The 3 step educational marketing process

Check out an excerpt from a new book on broking by Mortgage Australia Group's managing director, David Ham.

The 3 step educational marketing process

Below is an excerpt from Chapter 20 of Mortgage Broking: Lead Generation and Sales Mastery by author and managing director of Mortgage Australia Group, David Ham. The whole book is freely available here.

In Mortgage Broking there is a marketing process that works if you take the time and effort to create it.

As Brokers what we want is to get the attention of as many people as possible and get the necessary time to build trust with them by continuing to provide them useful information or resources, all based on your position as an authority in home loans specific to their circumstances.

The basic formula is this:

  1. Identify their specific needs relevant to home loans.
  2. Give them a substantial item of educational value relevant to their needs that immediately positions you as an authority and gets you permission to keep in touch with them.
  3. Send them regular information targeted to those needs to keep building both ability trust and personal trust, with occasional sales messages to make it clear you are there to help them when they are ready.

This process is similar whether it is a client you are trying to win over, or to create a formal referral relationship with a real estate agent, accountant, financial planner or any other potential source of home loan clients.

One of the biggest mistakes Brokers make is not having an educational follow-up system to drop clients into who aren’t ready to act right now. Sure, once in a while you will meet someone who just wants to get a loan right now and you are in the right place at the right time.

But more often, people haven’t even considered they want a loan yet, or worse, they have just gotten one from some other Broker. What we want to do is to get in front of them before they even know they need us, then give them as much time as they need to build trust with us by providing them valuable information and resources.

An example of the importance of maintaining contact in a meaningful way with your clients is from a marketing campaign I ran that involved giving away a 50 page long, free report about refinancing. This was then followed by a sequence of automatic emails also about refinancing, flowing on from the report. The whole campaign was demographically targeted and written with a specific audience in mind.

The end result was that we settled 43 loans, totalling $15.74 million from that campaign.

There were no outgoing calls from me to people who had downloaded the report. I just waited for them to receive enough emails with further information about refinancing that they would decide to contact me.

When they did make contact, they were a lot more predisposed to use us than were people who just came through our website or had simply responded to an advertisement.

Of significance is that only a very small percentage contacted me as soon as they got the free report. In most cases, it took around 6 weeks, meaning they had received several educational follow-up emails from me.

The lesson was clear, a strong educational lead item such as a free report or book is just the starting point. Yes, it allows you to begin a conversation with a good first impression, but you need to keep giving relevant educational information to build trust over time.

One-hit marketing is wasteful and ineffective. Even if you do get a good response from your initial lead item, co-ordinated follow-up will improve the results. Doing anything less is just leaving money on the table.