You can’t beat Facebook when it comes to seeing a return on your advertising investment. However, a lot of loan officers, especially those transitioning from a referral-based business to building their sales pipeline, make mistakes that cut into their bottom line.
Let’s look at the five biggest mistakes loan officers make with Facebook ads.
1. Funneling leads into a broken sales system
As with any type of online marketing, Facebook ads can’t fix a broken sales system. Do not confuse marketing with sales. Marketing brings in leads. Great marketing brings in the number of leads you need to hit your sales goals. But no amount of leads will yield those results if you can’t close deals.
Make sure before you run one Facebook ad, you have a clear path for prospects that leads them from awareness to conversion. This means you need a system for tracking leads, following up, having a proven sales script, and asking the right questions that build trust.
2. Not being patient enough
Another big mistake loan officers make is they try Facebook ads and after two weeks or a month, and declare, “Facebook ads don’t work.” Keep in mind, the average sales cycle for loan officers is 6-18 months.
As much as we’d love online ads to automatically fill our bank accounts, it takes time and hard work to build that long-term sales pipeline. No online marketing program — no matter how good their promises sound — can compress 6-18 months down to 30 days.
Again, if you’re thinking, “my average sales cycle is much faster than that,” it’s likely because you’ve been working with a lot of referrals. Remember, referrals are already months along in the process before their friend introduces them to you. The successful sales process for referrals is much different from the successful sales process for cold leads.
3. Launching ads that attract the wrong people
If you’re wondering what to say in your Facebook ads, you might start looking at examples of the kinds of ads other loan officers run. And you will likely see ads promoting “0% financing,” “no credit check,” or “no credit score is too low.”
Before you start following suit, consider who these types of ads attract. They attract the wrong types of leads: people who don’t qualify and are desperately filling out applications trying to find someone who will give them financing. Therefore, use your surveys to filter and qualify prospects so that you can focus on the ones that have higher intent.
Think about how you can start targeting higher-caliber clients. For example, veterans, health care professionals and first responders often have good DTIs. But you won’t attract them with ads promising “no down payment required.”
4. Not leveraging partnerships
You can use Facebook ads to bring in leads directly. But another powerful way to spend your marketing dollars is on developing strong partnerships. Consider how the average loan officer attempts to build relationships with real estate agents. They cold call 50 agents on a Monday morning and promise that they will pick up the phone and respond to emails. In other words, they promise to do their jobs.
You can stand out from the average loan officer by forming real relationships with real estate professionals. What if you could help them add an additional $30k in commissions by referring them pre-approved buyers that are ready to go shopping for homes?
Now, if I’m a real estate professional, I’m listening. You’ve just answered the question, “What’s in it for me?”
5. Abandoning the ads you create
Finally, another big mistake loan officers make with Facebook ads (and marketing in general) is not analyzing ad performance. The only way to know if your marketing efforts are working is to choose your metrics and measure them.
When checking your progress, pay attention to: ad frequency, click-through rate, conversion rate, number of leads generated, ad performance by type and placement, clicks by interest.
Regularly monitoring your ads lets you know whether your ad is “working” and where you need to make adjustments. Data is king when it comes to marketing. Don’t forget to check your data.
For your marketing money, you can’t do better than Facebook, but you’ve got to be a smart user. Avoiding these five mistakes will get your revenues moving in the right direction.
