Business has been booming in the mortgage industry as purchase and refinance application volumes hit all-time highs over the past year. While there’s no shortage of work, there’s still plenty of competition. As a loan officer or a mortgage broker, marketing is your lifeline to bringing in new business; however, one of the biggest problems that mortgage professionals face is running a successful mortgage content marketing campaign.
Effective content marketing is all about consistency and knowing your target audience — but as a busy mortgage professional, coming up with new content ideas can sometimes be a challenge.
How to Source Content Ideas
Content marketing is definitely worth exploring, considering content marketing generates three times as many leads as traditional marketing, while costing 62% less. However, you need a strategy.
You can post and promote anything you want, but it doesn’t mean people will find it, let alone read it. You need to decide the following:
1. What does your target market need?
2. What does your target market like?
There are several methods used by content marketers to answer these questions. Content creation can be a challenge, but it doesn’t need to be if approached correctly.
Keyword Research
Learning how to properly do keyword research is a fundamental part of search engine optimization (SEO). It involves identifying popular words and phrases that people are typing into search engines. Keyword research can reveal keywords to target, the popularity of these keywords, their ranking difficulty and much more. By knowing what people are searching for, you can customize your content around these topics.
Here are some steps you can take to start doing basic keyword research:
1. Brainstorm a list of ‘seed’ keywords.
Seed keywords are short, general words used to define the mortgage industry. Think about what people would type into Google to find what you offer. This process should only take a few minutes.
2. What keywords do your competitors rank for?
Look at what keywords are sending traffic to your competitors. You can do this by searching for your seed keywords and seeing what ranks at the top of the page. You can also use the autosuggest feature while searching Google.
3. Use keyword research tools.
You can also use keyword research tools that offer insight into how often certain words or phrases are searched and how they have been used over time. There are plenty of tools to choose from — Google Keyword Planner, Semrush and Ahrefs to name a few.
Scout Out the Competition
What content are your competitors posting that gets lots of clicks, likes and shares? What are people responding to the most? Keep in mind, looking at the content your competitors are publishing doesn’t mean you should copy what they are doing.
Look at popular content from your competitors and think of where you can add more value. Can you expand on that topic and improve it? Do readers still have questions? You want to provide as much valuable information as you can for your audience.
Social Media
What mortgage content are people engaging with on social media platforms? This can be comments, likes or shares. Keep an eye on hashtags or see if any mortgage topics are trending. You can also connect with your audience through social media polls by asking targeted questions.
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Identify Trends
As a mortgage professional, you need to keep pace with the industry by monitoring a variety of channels for trending topics and news. A trending topic is often something popular with the general public. These topics are typically heavily searched for a limited amount of time. It’s not unusual for real estate or mortgage topics to be trending, and you can use trending topics to your advantage.
You can use resources relevant to the mortgage and housing market to find the latest industry research or reports. Regularly look through mortgage and real estate publications and well-known research organizations.
This process can also be automated — set up Google Alerts with industry search terms and you can receive results in your inbox. There are also several tools you can use to see what’s trending in the mortgage industry:
- Google Trends: This site studies the popularity of top search queries over time in Google Search across various regions and languages.
- AnswerThePublic: Enter a word or phrase and get a list of synonyms or related terms that people search.
- Buzzsumo: This is a platform that allows users to enter any keyword to find out who ranks and what they’re writing about.
Research-driven content also builds your authority as an industry expert and is one of the first steps towards building trust.
Repurpose Old Content
You’ve identified trending keywords and topics, and put together a piece of content to publish. Congratulations — but what now? You don’t have to start the whole process over with a completely new content idea. You can repurpose your content to get as much value out of that topic as possible and to reach a new audience. Repurposing content is also great for SEO!
For instance, let’s say you have a blog post about the standard home buying process. You can turn the information from that post into an infographic or take a quote and overlay that onto a graphic for social media. You can also take a webinar and repurpose that content into a podcast series.
Start by reviewing your most popular content. What’s performing well? Which content gets the most engagement? See if you have more to say about this topic. Here are some ways to repurpose old content:
1. Create new blog posts. Use the same topic or come at it from a different angle or expand on that topic.
2. Build an infographic. Summarize the data in your blog post with a visual outline.
3. Revamp old blog posts. Things change. While the content in your post may have been 100% accurate, things are always changing in the mortgage industry.
4. Create an email series. You can take the information from your posts and cut it down into a daily or weekly email series to offer your target audience. This is also a great opportunity to collect new leads.
5. Create a podcast or web series. Use your old blog posts, webinars or videos and give your audience some personal insight.
6. Create an ebook. Expand on a topic and publish a short ebook.
7. Host a webinar. Present a topic and engage with your audience.
Remember to link back to your old content! This gives your audience the opportunity to click through your website.
Roundup
Don’t publish content, cross your fingers and hope it works. To grow your mortgage business, you need a game plan to generate topic ideas and to keep your audience engaged. It needs to be researched, created and repurposed, and then published in a way to make sure you don’t run out of mortgage content ideas too soon.
Looking to expand your mortgage business? BeSmartee is here to help! Give us a call at (888) 276-1579 or contact our experts at sales@besmartee.com.
