Rich Loan Officer - Helping Loan Officers Succeed

As a loan officer, you are always looking for an edge. There are many tools and techniques available to find new business as easy and as quickly as possible, as well as strategies to increase your time to more effectively process the loans that are already in your pipeline. However, with all the choices and technologies now available to mortgage professionals, it can be somewhat overwhelming to find the best options to use.

Through interviews and personal experience, I have come up with five mortgage marketing tools that will help increase your business volume and reduce your stress while spending less time working on your business. Some of these tools will be obvious but under utilized, while others will be a complete surprise. I hope that this article opens up your mind to new possibilities for marketing and running your mortgage business.

Tool #1: Business cards.

Every loan officer I know has more than enough business cards, but I have yet to find a mortgage professional who is really working this tool to its full potential. Your business card is your own little advertisement, and should be given out at EVERY possible opportunity on a daily basis. Give out more than one. Ask the individual to give them to friends and family. Beyond giving them out, you need to make them more unique and valuable. How do you do this? You can make them unique by making it a different color or shape, making it magnetic, glow-in-the-dark, etc. You can add value to them by making it a phone card or CD-Rom, or by writing down a personal message on the back.

Tool #2: Toll-free 1-800 hotlines.

Back in the late 1990s, very savvy loan officers were using this tool to the max. Here is how it worked. The loan officer would place a classified ad in the paper offering a free report. All the prospect had to do was call the hotline and leave their name and address. However, the hotline captured the caller’s phone number as well. So the loan officer would call back the prospect to verify the mailing address and build rapport. It was effective then, and is effective now although it seems that fewer loan officers are using this tool.

Tool #3: Auto-Responders.

Auto-responders have been around for about ten years, but are just now starting to become mainstream. An  auto-responder is simply an email management program that responds automatically to any email that is sent to it. Through the use of  auto-responders, you now also have the ability of sending an unlimited number of follow-up messages plus managing your database of email addresses. All automated. Some of the popular  auto-responder services being used are Get-Response and Aewber. Using the marketing technique for the 1-800 hotline, loan officers are now directing prospects to send an email to their  auto-responder service to get some sort of a free offer, report or consultation service. Once the prospect does that, an email is automatically sent, as well as the follow-up messages. These messages are not only sent automatically, but you can also decide on the frequency of delivery times (ex. one day after first email sent, 3 days after, 7 days after, 21 days after, 6 months after, a year after, etc).

Tool #4: Loan Officer Websites.

It seems like everyone has a website these days. But 99% of loan officer websites are useless. Why? It’s not because they aren’t professional-looking or lack valuable information about you, your company and your products. It’s because setting up a website is just the beginning of the process. If you don’t know how to market that website and get people to it, it serves no purpose. First, you are going to need to place your web address on all of your promotional and marketing materials. Next, you are going to incorporate your  auto-responder within your website. So you place a classified ad offering a free mortgage consultation service. The prospect emails your  auto-responder, and you start your follow-up series to them. Now in those follow-ups, you need to stress the value of visiting your website. Maybe it’s the helpful mortgage calculator. Maybe it’s the additional 3 reports and tips they can download by visiting your web page. You need to really promote your website through your  auto-responder series.

Tool #5: EBay.

Everyone knows that you can sell Beanie Babies and antique clocks on EBay, but some smart loan officers are promoting their businesses on EBay as well. Here’s how you do it. You offer some free service, article or report used in other marketing campaigns and put it up for sale on EBay for $.99, or even a penny. The goal here is not to make a profit selling these reports (you will be lucky if you even break even). The goal is to find people who are interested in doing a mortgage loan. Once they purchase the report from you, you then email them the report and offer to do a free evaluation of their mortgage needs. Or, you can send them to your  auto-responder and hit them with a series of follow-up messages. This technique works only if you can originate loans outside of your state (which most originators are allowed to do - if you are not one of these, you can still sell these  leads to the numerous mortgage lead companies on the Web).

These are certainly not the only tools available to mortgage professionals, but used effectively, these tools can get you more mortgage  leads with much less effort. A few of these techniques really use automation to your advantage. The hardest part is setting up the process up initially. After that, they pretty much run on their own.

I’ve seen many loan officers waste their time, money and energy on ineffective marketing campaigns. The ultimate goal of a marketing campaign is to generate immediate sales and/or potential  leads. If your marketing campaign is not generating  leads or  sales, you need to reevaluate your strategies and if the need be, get educated.

Running a successful marketing campaign is a really a rather simple process if you know the three most important elements of every effective campaign.

Element #1: Must be Specific and Targeted.

A good campaign is targeted to a very specific potential customer. Your marketing efforts should not be directed to a broad audience all over the place. If you do not strategize, do not do your research properly and focus who you are selling to and what, your response rate is going to be horrible because you’re not able to connect deep enough with your prospects. Think outside of the box and try to be different than other “loser” marketers. So, for example, instead of merely trying to target “people that need to refinance”, you are going to target “people that need to refinance that are over 55 years of age, who own a second home and are self-employed.” Being specific is powerful because you are able to tailor your marketing piece in a way that best connects with a larger percent of your target group.

Element #2: Must Be Measurable.

Three keys that are the essential building blocks of any marketing campaign – track, track, track. You need to track and measure everything. A good campaign keeps track of all the important details, including response rate, sales conversion rate, number of  leads generated, expenses associated with running the campaign, etc. You can’t possibly tell how successful a marketing campaign is without going over the numbers. How much did it cost to run the ad? How much did you pay in postage to send out the 1000 mail pieces? How many emails bounced when you sent out your newsletter? How many people responded? Not only is being measurable going to help you in determining whether or not a campaign is successful, it also guides you in improving your future marketing campaigns. You can make adjustments in your marketing piece and see whether or not it helps or hurts your response rate. You keep what helps your response rate and drop what hurts it.

Element #3: Must Have Strong Call to Action.

A good campaign tells the prospect exactly what you want him or her to do next. Not having a strong call to action can destroy what would have been an awesome campaign. You need to be straight to the point and do not assume anything. Don’t assume the prospect will call your number if they would like your free consultation for mortgage services. You need to tell them directly, “Call me today for a free mortgage consultation for the first time homebuyers!” You’d be absolutely amazed at how just adding that one phrase can totally change the response rate of your campaign. Make sure that every one of your marketing campaigns has a strong call to action.

Keeping these three elements in mind will give you a strong foundation for your future marketing campaigns. It also saves you thousands of dollars in marketing expenses because you will discontinue running campaigns that cost you money. To ensure that you have successful and profitable marketing campaigns, just remember to make sure that each campaign is specific, it is measurable, and that it has a strong call to action. This is critical to you and your campaigns’ success.

Goodluck in starting a Profitable Loan Officer Career!