Loan Officer Marketing S.O.S.!
Do you know what the word marketing means? Every day hundreds of thousands of loan officers go about their day looking for their next loan. Some have a solid plan in place that quickly identifies their next client. A majority of this group though, struggles and worries about how their next bill will get paid if they don’t find enough business soon.
Would you like to know what members of this group have in common? Most members of this group would have a very hard time describing what marketing is. Could you describe accurately what marketing is? How can we hope to master this multi-facetted art if we don’t even know what it entails? I think you will be surprised by the definition.
The American Marketing Association provides the following definition: “Marketing is an organizational function and a set of processes for creating, communicating, and delivering value to customers and for managing customer relationships in ways that benefit the organization and its stakeholders.”
So what can we take away from this definition and why should we care? Well, the answer to this is simple. Within this definition lies the key to making your marketing programs work.
Let’s begin with the necessary elements of a successful marketing campaign. A successful campaign will contain 3 core elements. Without these elements, it is doomed to failure before it can even get started. These 3 elements are:
1. Strategy
2. Planning
3. Execution
Nothing out of the ordinary there right? Within these 3 categories is contained a powerful approach to creating a successful business that will bring you all of the clients you could ever want. Why wait to find out what this approach is? Here it is:
Start out with the theme that will guide your marketing efforts. While everyone is different, a customer focused theme should run through all of your marketing efforts. My personal choice was “satisfying unfulfilled needs.”
If any of my marketing messages strayed off course, it was cut out of the program. Once you have your theme selected, you need to move forward with determining your strategy. This is the stage that most loan officers either rush through, or skip altogether.
This is a mistake. This step is essential to your success. Before moving on, you need to be able to answer these questions:
• Who are your most likely customers?
• What are their needs?
• What are their emotional influences?
• Where are they likely to be found?
• Where do they go to find information?
• What media do they frequent/rely on?
• What segments can be found within these groups? (Listing/Buyers/FSBO)
• Who is the competition?
• How is the competition marketing themselves?
• What are the competitions strengths and weaknesses?
• What are your strengths and weaknesses?
• How can you make your strengths known?
As you may already have noticed, marketing is about people. Yet many loan officers stumble through their entire careers without ever taking the time to identify who those people are. How can you ever hope to develop a loyal following of clients and referral business if you can’t answer even basic questions about them? How can you develop an effective marketing program that motivates your target to pick up the phone and call you, if you don’t even know who it is you’re trying to motivate?
Many originators seem to think that they can get away with just telling themselves that their target is “anyone who will give me business.” Unfortunately this is a quick way to find yourself with a dry pipeline. If your goal is to earn the income equivalent of a professional, then we need to become professionals ourselves.
A true professional would not need to think over the questions listed above. This step would have been planned out and recorded in writing from day 1. Skipping this step is akin to opening the doors to a retail store without knowing who, if anyone is interested in what you have to sell.
Take a look at the above list of questions. Take the time to methodically review and answer each question. Once you have completed this activity, you will be ready to move on to the next step.
I will cover the next step at a later date in part 2 of this article. In the meantime, you will have plenty of work to do as you discover the answers to these critical questions.
Chad Weber
Average Joe L.O.
www.average Joe L.O.