Mortgage Lead Generation Basics: How to Generate Exclusive Mortgage Leads

There are three components that make up an Online Mortgage Marketing / Mortgage Lead Generation campaign.

1 – QUALITY MORTGAGE WEBSITE

The centerpiece of all mortgage marketing campaigns is the mortgage website. Most prospects make a decision on whether or not they will consider working with your company based solely on their initial perception of your mortgage broker website. It’s true, before they have even spoken to a loan officer, they have already made a decision based on their perception of the quality of your services as they are embodied by your mortgage website.

Additionally, the mortgage website is the first place most prospects go when they are exposed to your online or offline mortgage marketing and this highlights the importance that your mortgage website holds.

Online Presence – The goal of your mortgage web site is to engage visitors to learn about your company and services. To be effective in internet mortgage lead generation, a mortgage website must be authoritative and professional looking to help build trust with prospects while giving them the answers they seek. The website must provide users with helpful mortgage tools and information that are easily accessed through intuitive and user friendly navigation and design.

Building Rapport – The goal of your mortgage web site is to engage visitors to learn about your company and services and to inform them about mortgage and real estate topics in an easy to understand and common sense way.

Through this process visitors build trust in your company and brand and in doing so are much more likely to contact you via contact form, mortgage rate quote request, live chat or phone. Building rapport and trust is the first step in generating exclusive mortgage broker leads.

2 – WEBSITE TRAFFIC

There are many different ways that traffic is generated to your mortgage website, some are obvious and some are not. Every day visitors come to your website as a result of simple activities you are already engaging in.

Offline Mortgage Marketing – The first source of traffic to your mortgage website comes in the form of visitors that are referred to your site from your offline mortgage marketing sources such as direct mail, flyers, radio, billboards, tv or even business cards. Instead of calling you directly when exposed to an offline mortgage marketing campaign, most prospects today will visit your mortgage broker website to learn about your company and build trust.

Online Mortgage Marketing – Driving traffic to your mortgage web site online can occur from naturally existing organic search engine results or paid activities such as banner advertising or Pay Per Click campaigns.

Mortgage SEO (Search Engine Optimization) – To achieve high organic search engine rankings for mortgage keywords in in search engines such as Google, Yahoo and MSN, a Mortgage SEO, it is important to make sure your mortgage website is SEO optimized.  Mortgage SEO is the process of creating useful unique content and then optimizing on page items such as the title, url, H1 and H2 tags and alt tags, among others and then building relevant links to these pages.

3 – MORTGAGE LEAD CONVERSION

When traffic is driven to high quality mortgage websites, the final step in real estate or internet mortgage lead generation is conversion of the visitor into an exclusive mortgage lead. This is where most mortgage websites today go wrong.

Most mortgage websites employ Full 1003 mortgage applications which have long since been proven to be a mortgage lead generation killer. They are simply too long and invasive for prospects that  you have not yet built a rapport with.

Free mortgage websites and generic mortgage sites don’t cut it, you are better off without a website and forcing prospects to call you directly than sending them to a cheap, generic, or tacky web site that is a dead end for mortgage lead generation. If your site offers a Full 1003 Application, flash intro or music, you are losing exclusive mortgage leads right now. More importantly, you are losing the deals that each mortgage lead has the potential to generate.