Usherpa Blog - Two Marketing Techniques Set Lenders Apart
Projections indicate that the end of the golden age of refi is finally at hand, and many Loan Officers are going to have to work their selling muscles--which may have atrophied or never existed in the long refi boom. But now is not the time to wing it and see what works. What sales professionals need is exceptional content that's compliant and sent on a regular basis to their database, and powerful yet intuitive CRM platform the serves up opportunities daily. Enterprise-level and Smart CRM™ software will be the well-equipped sales professional’s holy grail.
Loan Officers will need access to any and all sales tools that will allow them to connect effortlessly with consumers and business referral partners. This means they will need content that actually adds value to prospects and partners and a system smart enough to deliver it to the right party without the LOs intervention.
Marketing automation technologies are mature now. What sets CRM providers apart is largely a matter of the content they provide to the loan officer and how easy their platforms are for salespeople to use. LOs want the power to determine what marketing material is sent to which contacts and when, but they don’t want to have to program all of the details in themselves.
Compliance should happen automatically, so every text, email and video that goes out from the lender’s shop is fully compliant. This technology exists today. Finding a rich collection of industry-specific content to send it more difficult, but still possible.
Lenders who settle for platforms that aren’t capable of providing the most compelling, valuable content to consumers and business referral partners will lose business to those who do.
Two marketing factors that will set lenders apart in the near future are in-process marketing and video marketing.
In-process marketing was previously referred to simply as loan status updates, but these consumer and real estate agent communication opportunities are so much more than that. Triggered automatically when a loan origination milestone has been reached, these simple messages are the key to higher levels of customer satisfaction and, more relevant to this discussion, more repeat and referral business. In cases where the real estate agent doesn’t already have a relationship with the lender, these messages can open that door.
The key to using these effectively is to have management define their own milestones. Don’t settle for those built into your LOS or the few offered by a CRM provider. Set your own milestones and make them appropriate for the way you do business. It’s a fantastic differentiator.
What’s most exciting about these alerts is that once they are set, they go out to the parties on behalf of the loan officer without any intervention on their part whatsoever. It just works to get them more business while they’re busy doing other sales-related tasks.
When it comes to differentiation, nothing works as well as video. When the loan officer appears on the prospect’s or partner’s screen with the company’s logo, there can be no confusing your institution with any other.
Video marketing has come a long way in the past decade such that now we can easily integrate video into email, allowing a loan officer to easily schedule emails to go out to contacts in advance.
The tools are available today. Now, all lenders must do is train their teams to use them.
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The last installment of this series dives into how to make your CRM work for you so you can work smarter not harder.
Have you read part one? Check it out here.
Full article originally published in the August 2021 issue of Scotsman Guide - read the full article here.
