Total Expert sat down with Adwerx Director of Business Development Keith Strombotne to talk about the latest trends and challenges loan officers are seeing and why scalable, personalized ads are critical in today’s landscape.
Can you tell us why personalized ads are important, what key challenges they solve, and why brand-compliant ads are challenging to create in this highly regulated industry?
Loan officers who aren’t advertising themselves digitally are falling behind their competitors. The savviest loan officers know the importance of capturing attention from consumers where they’re spending their time, and today that’s online, with 97% of homebuyers using the internet during their search process. That, combined with the importance of building and maintaining a strong brand—one that your customers recognize and trust—emphasizes the importance of a digital marketing strategy. Loan officers need to lean into this marketing, and not shy away from it if they want to generate new loan opportunities or stay engaged with past customers.
Adwerx helps by providing brand-compliant advertising that is targeted to the right people, at the right place, at the right time. A proprietary compliance firewall built into our platform addresses the regulatory challenges that have traditionally prevented mortgage firms from entering the world of digital advertising. Using Adwerx’s compliance approval dashboard allows firms to create a pre-compliant template and also have full control over the final approval of edited ads.
Why did Adwerx partner with Total Expert?
Adwerx and Total Expert are both dedicated to providing powerful technology that enables loan officers to expand their business without lifting a finger, while helping mortgage lenders improve productivity, boost retention, and drive growth across their organization. While Total Expert provides a 360-degree customer record and real-time insights about who’s interested within the database, Adwerx ensures each opportunity within the database is engaged through personalized, targeted ads.
Working together provides value by making the processes more efficient, and leveraging the power of automation helps drive conversions without asking loan officers or their teams to constantly manage the ads.
What differentiates the Adwerx solution from others in the market?
Adwerx is the only digital advertising service designed specifically for mortgage lenders to automate brand-compliant, individualized ads for loan officers and branches so they can deploy digital marketing at scale to reach prospects directly and build brand awareness. The Adwerx platform offers full template control for each firm, providing ads that brand both the loan officer and the lender at the same time. Built-in compliance controls allow users to advertise themselves with little effort, freeing loan officers from the fear that ads won’t meet regulatory or company brand standards.
What success stories have you seen from customers leveraging the solution? What are some examples of the production increases that can be expected?
A study verified by HW Media revealed that producers in “relationship sales” businesses, like mortgage, saw an increase in productivity when using Adwerx to stay on the forefront with their networks. In fact, producers who invested in marketing to their CRM lists were 15% more productive than a similar control group that did not do this type of custom audience advertising. The percentage gain was even higher (24% increase) among those with lower productivity when compared to those with higher base levels of sales, demonstrating how critical these relationships are to producers who are new to their business.
The basis of the study was comparing the results of a producer using Adwerx Sphere Advertising to maintain contact with a database over a multi-year period. Obviously, a big takeaway is not just the use of Adwerx to follow up, but those producers who are committed to delivering a constant stream of messages to their database saw an immediate boost in productivity the year after having invested in the effort to stay in touch.
“The Adwerx and Total Expert integration is really going to boost our digital advertising efficiency. Prior to this functionality, loan officers relied on manually transferring information out of Total Expert and into their Adwerx campaigns. This new integration has been a huge time saver, allowing our loan officers to focus on serving their clients.”
– Jelaire Grillo, Brand Ambassador, Prosperity Home Mortgage
We know lenders lose 77% of their past customers to competitors, so what’s the impact of maintaining the status quo of digital advertising?
The mortgage industry is highly competitive, so loan officers need to figure out how to stand out from the competition and retain their past customers. Digital marketing can help them reach a broader audience, create brand awareness, and bring customers back. It’s also highly cost-effective compared to traditional marketing methods, and more impactful.
Targeting contacts by specific browsing behaviors or locations means loan officers can focus on reaching people who are most likely to need their services.
On average, mortgage lenders face some of the lowest customer retention rates than any other industry. We’re living in a digital world, so focusing on reaching customers where they’re spending time can help improve retention rates.
If lenders and loan officers aren’t leveraging digital ads, consider this:
- 95% of buyers use the internet during their home search process (NAR)
- 56% of homeowners accept the first mortgage rate offer received (LendingTree)
- 85% of U.S. adults own a smartphone (Pew Research)
- 11+ hours spent on screens every day (Nielson)
Whether you’re targetting prospective new borrowers or existing homeowners, Adwerx and Total Expert can help you engage consumers when they start the borrowing journey and keep them engaged until they’re ready to make a mortgage-related decision.
To learn more about Adwerx and how personalized digital ads can help build pipeline and drive growth for your business, visit TotalExpert.com/Adwerx
