When it comes to digital advertising for Mortgage Brokers, more often than not, their strategy revolves heavily around Facebook advertising. It makes sense. Facebook is the 800-pound gorilla in the digital marketing space. The truth is though if you are only focusing on Facebook, you are doing yourself a disservice. There are many social media platforms across the internet that have very robust digital marketing engines. If you are ignoring them, you are ignoring potential leads. Today we will examine why you need to look beyond Facebook, and how you can harness the power of some popular digital marketing platforms to attract more leads into your pipeline and do more business.
If It’s Not Broken, Why Fix It?
Before we dive into alternate platforms you can market your mortgage business on to attract leads, let’s take a look at reasons you want to expand your digital advertising activities beyond Facebook.
Facebook Ads Are Getting More Expensive
Whether you’ve noticed it or not, it’s true. According to Hootsuite, 87.1% of businesses use Facebook as one of their digital marketing channels. That is massive saturation on a single platform. As this saturation has grown, the cost of reaching your target audience (CPM or Cost per 1,000 people who see it) is rising. This just makes business sense. The more popular a platform becomes and the more businesses competing for the same audience, the more expensive it’s going to become.
Not All Your Ideal Clients Use Facebook
If you look hard at your ideal client personas, chances are that they don’t all spend most of their time on Facebook. The truth is every social media platform is built in a different contextual framework. Based on how that framework is set up (e.g. Instagram is very photo-oriented, LinkedIn is very business-oriented, etc.), different people almost undoubtedly are spending different amounts of time online on the platforms that matter the most to them.
If you put all your eggs in Facebook’s basket, you might be missing a giant segment of your ideal customers. The problem with this is that if they don’t know who you are, they never have the opportunity to do business with you. Because of this, it’s very wise to examine the likely behaviors and habits of your ideal potential clients and take steps to make sure you are everywhere they are, ensuring you have the maximum opportunity to potentially one day do business with them.
Facebook Does Not Belong To You
Finally, if the increased spend to get in front of your ideal potential clients doesn’t bother you, you aren’t worried about struggling with compelling enough ad copy and imagery to grab the attention of your ideal potential customers, and you’re fairly certain they all actually regularly use Facebook, perhaps this simple fact is enough to give you pause. You do not own Facebook. Not only do you not own it, but you also have no say in what their policies are going to be. They could suddenly one day make up their minds that you can no longer run ads on their platform to get leads (Remember the Special Ads Categories rolled out a year or so ago?)
While Facebook doesn’t look like they’ll ever be in a position where they would go out of business, if your digital ad strategy revolves only around Facebook’s ad platform, and you’ve invested all your time, money and energy into building up your lead funnels only there, you are in an extremely disadvantaged position. One simple policy change is all it could take to severely damage the health of your business.
Platforms You Can Use To Diversify Your Digital Marketing Strategy
So as you can see, there are some very compelling reasons why you would want to extend your mortgage brokerage’s digital marketing efforts past Facebook alone. There are some great platforms to consider and we’d like to share three of our favorite ones with you.
Instagram Ads
Instagram will not only allow you to share images and videos online with users, but it will also allow you to boost lead generation with social network ads that convert like crazy. Besides the typical captions associated with Instagram posts, they often have descriptions of images that contain clickable links as well. Now you might be saying, “doesn’t Facebook own Instagram?”. While this is true, it’s still important. Instagram has:
- 300 million monthly active users
- 75 million daily users
- An average of 70 million photos posted every single day
- The “like” button gets clicked 2.5 billion times a day
- 41% of users are aged between 16-24, while 35% of users are aged between 24-34
The key to building a solid digital ad strategy on Instagram is to create cool content that drives people to want to pay attention to your posts and stories and even click on your bio to learn more about you. For instance, perhaps you decide to build awareness and traffic. You are going to do a contest where you give away a gift certificate to a local restaurant in your area. You could post a photo of a local landmark, but blur the photo in a photo editing tool such as Photoshop to make it hard to figure out. You could ask people to click the call to action button in the ad which will lead them to a landing page where they will enter in their name, email address and the answer to what they think the photo is. You randomly draw a winner from all the correct answers that come in, and voila! For the cost of a dinner for two, you’ve generated tons of leads for your database that you can start marketing to.
Check out our full breakdown of Instagram Ads for Loan Officers here.
Setting up ads for Instagram is easy. You can actually do it directly in the Facebook Ads Manager you are currently using to run your Facebook Ad Campaigns. The trick to doing this is just to turn off all the ad placements that are Facebook, or Audience Network related and only leave the Instagram placements checked.
YouTube Ads
YouTube is the third largest social media channel as far as users are concerned. In fact, as far as search is concerned, it’s got more searches than Yahoo, Bing and Explorer combined. It has an amazing audience that allows you to really maximize your Mortgage Company’s brand exposure and engagement that puts it in a category of its own. If you’ve ever spent even a second on Youtube, you’ve undoubtedly watched countless ads that run before the actual video you want to watch, so you know that when it comes to YouTube, ads are what it’s all about.
It’s actually easier to run ads on YouTube than you think. First, you’ll start by creating a video ad. Let’s say for instance that mortgage rates have dropped and you want to create an ad talking about why now is the perfect time to refinance a home loan. Record your ad and then once you’ve edited it, upload it to YouTube. Next you want to configure your campaign. If you’ve been following our articles you’ve already built out client personas, so all you need to do is choose people in the YouTube ad manager that have similar interests and characteristics as those detailed in your personas. Client personas are semi-fictional stories about your ideal clients. Personas include things like where your ideal client works, their educational background, where they hang out and absorb content online, their goals, challenges and pain points and what type of gurus they follow, publications they read, etc.
Check out our full article on Youtube Ads For Loan Officers here.
Once that step has been completed, you need to select where you want your ad to show. On Youtube, there are six different ad placements you can choose from. Depending on your objective and level of experience with YouTube ads, there are plenty of options and one is sure to meet your exact needs.
Finally, you just need to tell the ad manager which one of your videos you want to run, and you are set. Your ad will now run to people comprised of the characteristics of your ideal clients, every time they search Youtube or watch videos on their platform.
LinkedIn Ads
When people are on LinkedIn, they are generally in a business sense of mind. Not only that, in the past three years LinkedIn has experienced a 50% year over year increase in user engagement. That means that people are posting lots of things on the platform, and users are interacting with it more and more.
Let’s say that you have a “state of the market” report that you want to use to generate leads. LinkedIn’s Campaign Manager makes it easy to do so.
First off, LinkedIn lets you decide if you want to do a self-service or managed campaign. Self-service campaigns allow you to do advanced ad targeting, promote content as sponsored content and even do text-based ads. If you are looking for a little more bang for your buck, you can utilize the managed campaign features where you have the LinkedIn Account Team help you run the campaign. This includes things like Sponsored InMails, Display ads and Dynamic ads.
Their interface in the Campaign manager allows you to easily create your ads and again use your client persona data to build targeted audiences comprised of only those that are most likely your ideal clients. Much like Facebook, you get to set your campaign budget, and as the ad runs, it’s easy to log in, monitor ad performance and optimize your ad as needed.
You can see our full tutorial on LinkedIn Ads For Loan Officers here.
PRO TIP:
The organic reach and engagement on LinkedIn is seriously no joke. If you’ve got a great piece of content that you want to use to generate leads, create a ”LinkedIn Article” posting on your account. You can do so starting in the same spot you would go to make a post. Those articles allow you to put call to action banners inside them and link them to the landing page of your choice. Even better, when you publish a LinkedIn Article, it ends up being searchable by anyone on the platform, extending your reach and increasing the chances of the article going viral, if it’s deemed to be valuable content.
Diversify Your Digital Advertising And Grow Your Mortgage Business
As you can see, there are many compelling reasons to diversify your digital advertising platforms from a safety perspective to ensure that your mortgage business stays strong, no matter what anyone social media platform decides to do regarding their terms of service.
On top of that though, there are plenty of very high traffic, compelling platforms that give you the same tools as Facebook that you can use to your advantage to get in front of more of your ideal prospective clients, get them to engage with your brand and give you more opportunities to close business.
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