July 25, 2016 / BY Admin / no comments

If you’re a loan officer, your time is best spent taking care of clients, networking for new opportunities and maintaining strong relationships with loyal referral partners. You know this. But you also know that looking good in person isn’t enough. Today, you have to look great online too — and that takes time.

Luckily, marketing automation for mortgage loan officers can help win that time back for you.

What’s marketing automation, you ask? In short, it uses technology to consolidate your marketing efforts in one place and streamline the process.

Imagine being able to create, share and analyze your online marketing results in a single location. Sounds a lot better than manually composing and sharing every tweet, email and Facebook post on separate accounts, doesn’t it?

In fact, you can schedule an entire month’s worth of emails, blog posts and social updates in just a couple of hours. In addition to saving you time, other benefits of marketing automation include:

• Saving money – Automation provides an all-in-one fix instead of requiring multiple software solutions to keep your marketing and sales efforts in order.
• Real time updates – You will know the exact minute when a lead takes an action and you can respond immediately while you have their attention, which increases your engagement level with that prospect.
• Lead nurturing – Automation options inform you how far along your leads are in the sales funnel and even makes recommendations on the next steps in nurturing that prospect.

Marketing automation can improve website traffic, lead generation and sales, but you’ll still have to dedicate time to creating the content to share across your channels.

Here’s an example of how it can work:

If you write a handful of blog posts in one sitting, your automation software will allow you to post one piece right away and schedule the remaining articles over the course of the next few weeks. This eliminates the necessity of manually uploading each post one-at-a-time over the coming month.

You can maximize the performance of your blog posts by sharing them via email, which you can automate as well. This will allow you to send the right messages to the right leads at the right time.

If you don’t have the time to dedicate toward writing your content, done-for-you marketing automation solutions for loan officers like OutboundEngine will handle the work for you.

Let’s say someone gives you their email address to download an ebook; you need to send a follow-up email thanking them for their download and for providing their personal information. If you get several downloads, this can become time-consuming and labor intensive.

This is another time when marketing automation comes in handy for loan officers. Most automation platforms allow you to set up workflows based on certain actions taken on your website. You can adjust the system so it will send out multiple emails to thank the user three or four times over the span of a month or two to provide them with your newsletter, promotional email or digest. Don’t worry; this doesn’t require a lot of tech know-how to set up.

Automation software systems like MailChimp have pre-set workflows to make it easy for anyone to schedule the appropriate message for different lead segments. All you need in the email is a short description defining the reason for each message and pertinent links to your content.

Would you like to make your social media marketing easier and faster? Of course, you would. And there are loan officer marketing automation solutions that allow you to post now and well into the future, making your social media marketing less complicated.

If you are posting on Facebook and Twitter on a regular basis and you want to tweet links to your latest blog content over a two-week period or publish status updates about the latest rates, there are a couple of excellent automation software platforms that will accomplish these tasks and make it simple for you.

Buffer and Hootsuite are the most popular social media automation services out there, and they offer an all-in-one automation solution that allows scheduling to all the main networks.

Every mortgage professional needs a Facebook business page. Establishing a presence on Facebook offers an excellent marketing automation opportunity for loan officers. And as a bonus, it gives you a competitive advantage among local competitors.

Facebook’s ad platform allows precise demographic and behavioral targeting and can focus on income, behaviors and interests, as well as geographic location. Before implementing a Facebook ad campaign, make sure you have clear goals in place. When setting up your ad program, Facebook allows you to choose what you want from your ad campaign. This could range from increasing conversions to promoting a particular page or getting people to claim your offer. If you want to capture leads, then your primary goal would be website conversions.

Another excellent source to find motivated buyers and sellers is on Craigslist. When posting an advertisement on Craigslist, your post should paint a story about the property. A headline should inspire the prospect to click on the text and investigate further. Give them what they want by striking their heart and always call them to action by putting “Text us at” or “Are you excited to see more?”, “Email us through the contact button for amazing images,” etc.

Write an advertisement that stands out. Craigslist ads disappear very quickly in populous areas so you will need to re-post them frequently. If you have a particular property you want to feature, consider hiring a professional Craigslist poster to do your advertising for you.

Marketing automation is a real time-saver for mortgage loan officers and it allows for consistent and improved communication with satisfied clients. There are several reasons you should institute a top-notch mortgage marketing automation tool today, including sending timely messages, generating new leads, being available 24/7, offering targeting advice and information, and staying in front of your social media network.