As most business owners know, the best way to keep your pipeline flowing is to market consistently. If you effectively maintain your marketing efforts, you set your business up for success and continued growth in the future. It’s about looking ahead towards gaining more prospects and future clients rather than focusing all of your efforts on current clients. For loan officers, this means coming up with some strategic marketing strategies and maintaining them to help your mortgage business thrive. Here are some of the most common marketing mistakes that business owners make and how you can avoid them:
Inconsistency
Creating a strong brand is key, and it’s equally important to ensure that it’s consistent across all mediums. This means making sure your tangible materials (brochures, business cards, etc), your online presence, social-media pages, and website all make a consistent brand impression. They should also be consistent with who you are and how you come across in person. This also includes your images and your descriptions of your business and services.
Ignoring millennial prospects
Making up almost a quarter of the population, millennials are a market that businesses should target. With an incredible buying power, this generation should absolutely make your priority list when it comes to marketing. If you’ve haven’t given this specific demographic much thought, you’re missing out on a valuable market. LOs who’ve had success working with millennial clients will find that this generation isn’t shy about spreading the word, especially online. In fact, the more successful millennial-client experiences you can deliver, the further your credibility and reach will expand.
Neglecting content marketing
Traditional marketing methods can often come across as advertisements today. With the flood of ads we see on a daily basis, it’s all too easy for yours to get lost in the mix. Instead of relying on traditional ads alone, LOs should consider a content-marketing strategy to drive their marketing efforts. This entails sharing content (whether original or reposted) in order to provide helpful or interesting information and spark interest in your brand and business. The idea is that you’re indirectly sharing your brand without turning people off with a pushy sales approach. Content marketing can help you build and strengthen your online presence, expand your reach, and make new connections.
An imbalance of automation vs. personalization
When it comes to marketing, it would be great to personalize each and every interaction we have with prospects. But this isn’t always feasible or an efficient use of time. For this reason, plenty of businesses use some kind of automation in their marketing. It can help you save time while remaining consistent in your efforts. For example, LOs can use automation in their email marketing by scheduling send dates ahead of time to those they want to follow up with or reach out to. They can use email templates to streamline their follow-up process. While automation can save time, it can also come across as cold and impersonal, so balance is key. Make sure you balance automated methods with a more personal touch. One example of this kind of balance might be briefly personalizing your email templates before sending out. You can have a template ready to go, quickly use your database to remind yourself of a detail about that person, and add a short reference to it in your message. Recipients will notice the personal touch, but you won’t be losing valuable time to crafting individual emails from scratch.
It’s natural to make some mistakes in your business, but some are more costly than others. If you can avoid some of these common marketing mistakes, you’ll be better set up to maintain and expand the growth of your business. What are some marketing mistakes you’ve found and how do you avoid them? Share some with us in the comments section.
