Free Website Review Consultations
Your company website should be a frictionless expression of your brand. The problems you solve, the benefits you provide, the ways in which you communicate with customers and build value in these connections should all be understood by your visitors. Text-block-explanations and catchy taglines, although important, are only a portion of the tools at your disposal in pursuit of a perfectly conveyed brand message. The images used, overall styling, representation of different market segments, the tone of copy, any implied hierarchy of menu items, and much more can have an impact on the shape your company assumes in a consumer’s mind. If you wish to provide your customers with electronic mortgage options there are most likely myriad User Experience Design improvements that you could be making, as recent studies have found that, despite the completely electronic mortgage application process taking an average of roughly half the time an in-branch application takes, customer satisfaction tends to be lower due to a customer centric experience in-branch and a product-centric design online. Best practices to remedy such problems include providing relevant and timely information to the prospective borrower, ensuring a natural and transparent flow of process, and to continually locate the consumer within the service process (1).
While keeping all these aspects of branding and User Experience Design in mind, an optimized website always keeps a second audience in mind: search engine crawlers (robots that search engines send out to find new or updated content). Consumers are increasingly using search engines to evaluate their mortgage options before reaching out to any originators, with a 2018 study already suggesting that this number was as high as 92% (2). If almost every single one of your prospective customers is Googling mortgage information before they decide on a lender, your brand needs to be visible in this space. There are two ways to go about taking advantage of this concentrated consumer attention, free Search Engine Optimization (SEO), and paid Search Engine Marketing (SEM). SEO tactics are diverse but most revolve around correctly and uniquely labeling relevant and frequently updated content on your website while also building inbound and outbound links. If your SEO program is working correctly, you can actually see an increase in the value of your dollar in SEM, which consists of bidding against your competitors for preferred search positions for selected keywords.
Search engine advertising spending in the US has ballooned from $54.8 billion in 2019 to $95.2 billion in 2022 according to Statista. Search engine use has lowered the cost of search for consumers drastically and this has inevitably resulted across markets in increased price competition. This price lowering dynamic along with the rapidly increasing amount of ad money spent in the paid ad space means that, for excessively margin conscious businesses such as mortgage origination, the benefits of paid search advertising are dwindling (3). This does not mean that you should abandon paid search as a large part of your marketing strategy, but it does mean that you would be remiss to begin putting your marketing dollars toward expensive search advertising campaigns before making sure those dollars are being stretched to their limits with the help of an optimized website.
There have been studies that have found that effective Unique Selling Propositions have a greater effect on generating business in paid search than simply competing for major keywords on price (4). This should serve as a reminder that you cannot lose sight of the core branding decisions discussed in the first paragraph of this blog at any point in the marketing process.
Your branding is paramount, and your website is the cornerstone tool to convey your brand to both consumers and search engines. A well-tuned website can work to increase the effectiveness of your online advertising expenditure across channels and provide a natural path to close for prospective borrowers once their attention has been grabbed.
Spillane Consulting Associates is now offering a Free Website Review service in which experts will interview your marketing personnel, review your website, and provide recommendations and a proposed path forward toward an increasingly effective web presence for your brand. SCA also ensures the complete mortgage industry regulatory compliance of all marketing-related suggestions or implementations.
Please reach out to Bill Dolan, Director at (617) 694-2617 or email at wdolan@scapartnering.com to schedule a free consultation and find out how SCA can help you.
Studies referenced:
(1) Coughlan, J., Macredie, R., & Patel, N. Understanding the consumption process through in-branch and e-mortgage service channels. A first-time buyer perspective. IJBM 29,2. Brunel University, Uxbridge, UK.
(2) Ellie Mae. Connecting with Borrowers Online study
(3) Li, K., Lin, M., Lin, X., Xing, B. Running and Chasing – The Competition between Paid Search Marketing and Search Engine Optimization. 47th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences.
(4) Animesh, A. Viswanathan, S. & Agarwal, R., Competing “Creatively” in Sponsored Search Markets: The Effect of Rank, Differentiation Strategy, and Competition on Performance. Information Systems Research. Vol. 22.
