I think it’s safe to say that the mortgage industry is undergoing a huge shift set in motion by the sharp spike in mortgage rates and the looming recession. It’s going to be a nightmare out there for those that can’t adapt to the new environment. 

With big shifts come big shifts in power and production. Yesterdays top producers, won’t be tomorrow’s top-producers, it’s just a different environment and those who can’t adapt, won’t be able to hack it.

Think about how we have had close to a decade of year-over-year growth. Housing demand and low rates created an environment where anyone, regardless of skill, could come in and start taking “mortgage orders”. The order takers will be gone by the first quarter of 2023, especially considering that the numbers show mortgage demand is down 86% and is at a 25-year low. 

The gravy train has left the station, and it’s not coming back. 

So now we’re asking, what is there to do for those who want to stay in the game, who have the grit, tenacity, and who understand that the game has changed? How do you counteract the stay in the business and eventually thrive again? 

It becomes more and more evident that investing in online mortgage lead generation is one of the most effective methods proven to work in any market.

 But the strategy needs to change, it was quite easy to get people to be interested in a 2.5% rate with no closing costs. Getting people to buy into a 7.5% or higher rate will require new skills.

Make no mistake about it, it is going to require a lot more in this new environment to get a lead. You have to be committed to do what it takes. You need to have the tools and systems to get the job done. 

The good news is that regardless of the market, there are those that need to buy a house. Your job is to be in front of them when they do. You have to be omnipresent everywhere you can find an interested buyer. 

Now before you start searching for the “top 10 mortgage lead companies” or “purchase leads for mortgage”, what if you could generate your own?

Maybe you don’t know where to start with online lead generation. 

Or maybe you just need a fresh perspective on simplifying mortgage lead generation to its fundamental building blocks so you can grow from there?

Wherever you find yourself in this journey,  read on. I am going to break down mortgage lead generation into 3 simple elements you need to be successful. 

 Let’s get started!

 

1. A Source of Traffic

Everything in exclusive lead generation begins with traffic.  Once you figure out how to get eyeballs on your offer, you can write your own paycheck.  Traffic is THE most important element of any lead-generation campaign. Depending on your traffic source, the amount of work you have to do on the other end changes dramatically. 

There are a number of different ways that you can run traffic to a website or landing page. You can direct traffic from tradeshows, a direct mail campaign, radio ads, or any other form of traditional advertising. For purposes of online mortgage lead generation, though, we’re going to focus on online traffic. 

1. Social Media (Paid/Organic)- This is the easiest and quickest way to get people to your offer. Paid ads on major platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, TikTok, etc., can get traffic to your offer in hours. The downside is that this is “interruption marketing,” a low quality of lead because the intent is so low. This “lead” isn’t searching for what you’re selling, you just caught their attention while they were scrolling.
   
   There is also the organic approach of posting on places like Facebook groups, marketplace, setting up your own Facebook groups, etc. Except for TikTok, most platforms are now “pay to play”.  If you don’t pay for traffic, your organic reach is practically zero.  The only places where you can get some good traction with organic content are TikTok and YouTube right now. That involves a lot of content which can be time-consuming and resource intensive.

If you can dance and sell loans or have a talent for good videos for YouTube, you can start on TikTok.  If you have more time than money, you can work these platforms for free for the most part until you have enough financial resources to invest in paid traffic.

2. SEO/Blogging - This is organic search traffic. The upside of investing in SEO and high-value content is that you can benefit from it for years. If you can crack the SEO code, you can get leads without having to pay to run ads. If we are being real, though, writing highly optimized content for search is not the forte of most loan officers. Even if you do, this is a long-term game, and you can go months and months before you see a noticeable payoff.
   
   

3. Paid search, AKA Google/Bing/Yahoo- Paid search network advertising is my personal favorite and the one that we use for our clients at Empower LO. It’s easily the most predictable and scaleable source of traffic once you get it figured out. Paid search can be an insanely lucrative way to build your business
   
   You will need some capital to run paid search campaigns. If you have time to learn the skills to do it yourself, you won’t need to break the bank, though. You will need a good back-end system to capture, nurture, and convert your paid search traffic leads. That’s where EmpowerLO comes in. We have paid search mortgage lead generation down to a science.  To find out more about how Empower LO clients are generating up to 875% ROI, book a demo with one of our mortgage lead generation experts or check out our standalone software.

 

4. Retargeting- Retargeting traffic is where marketing gets really fun and profitable. All advertising platforms, such as Facebook, Google, and Bing, have a way for you to insert a “tracking pixel” into your website or landing page. The tracking pixels keep tabs on who your visitors are; the data is stored and accessible by you. You can see the flow of traffic to your landing page, the actions that were taken etc.. Once someone has visited your page, you can attach this tracking pixel and watch their movements around your site, including when they leave and come back months later. You can even watch as people transcend the layers of your mortgage sales funnel.
   
   With your pixel set up you can set up ads that will follow your customers around as they navigate the web, showing up on the sides of their screen and as they scroll through content, that is designed to get that customer to come back and give you the information you need for whatever your value proposition is.
   
   Have you ever clicked on something on Amazon, not bought it, and then scrolled through your phone later, only to see it popping up on every website you go to? That’s retargeting at work, and although it’s not leveraged much by loan officers for ads now, adapting this to its maxed ability will be the next step in optimizing mortgage lead generation online.

OK, now that you have a primer on how to get traffic to your landing page or website, let’s walk you through what you need to do with that traffic and what tools you need to convert that traffic into leads for your business. Next up:

2. A Conversion Optimized Landing Page

Your traffic needs to be directed somewhere. The best place for them to land is a polished landing page that will get lead them down your mortgage sales funnel.

If you are not a web designer, don’t be discouraged.  I promise this is WAY simpler than it sounds.

First, let's be clear on what a “Landing Page” is - a landing page is just a specific page on a website designed for one purpose and one purpose only, to convert cold traffic into warm leads. There are websites out there that are nothing but a single landing page and websites that are nothing but multiple landing pages on a domain. YOU DON’T NEED A FULL WEBSITE TO HAVE A LANDING PAGE. 

I can’t stress this enough.

YOU DON’T NEED A FULL WEBSITE TO HAVE A LANDING PAGE.

 I talk to people daily who say they haven’t started generating leads because they don’t have a website. Not only can you use landing page builders like Typeform to build landing pages easily,  you can also use the same landing pages you build here and host them on your own domain name to make a single-page website for less than $5 a month.

Your landing page must be optimized for conversions, and the metric you track for this is your Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO).

It’s a bit of a science on its own, but you don’t have to be an electrical engineer to know that you can flip a switch and the lights come on. Same with the science of conversion rate optimization, we can put some proven elements in practice to make sure your landing page has the best shot at conversion. 

Building optimized landing pages, with proven design techniques, is one of the many tasks we take care of for our Empower LO clients but if you have enough time or resources to do this on your own, you can!

Marketers have been split-testing landing pages for years, and we can learn from past studies and apply what has been proven to improve conversions:

 

1. Value Proposition- This is not about extolling the virtues of wonderful you and your company. You need to clearly articulate the answer that subconsciously ALL prospects are asking themselves: What’s In It For Me, the old WIFM, as is known in copywriting.
   
   You know your business and your prospects and borrowers; what makes them tick? What keeps them up at night? What are their pain points? Once you have that, ask the biggest question of all: How does your service solve those problems? It’s all about the value THEY get, not the stuff you offer. What is the end result your clients are looking for?
   
   

2. Clear Call-To-Action (CTA) with a nice big button to make it easy. What’s your CTA? Make sure that it’s congruent with your value proposition and that the words don’t scare away the visitor.
   
   For example, if your value proposition is that you will give visitors of your landing page a pre-approval estimate, you don’t want to make your call-to-action button say “Claim your FREE Offer.” You’d probably want it to say something more along the lines of “Click HERE to Get Started.” Or “Get Your Pre-Approval Estimate HERE.” 

Give your visitors what you tell them you’re going to give them, or they’ll be upset!

3. Limited Navigation Options- This is the number one mistake that I see people making. Your landing page is designed to accomplish one goal and one goal only. That is to get your cold traffic to follow your Call-To-Action. Your goal is not to drive traffic to your website homepage or to give them access to your entire website for them to roam around. A standard website that is optimized to convert leads may convert traffic into leads at 2-3%, whereas an optimized landing page will convert cold traffic at 15-25% and sometimes even more.
   
   Leverage your landing page by eliminating the option to navigate anywhere else on your website. The exception may be the links to your privacy policy and terms/conditions located in the footer section of your page; that's it!

Design and visual appeal are important elements of landing page design, but it’s not just about making the site look pretty, It’s about using proven research to identify color schemes and text arrangements that are proven to convert traffic. The good news is, you can see what’s working and model your landing page with derivative elements to achieve the same results. There is no need to reinvent the wheel. 

This is how I did it before I had access to designers and tons of research about landing pages. I would identify landing pages in my space from successful companies.  I’d look them over and determine the common elements and make sure that my landing page had those unique elements. 

Then you do one simple thing that everyone does before they find success, you test and test and test until you find the best conversion structure for you.

The best way to find those landing pages is to click on offers that are relevant to the campaign you’re trying to run at every chance you get. Want to generate VA leads? Do a google search that aligns with what a VA borrower would be searching for, and start clicking on the sponsored ads on Google and Bing. 

Then, go over to Facebook, and you should start to see some VA ads in your timeline that you can click on. If you don’t, just navigate over to a website like adespresso.com and use their ad examples tool to identify Facebook ads that look like they have the necessary attributes. Caution with this, though, Facebook ads are not a great place to generate mortgage leads, so it can be hard to identify one that ACTUALLY works versus one that just looks like a cool loan officer Facebook ad. 

OK, two down, one to go. Next thing you need for your mortgage lead generation campaign:

3. An Appropriate Lead Form

Not many conversion rate optimization experts talk about this, but your lead form is crucial to your ability to generate leads online. Your lead form is the pathway for your cold traffic to become a lead. It is the way of submitting information to you through your landing page. There are multiple ways that you can incorporate your lead form into your landing page, and ultimately the best way to know what’s best for your campaign is to test test test.

A lead form doesn’t necessarily improve the performance of your landing page. More appropriately, perhaps, is to think of it as its own step in the mortgage sales funnel. The reason I say that is because your landing page can be the most optimized landing page in the world, but when they click on your Call-To-Action, you pull them into a lead form that asks them too many questions, or one of the wrong questions, your traffic will run the opposite direction.

The lead form you use needs to be carefully thought out. This is the part where people will either fill it out and convert or not. It’s “do or die” here.

 Here are a few things to consider on your lead forms for better performance:

1. Determine the appropriate length of your form.  There needs to be a balance between making it too short, getting low-quality leads, and asking just enough questions to weed out the time wasters and convert those that are more likely to make it to the next step of your mortgage sales funnel. At the same time, not asking too many questions so they give up and bounce off the page.
   
   

2. Choose the most relevant questions and fields to include on your form.  Ask the right questions, only what is essential to determine if the prospect is qualified to do business with you.
   
   

3. Include your privacy policy. Not only does it make the visitor feel more comfortable and trust you more, but it is also required by many states, and in some cases, by federal law.
   
   

4. Choose the right wording for your button. Nobody wants to “submit” a form unless they are doing so for something obligatory. Use phrases that are proven to increase conversions, such as “Get My Quote”, “Instant Access”, “Get Started Now”.
   
   

5. Split test your form. You should always try to improve conversions by testing against a control (a version of the landing page that you do not ever edit and use as a baseline to measure other changes against). 

Lastly, consider the modality of the lead form. There are various ways to deliver that form to the visitor. Let’s take a look at different modalities and their use:

1. Embedded forms - These are the most widely used method of incorporating forms in landing pages.  One distinct advantage from the user experience point of view is “familiarity”. Your visitors have filled out boatloads of these for one reason or another. When it comes to your landing page, they intuitively know what is expected. Because you are immediately asking them for information, you ideally want to use these on campaigns for traffic that already knows you or your brand, and there is a high level of intent. 
   
   

2. Pop-up lead forms - These are forms that open up and become the page's primary focus after the visitor clicks on the Call To Action link. You can use these effectively by writing great content that entices the visitor to want more, to connect with you for a purchase or at least a conversation. Since the form is not immediately visible, their guard is down while they read your content.
   
   By the time they have read your message, the call to action should invite them to do something that feels natural for them: request more information. By the time they click on the button, they have spent some of their trust in you, so you need to pare down the fields to those that absolutely necessary to reduce bounce rate. Make the form short, and remind them what they get when filling it out.
   

3. Gamified lead forms - These forms are quickly becoming the preferred modality of getting users to go through forms. You can run a search for something like “FHA refinance rates,” and the top 3 ads will lead you to landing pages like this one, or this one, from some of the top mortgage lead generation companies using these gamified forms now.  Suffice it to say that ALL major advertisers in mortgage marketing or Real Estate are using these now.
   
   Gamified forms are quite a bit more complicated. Unless you have some great UX design chops, you may need to either pay for them to be done for you or use a subscription service that offers these. One great example of a company offering these is Typeform.
   
   

There you have it, the 3 assets you need to start generating mortgage leads today!

I don’t mean to overcomplicate a simple concept, but I also never mean to oversimplify what is actually a lot of effort and energy to get started. 

All the content in the world is not going to help you if you don’t go out and TRY to implement some of it. I love talking to LOs who are going down this path of online mortgage lead generation, so as always, feel free to book a call with one of our mortgage lead gen specialists if you’d like to learn more about generating mortgage purchase leads or want to have us do it for you! 

Thanks for reading, and I’ll see you at the top!

Michael McAllister