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By
by Karen Hall, director of 101 Things
It might not be as sexy as Instagram or Facebook, but there is an enormous and often overlooked opportunity for mortgage brokers to use LinkedIn to create revenue and partnerships to grow their businesses.
Brokers that do are touting some incredible successes, writing millions of dollars a month off the platform and creating lucrative referral partnerships.
LinkedIn is essentially a business equivalent of Facebook. If Facebook is the ‘dinner party’, LinkedIn is a ‘business meeting’. And whilst that might sound drab (no-one ever wished they could spend more time in meetings!), it’s actually the professional personality of the platform that gives it extra cred and can help you reach an entirely different audience to the ‘dinner party’ crowd.
Mortgage brokers who are embracing LinkedIn are creating both prospecting and referral partner opportunities without the need to advertise, which is a pretty compelling proposition.
On top of this, they’re also staying in touch, and top of mind, with their customers and partners on the platform at the same time, killing two birds with one stone.
To emulate the success of these brokers, it’s important to understand the platform and how to engage with it effectively. Here’s a quick guide to get you started:
1. LinkedIn success is so much more than posting and waiting. Successful mortgage brokers share their stories and expertise, but they also invest time to like, comment and share other people’s content and build relationships in the process. Termed the ‘Dopamine effect’, your engagement in other people’s content both shows up in their feed and gives them a pleasure/reward sensation. Think about your SME and self-employed target market, as well as your referral partners.
2. Bigger isn’t always better. You might have thousands of LinkedIn connections, but are they all your ‘target’ market? Using LinkedIn filters, you can find your target potential leads and referral partners to connect with. Remember - like, comment and share their content before you ‘sell’ anything! We advocate a 3:1 rule - 3 likes, comments or share touches before any business engagement.
3. Step it up. Sales Navigator takes LinkedIn one step further to help you easily tag leads and prioritise their posts into a separate feed, so if you have thousands of connections, and only a few hundred of these are prospects or referral partners, Sales Navigator helpfully creates a separate news feed of these these posts, saving you a tonne of time to scroll through and engage with them. Sales Navigator is a subscription service, but your time is also valuable and the cost might just be worth the investment.
4. Grow your database. Not many brokers know that you can also export your LinkedIn connections to bolster your database, just ensure you have the requisite permissions to market to them.
As well as these key guidelines, your own profile needs to be ‘business-meeting’ ready. 95% of Mortgage broker LinkedIn profiles we see are underdone, which means you are selling yourself short and not optimising your credibility and trust. Our seven top tips for standing out on LinkedIn are:
1. Add a custom image behind your photo that says, in two seconds, what you do
2. Update your Title to include keywords, so people can find you more easily
3. Personalise your LinkedIn name, ie change Mark-2a938356 to .../mortgagebrokersuburb
4. Revise your About copy, to be more benefit focused for your customers
5. Add Media (think brochures, presentations, videos), again include keywords in titles and descriptions of each media upload
6. Update your Experience - you guessed it - keywords!
7. Ask for Recommendations, for extra credibility
Australian Broker spoke to one mortgage broker who uses LinkedIn to its fullest.
Bernard Desmond from Feedback Finance said, “If you know your target market you can go after prospecting on LinkedIn easily. I’ve worked very closely with real estate agents and financial planners and accountants. You can really make a connection with the people within these industries and start a dialogue and make them familiar with yourself without hard selling yourself.
“It’s been strategic from the beginning, I’ve been a big advocate of I would rather have 10 good referrers who have 500/600 other clients. If someone is a trusted adviser already they have got the relationship with the client and if they’re referring me to the consumer it’s better, I don’t have to go hard sell myself.
“I’m not selling anything on LinkedIn. My conscious effort on any social media platform is you’ll never see me selling that I do home loans. All I’m doing is celebrating customer’s wins and the people who are in my connections know what I do for a living.
“I’m not hard selling, I’m becoming that trusted adviser so that when they need one I get this business which is uncontested.”
