Love it or hate it, Facebook is the number 1 social platform in the United States with roughly 2.93 billion monthly active users.
To compete in a competitive landscape, one must take swift and strategic action to secure prospects and retain current borrowers from competitors. To captivate your audience, you'll want to enchant your customers via Facebook in an engaging and value-driven way.
Before putting resources into executing a strategy, you'll want to address your goals. You can start by asking yourself these questions:
- How can I improve the quality of sales by promoting via Facebook?
- How can I add more value to my organization?
- How do I share my organization's story?
- How can you keep up with your competitors when they seem ahead of the curve?
- How do I track my progress?
If you haven't thought about investing your time in developing a Facebook marketing strategy, we thought we'd give you some tips on how to get started.
Don't Skimp Out On Sharing Your Story
Your brand's narrative is the building block of your organization and your audience's perception of who you are. Carve out a story that will help show your customers who you are and what you do and cultivate a relationship of earned trust.
When creating or updating your Facebook Business (not personal) page, here are a few considerations for add-ons:
- Take advantage of the cover photo - no one wants to see a blank space.
- Pin posts — since you are likely updating your page regularly with fresh content, anything that you deem extremely important should live on top of your feed.
- The "About Us" section is more important than you think — fill out the area thoroughly without trying to glaze it over. Pro tip: make sure to optimize your "preview section."
Get Likes the Old Fashioned Way
Your competitor seems to be drowning in a flurry of new likes and followers by the hour. What are they doing that you are not? Although tempting, we want to sway you away from purchasing an extra handful of leads that might drive you over the thousand-follower threshold.
Why?
Not only will it make it harder for you to understand and connect with the "real humans" that are engaging with your brand, but it will also damage your brand's trust.
Promote Your Page
Unfortunately, hoping and wishing won't increase your followers on Facebook or likes of a post. You'll need to put a little elbow grease and invest some time. You can do so many ways without spending a great deal of time (and obsessing) about a possible outcome.
- Invite your friends — there is a great feature where a simple click of adding "Know Friends That Might Like Your Page" will automatically invite everyone in your network to join in on your page.
- Sharing is caring — cross-promote content on all social networks that will auto-direct them back to your Facebook Business page.
- Promote your page on your website and in all of your marketing emails
Engage with Followers and Know Your Audience
Now that you're starting to see those followers coming through the door, you'd be negligent in relying on those customers to stay a fan of yours without much effort. People expect engagement. Not only will you want to make sure that you respond to comments on content you are publishing, but you'll also want to engage with your community by commenting on other posts.
Another way to interact with your customers is to join in on other groups. It's an excellent opportunity for you to deepen your relationship with your realtor partners simultaneously.
Learn To Become a Content Marketing Maven
It's not news that content marketing is at the forefront of everything we do on a daily basis. But, hammering out valuable content that engages and allures your prospects can be tiresome. To start, begin creating a content calendar so you aren't overwhelmed by everything that needs to get done. You can always set aside some time every week or month or pre-schedule posts.
Here are some great content ideas to get you started:
- Customer-centric posts — share stories of past customers you've worked with. Let them tell the story about what it was like working with you via video testimonials.
- Educational — these are the "value-add" posts where you can educate your borrowers on the lending industry. Just because you're fluent in the language, doesn't mean those reading your posts know the differences in the types of loans offered and why they might apply to them.
- Discuss trends in the industry — keep customers up-to-date on the last industry news (in layman's terms, please).
- Meme it up — we think this one is self-explanatory.
Analyze Data
When trying to crank out content and stay engaged with your customers regularly, it can be hard to remember to analyze your data. But, trust us, this is key for any loan officer to have a successful Facebook marketing campaign.
You'll be able to use this information to see what's working and what's not. This is a heavy topic to dissect, so here are some key metrics to get you started:
Fan Reach: the amount of "fans" who have seen your post.
Organic Reach: how many people you can reach for free on your business page.
Click Thru Rate: the number of people who have clicked on a link.
People Talking About This: when someone reacts to your content — it could be a like, share, mention, etc.
Facebook Marketing for Loan Officers in a Nutshell
We hope this little taste of how Facebook marketing can work for your business will be the stepping stone to catapult you into a successful social marketing maven.
To begin, devote time to creating a business page. This task will be pivotal as you engage with customers. Promote your page organically (remember, so long are the days for paying for followers), and provide your followers with valuable content to help your campaign soar.
