For the mortgage industry, Lead Generation is an important first step in the sales process. It creates awareness about your name, company, or brand, and pulls potential customers into the beginning stages of the sales funnel.

Whether you are a loan officer, mortgage processor, or consultant, it is useful to have an understanding of how lead generation benefits your business, and how it works.

Here are 4 key tips on how to generate leads for mortgage brokers and start a mortgage lead generation program:

What do you do once you're generating leads?

1. KNOW YOUR AUDIENCE (AKA. KNOW YOUR FISH)

First of all, you have to know your audience. If you don't know anything about the customers you are trying to target, you won't be able to connect with them. 

Some good questions to ask in order to learn more about your audience in relation to your business are:

• What goals and problems do my customers have and how am I going to solve them?

• How are my customers influenced in their decision making? What would most interest them?

• What channels does my target audience use the most (eg. social media, phone, etc.)?

Use the data and information you find from your research to decide your marketing campaign's voice and imagery that you are going to use to reach your audience. 

2. USE DIFFERENT CHANNELS 

The more channels you use, the more opportunities mortgage leads have to find you. Here are just a few to get you started.

• A clean, updated, and responsive website that is easy to navigate 

• Company blog (content marketing)

• Email marketing

• Social media (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google +, Instagram)

• Print media 

• Trade shows

3. BE EDUCATED

In today's modern world, industries and marketing methods are changing rapidly to meet customer demands. In the past decade alone, marketing has shifted from an outbound marketing focus, to an inbound marketing focus, where customers are finding companies and not the other way around. Keeping up with topics or changes within your industry, and understanding the changing customer needs and demands, can help keep your company stay on top. 

4. CONNECT CONNECT CONNECT

Networking is crucial to the success of any company or individual, and is an essential part of building both success and wealth. For people in the mortgage industry, here are some people you might want to think about connecting and partnering up with:

• Real estate agents or companies

• Accountants

• Appraisers

• Carpet cleaners

• Credit repair agencies 

• Lenders

• Property managers

• Relocation companies