How Loan Officers Can Set Effective Marketing Goals

You’re probably familiar with the typical marketing goal setting trap – you’re so ambitious with all the tactics and channels you want to try that you end up abandoning many of them in favor of what’s worked in the past.

While there’s nothing wrong with sticking with what’s working in your personal marketing plan, you could potentially be leaving some opportunities on the table.

One other pitfall might be that you try so many channels and tactics but don’t keep track of which one is performing, and which isn’t. That’s why it’s so important to tie your personal marketing goals to business goals.

When it comes to tying marketing goals to business goals, we’re not talking about a generalization like the more I do activity X, the more business I’ll get. We’re talking about setting solid success metrics for yourself to know if a particular marketing activity is worth your time.

To get there, you need to ask yourself these two things:

• What are your business goals?
• Where do your leads come from?

Once you answer these questions, you can define your personal marketing goals. Below we’ll lay out how you can effectively create marketing goals that tie into your business goals and success.

What Are Your Business Goals?

In all likelihood, you start out each year with a set number in mind either of how much business you want to/need to close or how much you want to earn in commission. Having a solid number like that helps you set specific goals, but we can make that target more relatable to your day-to-day operations such as the number of loans you need to close.

To get to the number of loans you need to close to reach that goal, you have to do a bit of math. Start by writing down your commission rate and the average loan amount in your area. Multiply those two together to get how much you earn in commission on average per loan. Now, divide your commission goal by that amount. This is the number of loans you would need to close if you had 100% success rate.

However, we all know the mortgage process doesn’t always go as planned, so you should account for the fallout of loans that come through your pipeline. The fallout rate is about 10%, so multiply the number of loans above by 1.1 to get the number of loans you need to aim to close each year to reach your goal.

To make this number seem a bit less daunting, you can divide it by 12 or 52 to get how many loans you need to close per month or per week.

Where Do Your Leads Come From?

Now that you have how many loans you need to close for the year, month, or week, you can start evaluating where your leads come from. On the same piece of paper you’ve been working on, list how many leads you got from your leads sources last year. These can be referrals from real estate agents or customers, social media, your website, leads groups, or others.

Now, review each channel by its conversion rate. You may have one lead source that has a high volume but if it has a low conversion rate, you might want to re-evaluate it. For example, maybe you have a moderate volume of social media leads but they’re not well-qualified leads, therefore giving you a low conversion rate. In this case, try changing your call-to-action (CTA) to something that will help qualify those leads such as filling out a pre-qual form on your website.

After evaluating each channel, identify if there are any lead sources you could stop spending time on like a local newspaper partnership or any small streams that aren’t paying off. Then select one or two lead sources you would like to increase because the conversion rates are good. Take note of what kinds of marketing activities you do for each of those sources, if they’re scalable, and any other tactics you could try to increase the volume of leads from that source while still maintaining the quality of those leads.

Establish Your Marketing Goals

You now know how many loans you need to close as well as the lead sources you’d like to improve. From there, you can define your personal marketing goals and your key performance metrics (KPI).

We find that having a personal marketing goal statement rather than a line item can help tie everything together. For example, let’s say you want to increase the number of leads you get through your community events lead channel by 5% this year. Here’s how you’ll do it and what your measurements for success will be:

I want to increase my events lead channel by 5% this year by holding more events and increasing my promotional activities around the events. To do this, I will hold 10 events, and for each event I will:

• Promote the event on social media 3 times leading up to the event.
• Post at least 1 video or 1 image after the event to show the value of the event.
• Add all collected leads to my CRM and follow up with each lead no later than one week after the event.

With these key steps laid out, it’s now easy to see what you need to do to reach a 5% increase rather than not laying out a plan on how to achieve that marketing goal.

Do this exercise with each lead source you want to improve and then you’ll be ready to move into how you’ll market to your leads.

Wrap Up

While this might seem like a cumbersome process, you’ll find that putting in the groundwork to define your business goals, evaluate your lead sources, and associate marketing goals to your business goals will help you succeed in your origination efforts.

Want to learn more about tying marketing goals to business goals? Download our NEWEST eBook, 4 Steps to Successful Marketing for Loan Officers, now!