Mortgage Lenders often avoid the expensive and cumbersome marketing strategies needed to stake a claim in the digital and online world. When lenders do this, they leave valuable opportunities on the table by not realizing the real growth potential of new clients, referrals, and revenue.
Consumers today are taking up residence online and are continuously bombarded with marketing materials. Therefore, it is critically important to create content that is personalized and relevant to your target audience. Keeping this in mind, lenders must acknowledge the next generation of home buyers are millennials and will spend an overwhelming majority of their time online; whether this be social media (Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, etc), news sites, online learning, e-correspondence, or any other web based browsing. This same group of upcoming home buyers are lacking the education and confidence surrounding financial decisions - specifically home buying. This provides a significant marketing opportunity for lenders.
Due to the intensity of digital marketing, there are extensive opportunities for lenders to capitalize on connecting with this upcoming generation. This year it is projected nearly 4 million millennials will be positioned for home buying. Knowing this information opens a door for lenders to pour resources into digital marketing. Expanded digital marketing plans will create brand recognition, familiarity, and build relationships. Lenders should position their content to be educational, friendly, approachable, and easy to digest.
Basing a marketing strategy off purely statistics is not going to show the ROI you may be anticipating. To maximize your marketing dollars, you need to truly understand your target audience; in this case, millennials – their interests, dislikes, long term goals, etc. Look to your lending team for factual data about your target audience. They will be able to provide data points around the information you are seeking. The qualitative and quantitative data your lending team can provide you is vital in growing at a scalable rate that you can use to develop affective content and touch points that will better resonate with your target audience.
Digital marketing is all about the long game. Consistent content sharing will eventually grow into a replenishing sales funnel. This consistency can start small with just the sharing of content a few days a week. Over time as you develop more marketing assets, you increase your consistency to posting every day. As you begin to share more content, the subject matter needs to be differentiated from each other. Content needs to be attention grabbing, awestriking, entertaining, and informative. This will keep the interest of your audience and ensure they remain engaged with your messaging.
In the end, understanding a target audience on a deeper level, other than statistics, will give lenders the tools to thrive in a digital world. Factual data, interpreted correctly, will provide opportunities for engaging content that will lead to building relationships. Marketing is in a constant, fluid changing state, so do not limit your ROI by locking yourself into a one-dimensional strategy. And, if something is not working, change it. As you design your digital marketing strategy, make sure your creative and that you are answering the right questions of your new age audience.