When doing any type of marketing the first thing you have to understand is the consumers point of view. You must understand your audience to have success. In our industry our audience sees for sale signs up everywhere, they hear of for-closed properties, etc… The point is that with all the consumers hearing negative publicity on TV, radio, on-line, word of mouth etc… it builds fear into any financial move on their home. It builds this ‘exterior’ you have to break through when trying to reach these people. WITH THAT SAID, you have to now look at the different forms of direct marketing….
Direct Mail- whether your using post cards or envelopes, color or no color, or the type of advertisement that’s on it its still just that..”advertisement.” Any form of advertisement will get lower response in the target market when consumer confidence is down in that particular market. For us its the fear of entering any change in their finances when its “scary” Tough to get to someone like this when they get so many others and its easy to through them all away. There is not one mail provider (that can say that responses are not down in the last 8 months and are not getting better. That is exactly what has happened. NOW MAIL CAN WORK IN A GOOD MARKET but ours unfortunately isn’t good right now and mail is expensive! very risky with little control.
Voice Broadcasting- again a simple form of advertisement which requires little maintenance but since it is an advertisement in this market is going to get low response. I know in a lot of states its illegal as well so definitely consult a lawyer if you ever do decide to try it in your state. I just know that its easy for people to hang up on a recorded message and then even easier to hang up after the button is pressed. Cheap form of marketing but low returns as well. A lot of this depends on the type of list and the script and recording. Almost way to many factors involved for the max return you COULD GET. I tell my clients to shy away from it unless they already know what their doing with VB. If your new to it its not the right time to learn.
TV- this one varies nationwide. Other forms of marketing do as well but TV just depends on social activity of that market. For example if its big city your targeting TV wont work as well because people are more active socially and professionally that they watch about 35% less tv per person than smaller rural cities where most things shut down much earlier. Not to mention that it can be very expensive. If it was me in a city like Kingman AZ with 50k people i would do some local adds and if the add is catchy it will work because a decent number of that community will see it. How ever if I’m at home an hour away in Las Vegas marketing there then TV is not going to work because most people don’t watch TV here more than 1 -2 hrs per day.
Email Marketing-I flat out think this can work if you get a good list of Internet leads from a trusted supplier. Problem is that i don’t know of one unfortunately. They all will seem good maybe the first campaign or two but then they start weeding you out for new clients that will pay more. But if you can find a guy you can trust then this can work for you just make sure the emails are all text to make sure that at least some of them get through
Faxing businesses- don do this!! You might hear your industry peers making money doing it but trust me, you don’t want o get caught doing it. risk is definitely not worth the reward.
Social Networking-very big way to gain business. obviously we are all here but i mean social networking within your community. You would be surprised how many loan officers don’t even have business cards. get your butts out their and meet people. go to church, go to city league softball games, go to HOA meetings, go to neighborhood watch meetings. Oh and here is one that has gotten me more loans than anything lately….mlm social networking. don’t get me wrong i don’t do the mlm to make long term money with the mlm. I do it to meet other people who have visions of making BIG money. Those types own home, think about finances, and understand savings and benefit if you can show it to them. Its easy to get through that ‘exterior’ if your already discussing way to make money. I signed up for helloworld (which i do not do anymore) which was a videoemail service mlm. the third meetings went to had about 50 people in it. I did a loan for 8 of the 50 their that night with in the next 45 days. I didn’t care about he mm at all, the networking was the key for me.
Internet Leads-dead market. the problem lies in the fact that the consumer is the shopper. They enter their info into numerous web sites to get quotes not knowing that one site may be and probably is selling their information over and over again. so even IF you can find an honest sales rep somewhere the lead it self may be being sold by other companies and resellers which saturates your quality leads actual quality.
Live Transfers- Hot Transfers- this is the biggest con in mortgage marketing if you didn’t already know that. First of all its far to expensive to do live transfers from the united states to the united states. Did you know that the labor is so much cheaper anywhere out of the US that it make no business sense to do it form the states. The cost is almost double here per transfer so no smart business man would even do it from the states and secondly the quality of the transfer after it got a recorded message, then spoke to some person they could barely understand, and then get transferred again to answer the questions all over again. The only person that will go through that will be a desperate loan prospect that is desperate because they cant get financed. Pretty expensive turn downs most of the time in my opinion. you can generate your own live transfers and skip that process of the over seas call center however it is illegal in some states so please advise your lawyer. Also if you do ever try the live transfers make sure the company’s call center is in the US. Its a BIG difference.
Telemarketer Generated Leads- usually from a predictive dialer with live agent pitching a script or a manually dialing agent. In my opinion it the most effective and “guaranteed” form of generating business every day. Its more of a personal way of doing it. Now i know a lot of you are probably thinking “telemarketing sucks” and your right it does suck, BUT IT WORK. From where I’m from what works makes money and money is why we work, so even if it does suck i still have most of my client generating their own leads doing this method for 2-3 hrs per night. It cheap, mostly costs you your time. Now if Telemarketing is not your thing personally hire a “telemarketer” to do it for you. There are tele marketers in every city that are in the same week to week check and would be eager to try a new industry with more possible potential. You know that if you make x amount of dials in the same hrs every night you will get at least x amount of deals per month. Pretty hard to stop doing once you realize you are getting 3-4 apps per night which is very obtainable for an average cold caller. Of course the right scripts and list helps as well just like in direct mail but here its harder for them to hang up on a live person then to throw away a piece of mail.
In the end no matter what you do try to do as much of it in house and try to be very specific about who you are targeting. The shotgun approach is definitely not working. You have to target your market, reach them the best way you can to get through the ‘exterior’ and then do it routinely. if you do these basics you should at least do 2-3 more loans.
I’m sure a lot of you will agree with me on some of the stuff i mentioned here. I do apologize for rambling but its i love this stuff, plus its late and I’m tired….lol
