While private lending is a unique industry, its aims are much the same as any other business. To make a profit, private lenders must ‘sell’ loans to borrowers, and to attract borrowers these businesses must market their loans service.
If you’ve had your private lending practice for a while, or have a history in business, you may already be familiar with the ins and outs of digital marketing. Essentially, this type of marketing utilizes the internet, quickly becoming one of the best ways to ascertain and analyze your target market, reach out to people and convert them into customers.
Most digital marketing tactics can be applied to your private lending practice in the same way they would be applied to any other business. However, there are some methods of marketing online that work particularly well for private lenders. In this guide, we’ll take you through some of these most helpful forms of digital marketing.
Finding Your Brand
Other private lending practices, loan services, and financial institutions will be embracing digital marketing, too. This is why, at this stage, you should find what sets your practice apart, and hone in on it. If you already have your unique selling points and branding guide set up, it will be much easier to tailor digital marketing tactics to your private lending practice.
So, if you don’t yet have consistent branding and a style guide, now is the perfect time to create one. When making your branding style guide, you might like to consider:
Brand Story - This is not so much the story of how you came to set up your private lending practice, but why you set up your private lending practice.
Brand Voice - Your brand voice is how your private lending practice speaks to potential borrowers. Through brand voice, you can consistently convey your practice’s ‘personality’.
Logo and Slogan - If you already have your logo and slogan, your brand guide should dictate where and when these will be used.
Imagery - Here you can lay out the imagery that you want to be associated with your brand.
Typography and Color Palette - Finally, choose a font and color palette that represents your practice and employ this across your website, social media, and communications.
Planning Your Digital Marketing Strategy
Once you have a cohesive brand, you can start to plan how you’ll take it to the masses. A digital marketing strategy is a dedicated marketing plan that your private lending practice will follow. It can be as flexible as you like and altered to achieve bigger goals as you grow.
If you’re just starting out, there are only a few things you need to consider to start building your strategy.
- Ideal Customer Profile - A lot of digital marketing revolves around targeted marketing, which seeks out internet surfers who are most likely to convert into borrowers. Depending on your branding and your existing borrowers, you can discern what your ideal customer is.
For example, if your private lending practice is set up to assist first-time buyers who can’t access official mortgages, your ideal customer will likely be young, and ambitious, yet consistently disregarded by your larger competitors. You can play on these interests and pain points in your blog and social media posts, targeted ads, and email marketing.
- SEO Keywords - One of the essential components of digital marketing and upping your business’s visibility is SEO keywords. While there are a lot of complex concepts that factor into how keywords work, at its most basic, when customers search for a keyword that you’ve included on your site, your site will be shown to them. For your marketing strategy you should outline what keywords you’ll be targeting, and how.
Your main keyword should encompass your business model and brand story, for example, ‘private mortgages’. By running this keyword through a Google search, you’ll be able to find other relevant keywords that are being searched by potential borrowers. There is no end to the keywords that you can target, but for the best results, choose 3-8 and include them on each page of your site and all your social media posts.
- Social Media Presence - Finally, you should decide whether your private lending practice will use social media. Social media marketing is a facet of digital marketing that can open a variety of doors for attracting and converting borrowers. However, it does require a lot of extra care, to the extent that many businesses hire a social media manager once they have reached a certain level of success.
If social media will be a part of your digital marketing strategy, remember to outline how often you’ll be posting on social media, and what kind of things you’ll be posting. As well as helpful guidance for those seeking a private loan, you can use your social media to offer perks to your followers, and set up fruitful conversations with potential borrowers.
Perfecting Your Private Lending Practice’s Website
One of the main aims of digital marketing is to make sure your business can be seen by potential customers. If users can’t find your loan service, how are you going to convert them to borrowers?
Thankfully, upping your visibility doesn’t require any complex marketing techniques, and can be done using your existing site. Most, if not all of the digital marketing tactics you employ will lead users to your site. This is why your site has to be the best it can be; if it is set up correctly, it can convert users to borrowers with almost no input from you or your team.
Here are some things that are essential to your private lending practice’s website, and a few that will help set you apart from the competition:
Home Page
This will be your site’s most common landing page. Your home page has to do a multitude of things, including providing an introduction to your practice and establishing trust between you and your site’s visitors. On your home page, you should include your slogan or tagline, a brief introduction or explanation of your loan process, reviews and testimonials, and a call to action. The language used here should be persuasive and simplistic, and should always include your main keywords and phrases. On your home page, you can also offer links to your social media, explanatory videos, and a podcast if you have one.
Application Page
This page should be directly accessible from your call to action, and every other page on your site. Here you can list the loans you offer, and if you want to make it possible for borrowers to apply online, you can include your application form, too. If not, you should include a phone number or email for potential borrowers to begin their application with one of your employees. List your terms and conditions, how flexible and customizable your loans can be, your average interest rates, and the general steps of your application process.
About Page
On your about page, you can deepen the emotional connection that visitors have made to your brand. Here you should include the story of how you set up your business, as well as your motivations for private lending and plans for future growth. If you have employees you can add a ‘meet the team’ section, which will help give your loan service and digital marketing a human touch and remove the ‘faceless’ brand image. You may also want to place your certifications here or give them a dedicated page alongside any partnerships with other brands you might hold.
Blog
Having a blog is one of the most beneficial digital marketing tactics you can use. By adding pages to your blog, search engines will recognize you have more indexed pages than your competitors and push you up in the rankings. This is also where you will target your main keywords, as well as introduce ‘new’ ones. For example, if a lot of your customers have similar questions or you notice many people scouring Google for the same assistance, you can create blog posts that answer these questions and offer advice. This will set your loan service up as trustworthy and reliable, encouraging people to borrow.
Contact
Finally, your site’s contact page will include all the relevant details potential customers might need to get in contact with you. This includes your email and customer phone number or helpline, and your address and hours of operation if you have physical premises. On this page, you can also include any Frequently Asked Questions, so if customers are ever confused about your offerings, you can direct them here. Once again, this will add to your brand image and give people a great impression of your lending practice.
Digital Marketing Tactics For Private Lenders
Aside from utilizing SEO keywords and social media, there is a range of marketing tactics that you can employ. However, these marketing techniques involve more resources, a higher degree of effort, and at least some financial investment. Your digital marketing strategy should adapt to your current business, so don’t worry if you can’t set up them all at the same time.
Video Marketing - Video marketing can encompass a wide variety of topics, allowing you to reach out to potential customers through a highly personable, yet professional, medium. Making high-quality content does require a higher initial investment, but once your corporate videos are produced, you can use them across your site and social media for as long as they remain relevant.
Podcasts - Like video marketing, podcasting does require a lot of ongoing resources, so may not be possible for smaller lending practices. However, podcasting allows you to complete regular digital marketing, opens the doors for partnerships with industry leaders, and allows you to cover a wide range of topics that may be useful to your customers. Keywords in audio also count toward SEO, so any podcasts you make will help increase your visibility.
Text Marketing - While email marketing is a favorite of many small businesses and lending institutions, text marketing is still wholly underutilized in private lending. This may be due to data laws, so make sure you get your visitors’ or customers’ express permission to text them with marketing materials. This form of digital marketing may not be as useful for converting customers currently in the sales funnel, as it is for ensuring repeat business from existing customers. By reminding customers of perks they can receive, or simply checking in with tips and tricks, or even just a link to a recent blog post, you’ll keep customers in the loop and let them know you’re far different from major banks that offer unforgiving loans.
Brand Partnerships - Partnerships will increase your brand value not only for potential customers but for other brands who may want to partner with you. By creating digital marketing materials in conjunction with another brand, you’ll solidify your place in the industry and increase your following. Just be wary that in the private lending sphere, customers are only likely to choose one lender, When choosing the companies or influencers you partner with, be sure they’re not in direct competition with your lending service.
General Tips for the Best Digital Marketing
- Remember Your Branding and Keywords
Whatever digital marketing tactics you choose to employ, your branding should dictate how the final product looks. Again, for all the digital marketing you produce, you should include your main keywords and phrases, and any relevant ones.
- Keep the Conversation Going
Feedback from visitors to your site or social media is extremely helpful in improving your digital marketing. Social media can be a great place to glean information, through comments, direct messages, and replies to your stories. To make sure this source of free feedback doesn’t dry up, be sure to reply to any comments or messages you receive.
- Employ a Professional
Digital marketing is an incredibly time-consuming undertaking. To give yourself time to focus on your practice as a whole, it can be worth employing a digital marketing expert or social media manager. This individual will take care of online marketing for you, and provide you with regular reports.
- Consider Helpful Software
There is a huge range of digital marketing software available to businesses, the most popular of which can find keywords and optimize your site pages to get you up the rankings. Most software does require an investment in both money and manpower, but you will see returns when visitors begin to convert.
- Keep it Simple
With so much to consider when it comes to digital marketing, it can be easy to accidentally over-complicate your marketing materials. Any correspondence that may be seen by existing and potential customers should be as accessible as possible.
- Be Open to Change
Your digital marketing strategy should be thorough, but it should not be resistant to change. As you find out what tactics work for your practice, you can dedicate more attention to those areas, and adapt your digital marketing strategy accordingly.
Sources
https://www.moneythumb.com/blog/the-best-advice-for-marketing-your-private-lending-practice-online/
https://venngage.com/blog/brand-style-guide/
https://www.postplanner.com/9-game-changer-ways-to-step-up-your-online-marketing-and-get-more-leads/
https://realestatebees.com/how-to-scale-lending-business/
https://cognitiveseo.com/blog/13006/digital-marketing-tactics/
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