Use targeted marketing to increase your reach and your business

Joy Gendusa, founder and CEO, PostcardMania

As published in Scotsman Guide's Residential Edition, May 2012.

Oftentimes, business owners have misconceptions about what marketing is. They see it as some kind of lead-generating slot machine: Sometimes it works, other times it’s just a waste of money. But you can use marketing systematically to grow your mortgage business — and it doesn’t have to be a gamble.

When deployed properly, the right marketing will increase your business. Here are four steps to writing more mortgages.

1. Identify your market

The first step is to isolate your target market. This step often is the reason that some people think marketing is like playing the slots. If you skip this step, your marketing will be hit or miss. But, if you are diligent about this step, your marketing will be a consistent source of new leads.

To identify your target market, go back through your client list. What types of people have gotten mortgages through you? Are they older people? High-income wage earners? Low-income families? Businesses? More than likely, there are multiple markets that you have serviced in the past. Make sure you go through your client records carefully to figure out which group generated the most income for you, and target that group first.

Once you have some success with your first targeted market, your income will be higher and you can begin to set aside more money for marketing. With that extra budget, you can target some of the other groups that you know have brought you business in the past, and so on. This creates a profit cycle that can continue until you’ve maximized your company’s capabilities.

2. Select profitable products

Next, identify the products that create the most income for you. It may be that the products you sell for the highest commissions also are the hardest to sell. If that’s the case, focus your marketing on the easiest-to-sell product with the broadest market base. Then, when you have steady income coming in from that product, move on to more lucrative products.

Or it may be that you have a product for which it is particularly hard to qualify. In this case, you can get a list of the prospects in your area who qualify for that product and promote the fact that they qualify.

Either way, the key is to get the ball rolling with the low-hanging fruit of your business. These are the customers who will be the easiest to get and the quickest to close. Then you can move on to more profitable markets.

3. Promote to your market

When it comes to targeted marketing — especially for the mortgage industry — postcard marketing is the way to go.

The key to a successful postcard marketing campaign is a highly specialized mailing list. You already know exactly who to target (thanks to step one), and now all you have to do is get a mailing list of those types of people. The right direct-mail postcard company can help you with this.

Once you have the list, you must mail to it — consistently. Without consistent mailings, you may not see results. With consistent mailings, you are sure to see results. If you have the right list of prospects, the more you mail to them, the more likely they are to respond. This is especially true of the mortgage industry, where the product isn’t necessarily needed all the time.

4. Follow up

When your mailings go out, you will receive calls from interested prospects. At this point, the postcards have done their job. They aren’t going to close anybody — that’s your job. So you must have an efficient way to gather the contact information of your new leads and follow up with them.

To make sure you get all the information you need, create a new caller sheet. This can be just a sheet of paper that contains the questions that you need prospects to answer, such as name, phone number, e-mail address and how they heard about you (so you can track your marketing efforts). Have a stack of these sheets by the phone so that whoever answers knows exactly what information to get from a prospect upfront.

After you have a prospect’s information, the easiest and cheapest way to follow up is with e-mail marketing. E-mail marketing companies offer a system known as e-mail autoresponders. These are a preset number of automatic e-mails that get sent to your prospects once they are entered into the database. This helps keep your company in front of prospects and warm them up to be closed.

• • •

The process is pretty simple: Go through your records to define exactly who your ideal prospects will be. Then, develop a direct-mail postcard campaign (with a specialized mailing list) to promote to that target market. Finally, once you have some steady leads coming in, make sure to follow up with those leads.

The odds are, if you have enough new leads coming in, some of them are bound to close. All you have to do is stick to the plan, and you will increase your revenue and income. It may sound simple, but not enough business owners are willing to take the initial risk of paying for marketing. If you do — and if you are consistent about it — you will see positive results.

 

Joy Gendusa is the founder and CEO of direct-mail marketing firm PostcardMania. The company, started in 1998, offers full-service postcard marketing, website design and development, e-mail marketing, and results evaluations. In 2010, PostcardMania reached more than $19 million in annual revenue. The company now employs more than 190 people and has more than 45,000 customers in more than 350 industries. Visit postcardmania.com. Reach Gendusa at Joy.Gendusa@postcardmania.com or (800) 628-1804.