After the summer rush is over, mortgage brokers and real estate agents often face two dilemmas: a slowdown in new leads and a cooling off of existing ones. But with the right marketing strategy, you can generate ROI from your busy summer all year round, even during the slower winter months.
These five ideas for marketing mortgage businesses year-round help you take advantage of the extra time you have during seasonal housing lulls while increasing your potential income during otherwise slower periods.
1. Get in the Game as Sports Seasons Heat Up
You can easily mix sports-related merchandise and tailgating essentials into your mix of branded swag year-round, from football and baseball to hockey and basketball. Koozies and coasters with your logo and contact information serve a practical purpose at regular social events, where you can use the opportunity to let local contacts know about the services you offer.
Even after the events themselves, the take-home koozies and coasters could help attract attention to your business and inspire more in-person, word-of-mouth reviews among your clients and their family and friends.
2. Create a Guide or Map for Local Indoor Hangouts and Events in the Winter Months
As the weather grows colder, local residents begin looking for more indoor events and nearby watering holes to spend their free time. Create an online or printed asset, such as a map or guide, to connect residents, businesses, and events in your local community, and include basic information about your services on the back. This handy—but also branded—asset highlights these indoor locations and activities for the upcoming winter while also generating potential leads for your business.
3. Give Your Database a Winter Cleaning
Use the slower winter months to scrub your real estate lead database. By reaching out and confirming contact information with each lead, you can avoid sending emails to duplicate addresses or dead accounts. Besides ensuring your communications are being delivered to the correct email and physical addresses, you also cut down on too many bounces, unsubscribes, or spam reports, which can impact whether email platforms ban you to the spam folder or “promotions” tabs.
Accurate data also enables you to create more highly targeted email and social media campaigns for your business. A clean database with updated contact information leads to more personalized content for prospects with different needs or who are at different stages of your sales funnel.
To encourage your contacts to respond, consider asking them to trade their participation in cleaning up your database for access to a quick checklist or asset you create as an incentive. You could create a guide to prepare them for the upcoming tax season or a checklist for ensuring their homes are prepared for winter freezes.
If a contact might normally hesitate to take the time and effort to update their contact information with you, a helpful asset that’s simple for you to create and deliver to them could be the final push they need. It could also be a natural segue into offering your services should the contact have any questions for you or require further assistance.
4. Spring Clean Your Online and Social Branded Assets
As springtime leads begin to ramp up, spruce up your online presence end to end, from your website and email signature to profiles on social media and real estate sites like Zillow and Trulia. Update your contact information, images, and tone of content to ensure consistent branding across online and social platforms.
Besides branding consistency, also beef up your online and social profiles with client education about credit repair and other important loan approval tips. And be sure to include new testimonials, photos of homes your clients bought, plus client reviews, and other content that will improve your online reputation.
5. Help Clients Get a Better Loan
Just because your contacts aren’t buying or selling homes at a particular time of year doesn’t mean they don’t still need your financial expertise in other ways. If you help clients understand how credit scores work and how to resolve their credit issues, you enable them to secure a lower rate on their mortgage or to qualify for a mortgage they didn’t qualify for previously.
Be the mortgage broker who doesn't send unqualified leads away empty-handed. Educate yourself with tools to help clients improve their credit and you will close more loans in the process. By using credit repair software that automatically highlights errors, you will help clients resolve credit concerns more quickly so they can close the deal on their dream home.
No matter the time of year, educating mortgage clients on great credit habits and showing them how to qualify for a better loan helps your business. By combining seasonal mortgage advertising ideas with much-needed credit education, you can reach more potential customers and close more loans. Educating clients on credit habits and showing them areas they can improve their score can help you avoid the feast or famine cycle so common during the real estate industry’s offseason.
