The Edge Marketing

Do you offer superior service, consistently close loans on time and overall are more adept than your competitors, yet you’re struggling to figure out the mortgage marketing and advertising puzzle?

For many loan officers, marketing is a real puzzle. Your expertise is in pricing loans, closing them on time and rendering quality service. You’re not necessarily an expert at how to attract more new clients, especially from real estate agents, where most of the purchase transactions occur daily.

If your mortgage marketing and advertising strategy doesn’t have real estate agents lined up at your door begging to use your services, chances are you're missing the magical ingredient - the ingredient that magnetizes agents.

Too often, loan officers chase agents for deals. And when you chase agents, they’ll always feel they have the upper hand in the relationship, poised to take advantage of you or be over demanding in their expectations. Does this sound familiar with any of your past experiences dealing with these kind?

How do you reverse this pattern? What’s involved with getting them to chase you?

It begins with relationship building, and of course, that’s what your business is about, isn’t it?

Ideally, your strategy should reflect the major processes of relationship building; lead generation, client acquisition and client retention. Understanding each of the processes is the easy part, executing them to get the results you want is more challenging…unless of course, you know the magical ingredient.

Most Agents you meet today aren’t ready to do business with you because you’re a stranger. Remember growing up, the phrase mommy coined, “stranger-danger.” You were told stay away from strangers, don’t accept anything from strangers.

Gee, is it no wonder why our defensive guard is immediate when we meet someone that we don’t know for the first time. Let’s not fault Agents for feeling the same way. They’re human too, well, most of them anyway.

What’s it take to get a stranger to become your friend? The same thing it took when you met your best friend. When the two of you first met you weren’t instantly best friends, the relationship grew over time. That’s obvious, but what does it have to do with Agents? It’s not like we’re real anxious to make them our best friends.

It has everything to do with Agents. Both, the Agent and your best friend’s needs are similar. Familiarity, comfort, and trust are the seeds to growing a relationship.

So how can your marketing turn strangers into friends, friends into clients and clients into loyal clients (best friends)? Let’s get back to learning about the magical ingredient.

Since most Agents you want to attract to your business are strangers, your first goal is to establish familiarity. They have to get to know and trust you before they’ll do business with you. Don’t make the mistake that every other loan officer commits, by directly confronting Agents and soliciting them, a.k.a. cold calling.

Good, I’m glad to hear you don’t like cold calling because you shouldn’t do it. It’s the most difficult way to attract relationships.

OK, I’m getting to the point, enough dragging this out. The magical ingredient that most loan officers are missing in their marketing is the same ingredient that gets a political candidate elected to public office.

No, I don’t mean the lying and cheating part, I’m talking about what they do up to Election Day. They campaign! The magical ingredient to your success in becoming an Agent Magnet is campaigning.

A campaign is a connected series of messages corresponded over time designed to bring about your most wanted response. It’s what drives your message, keeps it in front of the prospect, and sustains it long enough for the prospect to take the action you most desire.

Let me briefly cover what a campaign isn’t. A campaign isn’t sending out a postcard and getting an Agent to pick up the phone and call you, that’s called an advertisement. A campaign isn’t sending an email message or calling an Agent every once in awhile to check in on how they’re doing or learning if they have a deal for you – that’s called desperation.

Now don’t lose the wind in your sails. There’s more to campaigning than you realize. Campaigning is what moves each process of relationship building forward. Remember the three processes; lead generation, client acquisition and client retention.

You need campaigns to match each process. The three specific campaigns that should make up your marketing strategy include:

- Teaser Campaign
- Top of Mind Awareness Campaign
- Client Loyalty Campaign

Each campaign serves different purposes with preplanned desired responses to move the Agent through the relationship building process. You need campaigns to match up with each process. It’s a form of action, nothing moves without action.

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