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How to Get More Mortgage Leads

by | Last updated Dec 7, 2023

How to Get More Mortgage Leads

How to Get More Mortgage Leads

The mortgage industry is a big one, and that means that any mortgage business or real estate agents that want to break into a niche of their own will require leads.

However, lead generation is not an easy process. Generating mortgage leads could involve any number of different strategies and techniques, all of which need to be carefully planned out in advance.

Without mortgage leads, running your mortgage business becomes much harder. If you do not have leads, then you do not have a steady supply of fresh customers coming in.

Since the mortgage industry is very slow and steady – customers only ever really need one mortgage at a time – you need to rely on new customers to stand a competitive chance. This is where generating leads becomes important.

What are Mortgage Leads?

Leads are potential customers with an interest in your products and services. A mortgage lead, in this case, is somebody who is interested in your mortgage options.

Proper lead generation is all about getting more of these mortgage leads and directing them towards your business, marketing your services to them so that you can make a sale.

Marketing Qualified Leads

Marketing-qualified mortgage leads are any customer that has an interest in your mortgage services. These are people who have not been fully convinced yet.

As a mortgage business, it is your job to offer something that will turn them into paying customers, whether that is website content or personal communication.

Sales Qualified Leads

Sales-qualified mortgage leads are customers who are ready to make a purchase. These are usually handed off to the team at the end of your sales funnel.

These leads are usually customers that want to talk about your options but have decided that they want to buy something from you. It is still possible to turn them away, so you need to be careful with how you approach each lead.

How to Generate Mortgage Leads

Generating leads is a very open-ended process: there is not a single defined strategy for approaching it.

Lead generation techniques can vary so heavily that many of them are completely different in how they work. If you want to generate leads effectively, you often have to use a combination of at least two strategies to cover all aspects of your target audiences.

Generating proper mortgage leads requires you to be flexible and to approach the problem from a variety of angles at once. This means that a mortgage broker business can’t rely on a single lead generation method to work flawlessly.

Here are some of the most notable ways to generate mortgage leads, all of which are taken from real lead generation strategies. If you want to generate interest in your business, you need to know how you can capture leads without spreading yourself too thin.

Paid Search Advertising

Paying for ads on search engines can be an incredibly powerful way of getting more mortgage leads. Search ads are one of the most prominent forms of advertising on the internet, making them a very desirable option.

Good paid search ads can allow you to target whatever niches you are aiming for while also providing you with a huge amount of data to work with. This combination means that mortgage brokers can gather more high-quality leads in much less time.

There are a lot of ways to handle these paid advertisements, but most are going to point back toward your company website.

Combining paid search ads with your own marketing methods can be an effective combination, but it takes trial and error to perfect.

Paid Ad Placements

Planting your own ads on other websites can be a great option, too. Ad placements require you to research the website you are targeting so that you can get a good idea of the audience behind it, but finding a good target site can be a great way to boost your customer base.

An ad placement can be an effective way to draw in a new audience from a specific site or platform. If you choose carefully, you can target an audience that has an active need for mortgage brokers, such as putting your ad on a financial advice site or forum.

Search Engine Optimization

Proper search engine optimization can cover a lot of different sub-strategies, but each one can help boost your mortgage business by a significant margin.

Good SEO allows you to rank higher on search engines, meaning that you appear more often for relevant search results.

By targeting specific keywords, you can gather new mortgage leads from specific target audiences or appear for key terms that your targeted buyers search often.

Beyond that, SEO involves a lot of changes to your site to make it more search-engine friendly. Doing this usually means that your site will gather more organic traffic over time and that you will have an excuse to correct site flaws like messy code or unoptimized images.

Site Improvements

While technically a part of SEO, improving your site can mean that more leads will actually convert into customers.

Slow page loading times and bad navigation can result in a mortgage lead simply giving up and choosing a competitor, making your lead generation efforts far less effective.

As a mortgage broker, you know that it is important to retain customers whenever possible.

Making your site better can often secure more potential leads, especially if your improved site puts marketing material (like positive reviews or a lead magnet) right in front of them.

Lead Magnets

Offering something for free can be a good way to garner interest, and this applies to mortgage lead generation too. Providing a free lead magnet – such as a quote service or a PDF of useful information – can hook more leads into your business over time.

These magnets are very powerful if used correctly, but the content or service has to be worth it. A mortgage lender needs to draw in leads without invalidating their own services, so you want the lead magnet to provide something useful without solving whatever issue the potential customers are having.

Email Marketing

Marketing through email can be surprisingly effective, but only if you do it very carefully.

Mortgage leads are usually going to interpret a lot of promotional emails as spam, so you need to think carefully about how you can promote your mortgage company in a natural way.

Email is ideal for bulk promotions or sending out regular updates about your business, whether that is new services or just details on new mortgage options.

You might also choose to send reminders, blog post updates, or even just promotional snippets about how to use your services.

Whatever you do, you can only use email marketing if you have a set of customer details to work with.

That means that you are relying on newsletter sign-ups, contact forms, and any other ways of gathering potential customer contact info.

Direct Mail Marketing

Marketing through physical mail can be as powerful as it is risky. While people are more likely to look at physical mail than emails due to the association of emails with spam, it also costs a lot more to send out physical mail in bulk.

Not only do you need customer address information, but you need to actually print and produce the material you are sending out. However, if you can find an easy way to do this, you can end up with a huge range of different options for promoting your business in a way that is blunt, straightforward, and professional.

Cold Calling

Cold calling is another option that can be quite hard to pull off well. However, it allows for a quick turnaround and a high volume of sales calls, meaning that you can get in touch with dozens of potential leads directly.

Many people will ignore the call or even disconnect once they realize what is happening.

However, cold calling is not necessarily a bad thing – you just need to get in touch with the right people, usually meaning people that are already in the market for mortgage services and just have not managed to choose a mortgage broker yet.

Content Marketing

Content marketing can be very effective for a whole range of reasons, allowing you to promote your mortgage business very well in a wide variety of different ways.

Mortgage lenders can create blog posts, informative articles, updated website content, or any number of other content types and reap the benefits very quickly.

Of course, the content itself still needs to be good. You want something interesting, relevant, suitable for your business, and appropriate to the kind of marketing aims you have.

With so many different ways to handle content marketing, it can be tough to know where to start.

Blog Posts

A blog can be a great way to generate leads. Good blogs do not just draw in leads – they contribute something to your site, which ends up adding an extra level of content that might naturally bring in online traffic.

Thanks to this, blog posts can serve multiple roles very effectively.

They are a mortgage lead generation tool, a way to produce new content for SEO keywords, and something that a mortgage lender can use to pad out their website with more information or attention-grabbing posts.

Guest Posts

Putting guest posts on other sites is a good alternative to creating your own. While this is mostly done to boost SEO through the backlinks, you’will be getting to your own site, and it can also become a decent online marketing option.

Choosing an existing blog with an audience relevant to your own is the best way to handle guest posts. That way, you can have them write about a specific loan program or tool like mortgage calculators and ensure that at least some of the readers will be interested.

Video Content

While video content can be very difficult to prepare, it can also be a good way to advertise yourself directly. Even if a video does not go viral, video content can be more engaging and fluid than written content in many situations.

How you use the video content depends on your own digital marketing strategy since it will not be suitable for every situation.

This makes it a hit-or-miss option in some situations, but if used well, it can become an incredibly powerful and valued piece of content to have available when you are building multi-platform marketing campaigns.

Social Media Marketing

Social media platforms can be incredibly versatile, making them one of the best ways to generate mortgage leads consistently.

Not only can they allow easy mortgage lead generation due to the way that these platforms spread content around, but they open up more options for communication between your business and any potential leads you find.

Having a business account on a social media platform can supplement other marketing methods.

It also contains a simpler form of SEO and paid ads – you can do your own form of paid PPC advertising on sites like Twitter, and using certain terms or hashtags will spread your posts to certain places.

The open communication means that your loan officers and representatives can get in touch with interested users more often, allowing for even faster conversions of potential customers into paying clients.

Just remember that all social platforms can be very different in how their algorithms work. Not all platforms are going to be perfect for every situation, and you can’t rely on the same marketing campaign to work exactly as-is across all platforms.

Reviews

Review sites can have a huge impact on your brand, with positive reviews pushing you to higher rankings and more customers, while negative reviews can slow your company’s growth.

Positive Reviews

Good reviews can be a major boon to your business, increasing traffic and helping you secure more mortgage lead options. Getting more of them means gently pushing customers into leaving them whenever you can – usually after a transaction or after talking with one of our experts.

You can’t force good reviews, and that means that you need to actually have a mortgage loan service worth reviewing. The more good reviews you can earn from existing customers, the more benefits they will provide: new customers will be reassured by seeing positive feedback from past customers.

Fix Negative Reviews

Negative reviews can have a big impact on your overall marketing, forcing you to either deal with them or compensate for the lower rating on that review site. While you can’t just get these reviews removed for no reason, you can still try to deal with them professionally.

Try contacting the person behind the review to see if you can compensate them for whatever went wrong.

Offer them free services, give them partial refunds, or find some other way that you can convince them to change the review to a positive one. Doing this not only removes the review but shows other viewers that you are committed to rectifying problems with your services.

Other Ways to Generate Leads

Lead generation is complex, with mortgage lead generation covering a lot of different techniques and elements.

This means that there is not a specific way you can approach lead generation for perfect results – you need to employ a range of strategies.

Mortgage lead generation is completely different for every team of real estate agents, loan officers, or mortgage experts in the industry.

The important thing is finding a way to make it all work for your company’s goals and target audiences.

Market Locally

The local market often goes completely ignored by many real estate agent businesses and mortgage groups.

Joining up with relevant local directories, using SEO to get into local search results, posting yourself in local real estate magazines, and targeting local realtor websites can all be valid ways of getting yourself noticed by your local audiences.

Physical options, like the local real estate magazines, can also be a good way to reach people who might not be susceptible to normal advertising options.

For example, a rural area may not have as many people who are going to see internet ads on a regular basis.

Marketing yourself to a local audience can be important for smaller-scale real estate agents since mortgage leads are often very relevant to a certain area.

Most people will turn to local companies for real estate and mortgage work, even if they do not need to.

This means that your mortgage lead generation often relies heavily on you specifying locations. Using place names as keywords is a great example since this is a very common kind of lead generation trick.

Services and platforms like Google Maps make this even easier. Using SEO and select keywords to put yourself at the top of local search results means that you will get a lot more exclusive leads – people who are there just for your business.

A local business is far more likely to get recommended simply because local businesses are always perceived as smaller-scale. Even if you have the backing of local banks and a full suite of digital marketing tools, customers may be more likely to recommend you just because you are local.

Use Word-of-Mouth Marketing

Marketing through word of mouth from past clients can be just as powerful as online reviews, and the two are very closely linked. Not only can this drive more relevant leads your way, but it can open them up to more direct mail and social media ads from you.

Using services like a Google Maps business listing means that it is easier for people to find you through word-of-mouth. Even if you fall outside of a customer’s own buying habits, being recommended by a friend can nudge them into trusting your company.

Social media can be a great source of recommendations, even if a lot of those leads are non-exclusive leads that may be considering other companies, too. Using social media well can effectively double your overall audience before you even know it.

Be sure to get your loan officers and representatives to try nudging customers into recommending you. This is not easy without coming across as forced, but there are plenty of ways to gently push customers into talking about you more.

Using this as a lead generation option can make it feel more natural than using Google Ads or similar platforms, meaning that fewer customers will actually feel like they are being marketed towards.

Form Partnerships with Real Estate Agents

You can work with real estate agents and specialists in your area to share your leads. People who buy new real estate properties are going to want a mortgage, and vice versa.

This means that your mortgage lead generation can be useful to another company, just as their leads can be useful to yours.

If somebody is trying to view property listings online, they might be in the market for a mortgage very soon.

Proper partnerships can be incredibly powerful, especially if you also interact with one another over social media.

Not all partnerships are obvious, either. Sometimes you can work with life insurance agents or other unexpected companies to help share leads and marketing options,

Partnerships can be tricky to figure out, but once you have one, it becomes even easier to gather up mortgage leads. In fact, you might end up with more mortgage leads than your company would have been able to generate on its own.

Buying Mortgage Leads

Buying some mortgage leads is entirely legal. While it might sound like deciding to buy mortgage leads goes against some kind of rule, there is nothing stopping you from buying leads from third-party companies.

There are entire groups who base their business model on finding and selling leads. While not all of these groups are going to be five-star material, buying some leads can still be a good way to supplement your own lead generation options.

Buying leads takes away a lot of the pressure and allows you to focus on more important parts of your marketing.

Note that not all leads are going to be worth what you pay for them, so you still need to look over them and judge that for yourself.

Generating Leads for Mortgage Businesses

Whether you have already started generating leads or are just in the process of getting ready to try it, remember that no two businesses are the same. Even if you have a similar business listing and target audience, your generation efforts will be vastly different from any other business.

There is no perfect way to pursue lead generation, and that means that you need to think carefully about what kind of leads you are aiming for. Some lead generation options are going to be incredibly predictable, whereas others can be a huge risk that might pay off well.

Plan

Whatever you choose, make sure to form a decent plan that you can rely on. Marketing without any kind of plan usually falls apart quickly once you start overlapping too many marketing methods or marketing to the wrong people.

You need to be sure that you are targeting the right audiences and promoting the right things, and that means planning ahead as far as possible. Of course, you will not always follow that plan perfectly, so do not hesitate to adapt as needed.

React

Remember that marketing is a constantly-changing field. That goes for lead generation too.

Leads are not always going to fall into your lap in a consistent way. Sometimes it will take you days to produce the proper lead options you need for success, while others could take months to fully develop, and more might take effect almost instantly.

You need to be able to react to the changing markets as well as your own lead performance. If a certain generation method is not working as expected, then you need to figure out why or find alternatives, especially if the rest of your plan relies on it.

You need to be both proactive and reactive when working with leads because even tools like Google Analytics are not going to tell you how they will perform in practice.

What Next?

Whether you are relying on social media advertising, Google Analytics search ads, or a basic lead form on your website, there are countless ways to approach your lead needs.

It is easy to go for simple options like Google Search ads, but sometimes something like targeted ads, web classifieds, or unique marketing strategies perform better.

Really, it is important to tackle lead generation with a range of different options that are at your disposal. A Google Search ad campaign might be simple and straightforward, but it also has its limits, just like any other method does.

Do your best to think ahead and find any obvious weak spots with your marketing. You want to be prepared for the worst, especially if you are relying on your lead generation options to draw in the bulk of your upcoming customers.

Whatever strategy you settle on, there are countless ways to make it work. You just need to be prepared to adapt with the market, as well as the performance of your lead generation strategy overall. The more careful you are, the better results you will get in the long run.

Useful Guides

Please see some useful guides related to generating more business leads.

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