Congratulations, you’re a new business owner and you have your first mortgage brokage up and running. There some key challenges ahead to gain your first customers and have the revenue rolling into the bank account. Let’s go through the steps of understanding your market right through to gaining your first customer
Online Marketing
One of the first steps to reaching your customers is ranking well on search engines. Whether this is through building links (click here to find out more) or pumping out great content on your website, you must put in the hard yards to achieve results. Many potential borrowers will be using search engines to find and calculate the correct mortgage for their needs. Often before even knowing a mortgage broker is what they actually need. Therefore, using this as your tool, you can create areas on your website for simple mortgage calculation. Enrich the pages with everything a potential customer would be looking for in their initial mortgage search.
Think Like Your Customers
As you well know, your job is to reduce the stress of finding the right loan for your customers. The customer wants to be able to find the best deal at the lowest fee. However, there are tasks that you might not know your customers want from you. These include mortgage pre-approvals, handling applications and documentation, and giving general advice for free. It’s important to understand what the borrower is looking for, and often it can be a little more than expected.
Promote Your Credentials
Many borrowers often decide on a broker simply based on their extensive experience and certification history. It’s very important that this is placed front and center when winning over new business. This includes the license you acquired to practice in the industry and the college degrees that are relevant to the field.
Choose the Target Market
Sounds simple right? Borrows. However, it’s not as simple as that, because there is a range of different borrowers all looking for finances in particular areas. These borrowers also may be looking for a broker who has specialist knowledge in the area of which they are attempting to gain financing. For example, commercial borrowers are often looking to finance large scaling building projects and require a particular set of skills that would suit the industry. This is different to the average potential homeowner who is looking to buy their first home.
Gain Industry Referrals
Many brokers will tell you that a majority of their business comes via referrals from other businesses in the industry or via previous customers. Often banks or financial intuitions that have the customer’s interests in mind will refer their customers to trusted brokers in exchange for a commission. This can also work in the other direction too, when you make the recommendation on which bank to borrow finances. Making relationships with people in the finance industry will be very beneficial for future growth. It will mean sometimes giving away customers but in return, you may receive many referrals back to your business.
Good luck with the marketing ventures of the new brokerage business and please let us know any other marketing tips you may have that we missed in the article.