8 Tips to use your presence online to generate mortgage leads
If you’re desperate for leads, it may be tempting to take the quick option and buy them directly from a lead generation company. It’s better, and usually cheaper, however, to use your existing online presence to generate targeted mortgage leads. Here’s how you can use your website and digital marketing to create processes and funnels that will provide you with qualified leads.
- Start with the research
Whether you are intending to rebuild your whole website and marketing process, or just take out a few Facebook ads, the key to successfully generating mortgage leads online starts with research and having the right strategy. Whether you develop it yourself or work with an agency, before you do anything else you should make sure that you have spent time identifying what type of leads you are looking for. Once you know who you want to appeal to you can start the job of attracting them to your business.
- Optimise your website
No matter how pretty it looks, no-one is going to contact you through your website if they don’t see it. SEO programmes use keyword research to produce website copy that achieves high page rankings in search engines such as Google. Given that 75% of people never scroll past the first page of search results, getting your page up the rankings is vital if you have any chance of potential customers looking at your website.
Getting them to your website is just the first step. What you need them to do now is act. If your keyword research was thorough, the relevancy of your copy will already mean that the vast majority of your traffic will meet the demographic of your perfect customer. However, you still have some work to do to ensure that you target those visitors who are most likely to become customers. In short you want to use your content to generate qualified leads.
- Using your content to generate leads
There are a wide range of techniques that you can use to capture qualified leads via your website. Key to all of them is design that centres the goals of your business. Put simply, if you are only interested in high net worth mortgage clients providing a downloadable guide to ‘how to get a mortgage when you are on a tight budget’, won’t capture the details of the leads you want. If however you are providing a specialist service for people on a low income, this type of content will help you to capture the details of website visitors who are more likely to be genuinely interested in what you have to offer.
Other tools that you can use to capture the details of qualified leads include well-designed contact forms, surveys, quizzes, and even live chat.
- Capturing the power of your social profiles
If you are already active on social media, then you are probably already aware of the value of these platforms in connecting with potential customers and with maintaining your relationship. However, in the wrong hands social media can be a rather blunt tool. Likes, shares and retweets may increase your visibility, but this doesn’t always translate to an increase in leads.
To use social campaigns effectively you need to develop a coherent strategy that allows the capture of contact details. You also need to consider which platform is the most appropriate for which messages. LinkedIn in particular is often underused by mortgage brokers looking for leads in the SME market.
- Paid advertising
Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising is one of the most effective methods of lead generation. Targeting is possible at all stages of the process using well-chosen keywords and segmentation. In addition, by undertaking a continual program of testing ads and analysing results, your lead funnel can be repeatedly refined to gain better and better results. This testing and analysis also allows you to effectively manage your budget.
Hopefully, if you’ve followed the previous guidance regarding using relevant content to generate leads, the email addresses you have collected via this route will already be those of people who are actively looking for a mortgage – or at least will be considering it in the near future.
Once you have captured these details then, you want to ensure that you are marketing your services to them effectively. Email campaigns can do this by identifying at what stage of the lead funnel recipients are at and targeting the email correspondence they receive accordingly.
- Don’t forget the phone
When your phone number appears online, either on your website or in PPC ads, you need to ensure that calls are tracked so you can determine where callers found you. This allows you to assess which of your channels is most successful at producing qualified leads, and subsequently invest further in these.
Using SMS campaigns to connect with leads is highly effective when you want people to respond quickly. The cut through and ease of replying to a text encourages potential clients to contact you. While the facility to opt out of this type of marketing swiftly removes uninterested contacts from your list of leads, reducing the time you will spend chasing potential time wasters.
- Automate for efficiency
Automation tools and AI can be used across a range of online and digital lead generation strategies. When you control the parameters of these tools, rather than relying on external lead generation companies, you are much more able to develop a responsive strategy to managing leads. This is because automation gives more time and better insights, ideally you can access to up-to-date deep analysis of a range of statistics relating to your lead generation process, rather than relying on assumption and guesswork.
Automation also lets you focus your human resources on the business of turning qualified leads into customers, instead of burdening your workforce with repetitive, administrative tasks.
The mortgage sector is highly competitive market in which to work. Generating your own leads online can help you get ahead of your competitors on your own terms.