Mortgage marketing can be a tough business. Customers are expensive to find and acquire—and once they land on your page, there’s no guarantee that they’ll choose you. Although you might have a decent sized advertising budget, the number of dollars you spend is no guarantee of future results.

Ultimately, it comes down to generating leads and successfully converting them into customers.

If you’re not doing that, no amount of blank marketing checks are going to grow your company. You need to make an investment in mortgage marketing that doesn’t only get you seen by more eyes, but gives those potential customers an engaging sales funnel to interact with that ultimately converts them into genuine leads.

If you’ve noticed a massive amount of money spent on marketing and no growth to show for it, here are a few reasons why you might be coming up short:

Reason #1: Your Mortgage Marketing Isn’t Interesting Enough

According to CBS News, people view as many as 5,000 ads on a daily basis. That’s a heck of a lot of clutter to cut through.

True: your mortgage marketing efforts might already be tailored specifically to a certain type of crowd. Maybe you’ve successfully honed your audience down to people who are actively searching for mortgages. That hard work, in and of itself, can often be enough to generate leads.

But it hasn’t been enough, has it?

In addition to competing with other mortgage lenders, you’re competing with the innate “advertising filter” that every customer has built up after a lifetime of experiencing frequent ads. They’re focused on their problem and their attention only lights up when they see something worthy of their interest.

It comes down to this question: are you worthy of their interest?

If you want to be more interesting, you’re going to have to realize that every other mortgage marketing “expert” on earth is already doing what you’re doing: writing the same old ad copy, using the same old lead conversion generators, and doing barely enough to get noticed online.

When one converted lead yields you thousands of dollars, you can sometimes afford to get away with this.

But if you want real growth, you need to get more interesting—in a hurry.

Reason #2: Your Landing Page Doesn’t Engage Potential Leads

Is someone who clicks onto your page a “lead”?

Many mortgage marketing professionals might tell you that clicks = success…

But let’s think about this for a second: Time Magazine reports that you have about 15 seconds before someone decides to click “back.”

Is someone who merely lands on your site really a “lead,” or are they just another pair of eyes?

If you’ve noticed high traffic on your website but a low conversion rate, you need to optimize the next step in your personal sales funnel: you need your landing page to engage these potential leads and draw them in. Usually, you can do this in a number of ways:

• Give your audience something relevant to them. A lead generation page with a mortgage calculator is going to keep countless clicks for more than 15 seconds. Why? Because the page is no longer about everyone else—the second they start using the calculator, the page becomes about them and their current situation. That’s engaging, but remember: to make it work, you need to couple it with an interactive lead generation form, otherwise, people playing around with your mortgage calculator won’t do you any good.
• Give your audience something they can use. It’s not enough to have a customizable tool. The Internet is full of these. If you’re going to keep their attention long enough to turn them into a lead, you need to actively give them something useful. Something they might bookmark. Something they might share with someone they know who’s in their exact situation. We’ll get into specifics later, but think: videos, webinars, eBooks, infographics — stuff like that will go a lot further than just your typical canned mortgage website content.
• Give your audience something they can use…right away. With only 15 seconds to grab their attention, you need to make sure that they can actually use your landing page for their benefit. Is your landing page mobile-accessible or does it look flat when used on a smartphone? These are the questions that make the difference for more leads than you might realize.

Getting the audience “in the house” isn’t enough in the world of mortgage marketing. Funneling has to be relevant, effective, and creative enough to stand out from the competition.

Reason #3: Nothing About Your Mortgage Marketing Says “Relationship”.

Let’s be clear here: we’re talking about mortgages. We’re not talking about selling simple widgets or mall plastic toys. Your leads are interested in making long-term financial commitments. In order to do that, they’re going to need to feel comfortable with you.

If everything about your mortgage marketing suggests that you view them just as another sale and not as a human being that you can help, they’re going to be turned off.

Entrepreneur.com recommends letting customers know what you’re doing for them. What is it about you that separates you from the other mortgage marketing teams out there? And how can you demonstrate that you’re interested in created a customer-business relationship, not simply squeaking out another sale for the quarter?

There are a few ways you can demonstrate how earnest you are about working with your customers:

• Social media engagement. Does your lead conversion funnel plug into social media like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn? In the social media age, your willingness to reach out on these platforms shows that there are real people on the other end of the line.
• Tracking & reporting. Tracking your leads and breaking them down by interest helps you tailor your newsletter campaigns to their specific tastes. This prevents you from sending out the same exact form letter to each and every customer and gives your communications the personal touch that mortgage customers need to experience.
• Integrating with CRM solutions. If you already have a Customer Relationship Management solution, then your sales funnel needs to integrate with that solution. Otherwise you’re simply asking for potential customers to get lost in the shuffle.

Mortgage marketing isn’t easy. It’s a business in which you need to find customers who are at a very specific point in their lives.

There are no “impulse buys” here.

In order to ensure that you’re acquiring the customers that you need and engaging with them all the way to converting them into customers, you need a solution that’s tailored to your specific mortgage solution. With leadPops, you can have the integrations, tracking, and reporting you need to use real lead generators that engage with potential customers.

If you’re interested in leadPops, try a 30-day trial to see the difference between mortgage marketing and mortgage marketing that actively brings in new leads.