The mortgage industry is one of the primary industries that benefit from digital and social media marketing. The main reason is that borrowers do A LOT of online research prior to talking to a real person at a mortgage company.
This presents many opportunities for a forward-thinking mortgage company to capture more online leads.
For example, the term “mortgage calculator” yields nearly 2.25 MILLION Google results per MONTH. The term “first time homebuyer” yields nearly 75,000 results per month.
So long story short, there are a lot of people on the Internet looking for mortgage information.
When I speak with mortgage bankers and brokers, many of them have a website. This is a great start, because their sites contain important information that people are searching for on the Internet.
These sites share information for first-time homebuyers, which is smart, considering how many monthly searches there are for that type of content. Most websites also include guides on the different types of loan programs and, most importantly, a rate calculator so homebuyers can estimate their monthly payments.
If you’re in the mortgage game, a rate calculator is probably one of the best features you can put on your website, because it effectively acts as a lead magnet for your potential borrowers. In other words, the rate calculator is a free piece of content that attracts strangers to your website.
This is invaluable, as most borrowers understand the basic characteristics of their loan (LTV, Term, FICO score etc.), but want to know what kind of rate they can get.
So the borrower comes to your website and they input their loan profile.Your pricing engine spits out a rate and price, and then...
The borrower bounces from your website without a trace. No email address, no phone call, nothing. Sound familiar?
The sequence that I just described is what’s happening to a lot of mortgage companies that have websites full of useful content. These companies have spent a great deal of time and money integrating pricing engines like Optimal Blue to put out custom rate quotes, but there’s no mechanism to capture that lead.
A quick fix? Have users enter their email address in exchange for a free rate quote. Seems like a solid solution, but that could potentially deter people from going further on in the process. Understandably, people get kind of squirrelly when you ask for their contact information.
So what do you do?
Introducing Retargeting
You need to keep your brand in front of that borrower, as they leave your website and go “other places” on the Internet.
One of the “other places” that people go, and spend a large portion of time (for better or worse), is Facebook. According to Facebook, in 2016, people spent an average of 50 minutes per day on the social network. That’s pretty incredible considering most people are awake for roughly 16-17 hours a day.
So if people are spending 5-10% of their day on a single social network, why aren’t you putting your brand in front of people on this platform?
Most mortgage companies don’t understand the value of advertising their company on Facebook. Furthermore, most mortgage companies don’t understand that they can target people people who have already visited their website.
This is enormous for two particular reasons:
- You have the opportunity to show your Facebook ad to people who have already been exposed to your brand--which means they are “warm” leads.
- You can address the issue of a borrower bouncing from your website without asking for personal information, such as their email address.
The strategy that we’re discussing here is called “retargeting.”
How to Retarget
The basic idea is that you install code from Facebook onto your website.
That code then tracks everyone who visits your website and sends that information to Facebook.
Once Facebook receives that information, it shows your advertisement to your visitors.
A lot of mortgage companies get tens if not hundreds of thousands of visitors a month.
This is great because they’re generating amazing online awareness for their brand and their loan programs. But if you’re looking to convert that awareness into a legitimate lead, you need to consider putting together a social advertising retargeting strategy that leverages the website traffic that you’re already getting.
The end goal would be to convert the traffic that is leaving your website into more mortgage applications.
Are you interested in learning how to develop a retargeting strategy for your mortgage company? Drop us a line and we’d love to chat with you! Not ready yet? Check out this blog post to learn more about retargeting for mortgage companies.
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