If you’re a loan officer, then you might not have spent your life learning marketing.

Why should you? After all, that’s what…marketers are for, right?

Well, sure.

But it doesn’t mean that you can’t benefit from some great marketing tactics yourself.

Everyone who has a business needs to learn how to generate leads. It doesn’t matter if you’re a loan officer or a mortgage marketer.

What is a “lead” for a loan officer?

It’s someone who’s looking for a loan—and also has a high probability of paying off that loan.

That means that you need to achieve two things:

• You need to find the types of people who are already looking for a loan (and thus inclined to seek out your services)
• You need to find someone who will also be a high-quality customer—i.e., a perfect candidate for your services

How do you achieve both?

Here’s an introductory guide to help:

Understand the Need of Your Target Market

Want to land your site in front of more leads?

Then it comes down to one question:

Where are they searching for you online?

As a loan officer, you probably have a clear idea of who you want to target. You know what types of people tend to come seeking out a loan from you.

For instance, if a majority of your business comes from people seeking conventional mortgages for their first home purchase, then you know that your leads might tend to be younger professionals who are just getting started on their real estate journey.

The challenge comes in taking this knowledge and applying it to a marketing strategy that works for you.

Here are a few ways you can begin to capture potential leads immediately:

• Online marketing. Using advertising with Facebook and popular search engines like Google and Bing, you can immediately target the types of keywords that your potential leads are using to find your business.
• Landing pages. Do you have a landing page on your site that speaks specifically to your target market? If you don’t, avoid the “generalist” approach. You might think that you serve a larger market by keeping things vague and not narrowing your focus, but instead you’re being nothing-to-everybody rather than giving value-to-somebody. You want to be the kind of loan officer who does more of the latter.
• Sales funnel. Do you have a proper sales funnel? Are you able to map your potential lead’s journey from visiting your site into becoming a genuine lead for your loan services?
• A call to action. One of the reasons many loan officers don’t get the leads they could otherwise get? They don’t create urgency with the call to action. They might leave a phone number and say “to learn more, call us.” How boring. Sure, you want to communicate that you’re a real loan officer and that you have a phone number. But you need to create psychological urgency if you’re going to encourage more leads to actually find out if you’re the right loan officer for them. More on that later.

Marketing Concepts Specific to Loan Officers: Building Trust

While there are some marketing concepts that work universally for everyone—concepts like creating value or creating actionable Calls to Action—there are some that you really want to focus on as a loan officer.

Primary among them: building trust.

As a loan officer, your business is built off of the largest transactions of your clients’ lives. They’re not making an impulse purchase when they choose to work from you. It’s not like adding a pack of gum to their grocery bill.

Getting a loan is a big deal for them.

You need to have trust.

Now, that’s a great thing to say. But a different thing to accomplish.

How do you generate trust when you’re essentially trying to attract leads from people you didn’t know before?

There are a few tools you should employ:

• On-target copywriting. When you create a landing page specific to your audience, you want to first build trust by making it clear that you have them in mind. That’s where it becomes most important to write headlines and calls to action that specifically target your audience. Write about what they care about. What kinds of loans they’re looking for.
• What does your site look like? Is it the type of site that a professional, highly trusted loan officer might actually publish? Or is it dated? Obsolete? Hard to use? Hard to navigate? Demonstrate that you’re trustworthy by building a web presence that looks like something a professional loan officer would actually use.
• Create a story. Let’s learn about you. Sure, you might want to funnel leads to your call to action as soon as possible. But they should have the option of learning more about you. Create an online social media presence that highlights your professionalism. Show that you’re trustworthy; don’t just tell people.

Overcoming the Potential Objections of Leads

As detailed in our book The Mortgage Marketing Manifesto, you’ll often hear a common objection that leads may have with loan officers:

“I already have a loan officer I’m working with.”

If you’ve never stopped and considered that there may still be ways to achieve a lead in the face of such an objection, your instinct is to give up.

To say, “well, that’s it. They already have a loan officer.”

But it’s time to reframe that problem not as decisive, but as a challenge.

Now, we’re not going to tell you that you have to hound leads until they say yes.

That’s not what this is about.

You have to take things in context: a potential lead is still talking to you because they do have some amount of interest.

It’s your job to frame it in such a way that you can still be the loan officer of choice.

You might say, “that’s no problem—I think you should explore every option.”

The point is not to object to this.

Not to paint other loan officers as bad, dumb, or immoral.

Instead, approach things from the proper frame: that it’s perfectly all right if your lead explores you as an option.

Because it is.

It’s not immoral to explore one’s options when it comes to loan officers.

But many leads don’t get to that point psychologically. Why?

Because the potential loan officers hear “I already have a loan officer” and assume it means a rejection.

And it doesn’t necessarily.

Make sure that when you do capture leads, you don’t immediately turn them away by assuming that every objection is also a rejection.

Making Leads Work for You

When you build a sustainable, lead-generating online presence, it’s like automating one aspect of your business: marketing. You can continually bring in new leads with a website that’s optimized for your sales funnel. But only if you have the infrastructure in place.

To accomplish that, we recommend that you try out leadPops on our free trial basis. Not only will it introduce you to the marketing concepts you’ve read about here, but it will provide the web structure you need to turn more visitors into genuine leads.