100 percent of the way? The difference is repetition, but the cost is the same.”
Listen to Feedback
In all your marketing efforts, there should be a space for customer feedback. Always make it easy for customers or visitors to make suggestions—and then read them. This isn’t a pro forma exercise. You need to know what customers think of your outreach program.
On all loan applications, you should have a question about how the customer came to you: friend referral, realtor/builder/contractor referral, website, TV spot, newspaper ad, radio spot, Yellow Pages, and so on.
Refining Your Message
You’re a mortgage broker company. That much is clear, but what that is may not be immediately apparent to potential customers. Does it mean you will lend them the money they need to buy a house? Reasonable question, even if the obvious answer is no. So getting the message out about who you are, what you do, and why you’re better at it than the other three mortgage broker companies in your area is critical to your success. If you’re the new kid on the block, it’s important that you get the message out fast and clear. But projecting a strong message about your company is true whether you’ve been in business for three months or thirty years.
Traveling the Internet Highway in Search of Business
There aren’t many hard-and-fast rules in running a company, but here’s one: you have to have a website for your mortgage broker business. It needs to look sharp, professional, and cutting edge, yet accessible.
But Why Do I Need a Website?
Even if you don’t intend to operate as an online mortgage brokerage, you still need to have a website. Why?
• People expect it. Nowadays, we assume that everything is available on the Internet—and if it’s not there, we question why.
• It increases your visibility at a minimal cost. Start-up costs for design are an investment, but a website is the cheapest form of advertising you can buy. A radio or TV campaign of ten 30-second spots over three weeks can run between $5,000-$10,000, depending on your market. Literally hear it and it’s gone. Print advertising is in the recycling bin by the end of the day or the length of the publication pull-date. In contrast, you can have a professional website designed and installed for less than $3,000, with annual maintenance costs of under $500. And it’s a permanent form of advertising, accessible 24/7.
• Updates are easy, quick, and less expensive. You can announce new rate changes almost instantaneously, or quickly revise any company info. A company brochure is helpful, but once it’s in print, you’re stuck with the information.
• Customers can interact with your company on their terms. Research has shown that customers expect to do the heavy lifting on a website—and they prefer it. Potential clients can help themselves quickly, anonymously if they prefer, and whenever it’s convenient for them. Your website needs to be interactive. Mine allows a visitor to run a variety of calculators so they can check how much a loan will cost them, contact me via e-mail, forward my site to their friends with a personalized message, look up mortgage broker terms, find links to sites of interest, even participate in a monthly sweepstakes. When we finally do talk, they’ve already got some of their questions answered.
• Tracking customer data is simpler. You can learn a lot from the traffic to your website. You can analyze (or have a professional interpret the stats for you) a host of data, for example, which pages are used most frequently (which can tell you what their biggest concerns may be) and where the visitors came from to arrive at your site. You can also provide a space for visitors to leave comments and opinions.
Make sure to keep your website easy to navigate. Make sure that a customer doesn’t need to return to the homepage to get to another section of the site. Don’t get carried away with fancy graphics and animation. Customers want to load pages quickly and those extra gizmos slow things down.
Did You Know?
Visitors to my website have the opportunity to enter a contest to win one month’s mortgage payment, up to $5,000! The winner is selected on the last day of the month and visitors are limited to entering only once per month. I pay an annual fee to be part of this national contest so I’m not financially responsible for a winner each month. But I do get the valuable data of name, postal and e-mail address, why they visited my site (looking for a loan to buy a house, to refinance, consolidate debts, home equity loan, or other), as well as the current mortgage information of each person who enters the contest. It’s an inexpensive, but effective, way to build a customer database.
What’s in a Name?
Don’t let ego or whimsy be the motivating factor in choosing your business’s name. The name choice will affect your marketing campaign, especially any online efforts.
Search engines look for the title tag in a website. Those are the words that appear in the link users click on the search engine results page. And that’s what makes the title tag one of the most important factors in achieving high search engine rankings. You want to focus on what your customers are looking for when they type in keywords for a search.
Make sure that the name of your company includes what you do: for example, Smithtown Mortgage Broker Company. Place it prominently on the title page and in the body text. That makes it easier for search engines to pick it up.
Did You Know?
On average, 75 percent of search queries are for what a business does, not for a specific company.
Keep It Fresh and Updated
If any part of your website looks dated—even if it’s just the notice of an open house that was held two weeks earlier—you’ve turned off the customer. It tells them that you don’t pay attention to details. Keep in mind: the content of your site must be pertinent, current, and always user-friendly.
Update your site on an as-needed basis, but certainly review the evergreen material once a year.
When your site is originally designed, invest in a content management system (CMS) which simplifies updates.
Heads Up!
Post testimonials (with permission) from satisfied customers, realtors, builders, contractors, and so on. It adds credibility to your site.
Search Engine Marketing
Search engines are the most efficient way to find products on the Internet. They’ve also become one of the best ways to find and acquire customers. While there are several products on the market to help you design a website and coordinate search engine placement, I’d advise you to focus your energies elsewhere and hire a pro.
My designer has developed sites for other mortgage broker companies—although not in my area. I wanted someone who understands the business and already knows the keywords that will drive visitors to my site. I could probably figure it out, but I’ve got better uses for my time. Ask realtors in your area for recommendations of website designers.
But here are some tips about the process so that when you hire a designer you can judge his credentials.
Did You Know?
The online search industry is expected to reach nearly $7 billion in worldwide revenues by 2007.
Spend time developing the list of keywords for your site. Check out www.wordtracker.com, Yahoo!’s term suggestions, or Yahoo!’s “View Bids” tools under their Search Marketing advertiser center. The obvious ones are your company name, your own name, your location, mortgage, mortgage broker, loans, homeowners, interest rates, mortgage calculator, loan originator, refinance, fixed rates, and ARMs. These are the terms that you will input into search engines, and your company’s name should appear.
The problem, of course, is that there are thousands of mortgage brokers in this country, and even in your own region, you’re probably not a lone practitioner. You want to be on the first or second page of search results, so keywords may not be enough. You may want to optimize the search engine process by paying to influence the outcome.
There are two methods to do this:
• Pay-Per-Click or Cost-Per-Click. If you look at the top of a search page, when you type in the words “mortgage broker,” you’ll see sponsor results. These companies have paid for the privilege of being among the first businesses you see when you type in a description of your business. It’s a bidding system, and the highest positions go to the top bidders. To get at the top of the list for a generic topic like “mortgage broker,” you’d have to be willing to pay quite a lot for each click, especially if you are working with either Yahoo! Search Marketing or Google AdWords. They reach a huge audience, but you pay for the privilege, and when you are first starting out you need to consider if it’s a worthwhile investment. One way to limit your investment is to sign up for the Local Sponsored Search option so that you only pay for clicks from customers in your area.
• Relevant Paid Search or Content-Targeted Advertising. This moves your sponsored link to a page with related content. For example, if a user was checking contractors in your area, he might also see your listing for a mortgage broker.
Keep Track of Your Website
It’s almost a waste of money if you go to the trouble of setting up a website, and then don’t bother to analyze the information that it can provide. Watching the traffic pattern on your website permits you to change what isn’t working and beef up what is. There are a variety of tracking tools that can provide you with raw data on your site. Here is the important information you need to know:
• Tracking tools can tell you which search engines are sending you the most visitors. You want to know if the search engine ads and keyword buys are working.
• Tracking tools will show you if most of your traffic is coming from search engines or if you have on-ramps from other websites. Perhaps complementary businesses, like realtors and builders, are linked to you. If so, are they providing you with a significant number of visitors? This might tell you that you should be working even more closely with that company.
• Tracking tools will show you which are your most requested pages and from which most people exit. This tells you what’s working and what’s turning off visitors. You can make the appropriate changes.
• Tracking tools will tell you what kind of operating systems and what browsers your visitors are using. You want to be sure all visitors have equal experiences. Tracking tools can also tell you if there are any defects in the design of the site. It will alert you if a visitor is getting a nonexistent page when they attempt a link—an instant turnoff.
Cable Television and Local Radio
Let’s assume that your company isn’t ready for promoting on the Super Bowl. But that doesn’t mean that local television and radio might not be a reasonable avenue for marketing. You can work with the cable company and radio station reps to develop small, focused ads.
Most cable companies can segment their broadcast area into smaller sections to better fit your budget. But remember, repetition is the key. Better to run three ads at the same time and days of the week, month after month, than to scattershot your ads. You are reaching the same people over and over again—and that’s exactly what you want. When they buy a house, it’s your company’s name they remember. Yes, that’s not the entire house-buying population, but the goal is to get the vast majority of a small, targeted segment of the public remembering you, rather than to get virtually none of a larger population. Similarly, radio ads should be in the same time slot on a daily basis.
Don’t expect instant results from either avenue. Marketing campaigns are a long-haul proposition. You’re building brand awareness, not advertising knives at the unbelievable price of $9.99 and the viewer needs to call “right now.”
Signage and Print Advertising
Billboards and transit signs are low-tech, but effective. Roy H. Williams advises maximizing your signage as much as the city sign code allows, as this medium is “often the cheapest advertising your money can buy.”
You reach not only the buying public, but also those who influence them: realtors, builders, contractors, lenders, community leaders. It’s a permanent reminder of your company that can’t be turned off, zapped, or ignored.
Don’t forget newspapers and the Yellow Pages. These media don’t build brand awareness, but should capture the attention of the person who is in an active search for a mortgage broker.
Roy H. Williams recommends small business owners should “buy mass media—radio from 6 A.M. to 7 P.M. and/or cable from 7 P.M. to midnight—to reach the baby boomers. And use dirt-cheap, pay-per-click Internet ads tied to specific keyword strings to reach the Gen X customer who’s using the Internet like a phonebook.”
Heads Up!
“The goal of advertising is to create a clear awareness of your company and its unique selling proposition. Unfortunately, most advertisers evaluate their ads by the comments they hear from the people around them. The slickest, cleverest, funniest, most creative, and distinctive ads are the ones most likely to generate these comments. See the problem? When we confuse response with results, we create attention-getting ads that say absolutely nothing.”
—Roy H. Williams
Direct Mail
Whether it’s a postcard, a letter, or even an e-mail, to promote your mortgage broker company, direct mail can be an effective way of reaching new customers, assuming that you’re using an accurate database. And that’s the key. Otherwise it’s postage down the drain.
You need to work with a firm that will customize the data for you. One of the largest customer data companies is infoUSA, www.infoUSA.com. It’s teamed with Microsoft Small Business Center and can provide lists of qualified sales leads from data from 2 billion leads. The basic cost gives you the prospect’s name, address, and type of residence. For an additional fee, you get the phone number, marital status, age, size of the household, household income, homeowner or renter, average home value, whether the household includes children and/or pets, whether it has Internet users, even hobbies and interests, if available.
infoUSA recommends a direct mailing, followed up by a phone call a month later. This is a huge commitment of time and effort and might be a good project for an entry-level mortgage broker, or you could outsource it.
E-mail marketing is growing, but is being watched carefully by the Federal Trade Commission and state governments. You want to avoid being grouped with the spam of fake medical cures that flood inboxes. Some small mortgage broker companies find it more effective to advertise in the e-mail newsletters of related companies like realtors.
If you do send e-mail direct marketing, include links to your site for more information or to receive a special offer. For example, if you’re a participant, tell them about your mortgage payment sweepstakes, but also offer to give them a free analysis of their current mortgage and how you can probably save them 10 percent or more in monthly payments. Use e-mail to invite prospective home buyers to a seminar you give on mortgage financing.
Heads Up!
Always ask any prospective customers to include both their postal address and their e-mail address in the information they give you. You can develop your own direct mail contact database.
The Least You Need to Know
• Include a marketing budget in your start-up costs for your mortgage broker company.
• Repetition is the key element in getting your company’s name recognized.
• You want your marketing campaign to reach both potential customers and those who influence their decisions, such as realtors, builders, and contractors.
• A high-quality database is essential to the success of a direct marketing campaign.
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