How Can Your Mortgage Business Effectively Compete — And Win — Online?

Tips for successful digital marketing strategies

Insider

Danielle Michaely

It’s obvious that shopper purchasing patterns have changed dramatically in recent years. At the start of COVID, we jumped 10 years in e-commerce penetration in the United States in just 90 days. Furthermore, the mortgage sector is evolving. It’s no secret to readers of this piece that, in addition to traditional banks, there are more direct-to-consumer brands attempting to target mortgage customers.

Also, when consumers are deciding on a mortgage choice, they go through a lengthy process of obtaining information from websites, getting comments from user forums and opinion sites, and searching social media for other people’s experiences with a company. In today’s highly competitive purchasing environment, this represents a crowded and complicated path-to-purchase for mortgage providers attempting to spark buyers’ interest.

How can banks, nonbank lenders, and other mortgage lenders stand out while focusing and maximizing marketing resources when consumers have more information and options at their fingertips than ever before? They must invest in digital marketing in a smart, efficient, and data-driven manner to remain competitive and avoid losing money by blindly following money-backed corporations with more flexible budgets.

They greatly boost their chances of securing business if they can “divert” consumers’ attention at the correct time on their journey and invest in the proper places to assure return on investment (ROI) — positioning themselves front and center as the best choice over a competitor.

Here are three suggestions for achieving this:

Tie Purchases to Early Funnel Activities

When consumers start their shopping journeys, one of the most effective ways to secure their interest is to do so before they decide where to get their mortgage. This requires an understanding of the first motivators that lead consumers along the path-to-purchase, as well as the capacity to link them to the final conversion and do so in a personalized manner for each segment (e.g., those with low credit scores all the way to high net worth consumers). Mortgage lenders can intervene at the proper stage with information consumers require by identifying the early funnel activities that generate sales, such as consumer behaviors, tendencies, and trigger points.

All Data Sets Should be Included

Some data sets are easy to come by. Mortgage companies, on the other hand, must verify that they are considering all options. As a result, businesses should look for solutions that can assess all data sources, including unstructured data such as mobile and desktop surfing behavior, social activity, and so on. With this information, they’ll be able to get a complete picture of mortgage shoppers, and they’ll be able to nurture leads in a more concentrated way, reducing the likelihood that they’ll interact – and ultimately convert — with a rival.

Use Prescriptive Analytics to your Advantage

Marketers in the mortgage industry must change their mindset from reactive to proactive to prescriptive. This implies shifting from reactive monitoring of competitor and market data to proactively predicting outcomes and prescribing actions using tools like real-time AI-driven analytics. With options like these, they can identify what they need to do to bolster ROI by improving conversions and lowering acquisition costs.

One of the most effective ways to secure their interest is to do so before they decide where to get their mortgage.

Let’s explore this further.

A mortgage company can establish connections using analytics technology that can incorporate complete data sets and early-funnel activities related to purchase. For example, brands in the financial services space, including those who provide mortgages, are forced to pay high acquisition costs when looking to acquire new customers in the intent phase of their journey in comparison to other industries such as real estate, beauty and personal care, health and fitness, etc.

The ability to find correlations between consumers who are taking out a mortgage and buying other products online in close proximity to when they take out a mortgage opens up a window of opportunity for mortgage providers. With this insight, they are able to target these consumers in different industry channels across the acquisition funnel, resulting in a lower overall customer acquisition cost and increased conversions by getting in front of the consumer earlier, but while it matters most.

Here’s another example of the importance of addressing connections between early-funnel activities related to purchase. Analytics have shown that there is a unique online behavior identified for consumers who take a refinance. Lendstart.com (203,000 monthly visitors) is a prominent trigger point for this segment. Consumers who interact with this domain are three times more likely to convert in comparison to more traditional trigger points like Investopedia.com and two times more likely to convert than those that go through Businessinsider.com, for example. With this knowledge, a mortgage lender can focus its marketing dollars and personalized messaging on this website to drive traffic to their business, rather than a competitor’s.

As the path-to-purchase becomes more complicated and consumer shopping patterns become more difficult to follow, mortgage providers need a means to grasp the nuances of shopper journeys in order to influence buying decisions in their favor. With the removal of cookies, this becomes even more difficult.

Using the methods outlined above, mortgage companies can determine how to segment shoppers based on their online behaviors, fully comprehend their journey, and link specific behaviors to other product purchases, allowing them to nurture leads and target shoppers in the most effective way possible — maximizing the ROI of marketing dollars rather than wasting resources and making guesses that aren’t backed up by conversions.

Taking Action

It may appear difficult, but with the right tools, it isn’t. While consumer data platforms (CDP) exist to provide insight into consumer behavior, they only address part of the issue. Mortgage companies require “external” CDPs that can measure what shoppers do before, during, and after online interactions with them, as well as where they go to competitors.

Mortgage lenders can then act based on the information acquired from solutions like these to get the most out of their marketing money. They may be able to do so while simultaneously adhering to increasingly strict privacy regulations, such as GDPR and the California Privacy Act.

If mortgage lenders don’t use available tools to gain visibility into online consumer behaviors and trigger points, they’re missing out on significant opportunities to not only increase sales and conversions, but also reduce acquisition costs, uncover untapped niches, and decrease dropouts and abandonments. Can your business risk this?