How To Generate Free Mortgage Leads In 5 Steps

A mortgage lead usually is the basic contact information. And in some cases, demographic information of a customer who is interested in a specific loan product or service from a mortgage lender or mortgage broker. Mortgage leads are generated on the basis of demographic criteria such as FICO score, income, age, household income etc. These leads are typically followed up through phone calls, emails, or social selling by the loan officers, agents, brokers and lenders.

Mortgage leads can be generated from many sources. The most common are response to off and online advertisements, websites, social media, word-of-mouth referrals or personal acquaintances. In this article we’ll focus on what to do to generate qualifies leads from a website.

1) Register a Domain Name:

First of all you need a domain name. It would be something like yourname.com, yourcompanyname.com, mymortgagebusinesscompany.net etc. You can choose/register any available domain name. But it needs to represent your business, your product, your services or a specific chosen niche.

2) Have a Professional Website:

You can just have one carefully crafted landing page to capture leads. This works fine with paid advertisements but still having a legit website with quality content is a must. You can’t just have one landing page claiming that you are the go to person or company for a commercial or residential loan. You need to a solid website with unique genuine content. And you should add/update new contents regularly.

You can have a custom website built just for you. Or get a ready to go website and tweak it to present your product and services. If you have time, expertise, money and patience to deal with developers and designers custom solution is the best option. However, if need a presence immediately we minimum of efforts and fraction of a cost, then go for ready-to-go mortgage website (as offered by ireadysites.com).

3) Add Quality Content:

The digital marketing has become very competitive and mostly driven by content. To stay in the competition you need to crank out as much website content as possible. But the key is your content should provide your audience with valuable information. Quality content demonstrates your expertise and help you become authority in your area. This ultimately brings in the trust, credibility, and engagement.

So don’t write articles after articles on your blog, offer/write something of value that is hard for your audience to find elsewhere. And then present it well with the help of a mix of text, video, and infographics to cater for a broader audience.

4) Optimize Your Website to Capture Mortgage Leads:

Optimizing your website for mortgage lead generation is an integral part of any lead generation campaign. Now that you have (step 3) valuable relevant content, optimize on-site content so that users can easily find you through search-engine results. We all know that ranking for highly competitive terms is extremely difficult. So research for relevant long-tail keywords that you can realistically rank for.

Remove clutter: Search engine (and online visitors) like easily navigable website structure. So remove clutter (i.e. remove what is not needed). And make content flow swiftly. Don’t present your visitors with disconnected and seemingly random information. You only have seconds to capture visitors attention, be on point. And make sure they clearly understand what you are talking about.

Add clear and obvious call to action: A call to action (CTA) is a marketing term that refers to the next step a marketer wants its audience or reader to take. In digital marketing a CTA can be word or phrase, a button linked to a web page where the user can take further action. It should provide the visitor a clear idea of what they are suppose to do. And what they should expect at the next step. Some of the qualities of good calls to action:

• Compelling Design: The sole purpose of CTA is to to grab the user’s attention, so use bright contrasting color scheme. CTA text or button should be larger enough to stand out from the rest of the content.
  
• Clear Benefit: Very clearly indicate what the user will get if they take action.
  
• Actionable Text: Entice user to take action, use words such as “apply now”, “start now”, “learn more”, and “get instant access”. Users are easily distracted on the internet. So a use of strong sense of urgency phrases such as a “limited time offer”, “one time offer”, “last x copies left” can help compel users to take action immediately.
  
• Logically Placed: A good call to action should be in the direct path of your users. Arrange your web content in a way that encourages a natural reading flow that ultimately directs them to your CTA.

5) Drive Qualified Web Traffic to Your Website:

Now that we have everything ready. Time to start taking steps to bring traffic to your site. So what is the best strategy to drive traffic to you newly created mortgage website? The very first step like any offline business is understanding your clients: who they are, what their habits are, what their needs are, what are they looking for (commercial, residential or reverse mortgage loan). This is essential for content writing as well as while defining your traffic strategy.

Once you have above mentioned data, now look for the best traffic source that suits your needs:

• Organic Traffic from Search Engines: Organic traffic is mainly any traffic that comes to your website from a search engine, such as Google, Bing, Yahoo, or DuckDuckGo. This is done with the help of Search Engine Optimization (SEO). And is fundamental to driving traffic to your website. However, this is a recurring process and it takes time to see results (i.e. people coming to your website).
  
  
• Social Media: When used sensibly , it can be a great way to promote your content and to directly communicate with your audience. According to Q3 2016 Merkle Digital Marketing report, Facebook accounted for 61 percent of website visits generated on social media. Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, Pinterest are some of other social media tools that can help you get results.
  
  
• Videos: People love watching videos, they prefer videos over text and image based content. Over 96% of people have watched explainer videos of products or services in the previous year. Video is a (if not the) highly effective form of online marketing. Despite the fact that almost every one consume online videos daily, many mortgage website brokers, lenders and loan officers still aren’t using video as part of their digital marketing strategy.
  
  Like realtors, most mortgage professionals rely on marketing themselves to maintain a steady income. And videos can play a significant role in achieving this goal. No matter how you get this done, whether you take a selfie video (even using our own phone) or outsource to a professional mortgage video production company. It is important to offer a video that can properly explain your products and services.
  
  Videos should be informative, well presented but they have to be short & sweet. Create videos showing your expertise, some special offer, client testimonials and about loan programs that you offer. Record a one minute clip answering frequently asked questions you get from clients. Mortgage business leads are all about building relationship. And there is no better way to come on camera and talk to your potential clients directly through an online mortgage video. You can show these videos on your website. As well as on video and social media sites such as YouTube, Facebook, LinkedIn, this would be a great source to bring qualified traffic.
  
  
• Referrals: Referral traffic is defined as visits coming to your site that originated from another website and came to you through an organic link click. This traffic most often comes from partner sites referencing your content/resources. These are mostly Authority blogs and news websites.
  
  
• Paid Advertisement: And finally you drive immediate traffic to your site through paid online marketing for your commercial residential, reverse mortgage company. You might think that it is going to be expensive but that is not the case. Paid ads can even be cheaper than traditional SEO techniques. If keyword research, geo-targeting, competitive analyses, ad copywriting and on-going campaign management is done properly, you would see instant results. This is what we prefer for our own website.
  
  For example with pay per click (PPC) advertising, you can bring loan shoppers directly to your mortgage website, where you are in control of how you present yourself. This means rather than your listing appearing with some many of your competitors, visitors see only what you want them to see. By running ads through Google AdWords (or other similar platforms), your mortgage and real estate business will be able to show up immediately for the words and phrases that people search in the area that you serve.
  
  Most ad platforms such as Google, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn allow you to pick a target audience, budget, ad type (e.g. image, video, carousel), and length of your promotion. Start with a small budget, evaluate, tweak and once set go with full throttle.