Thalasar Ventures

Keys to an Effective Website

Having a good mobile version is one aspect of effective mortgage broker websites, but there are several things that your main website should offer as well. Your website is responsible for several things:

Educating your audience
Branding your company
Establishing your expertise in your industry
Generating leads and sales
Building relationships with your audience

There are also a couple of things it’s NOT responsible for, however:

Miraculously drawing in people searching for what you offer
Replacing personal connection and interaction

One mistake that a lot of companies make is trying to cram as much information as possible into the home page of their site. This is a sure-fire way to overwhelm any new visitors, and in many cases they will just click away and keep looking.

Instead, use the home page to grab the visitor’s attention and help them find the right page on the site for whatever information they’re looking for. Think of it as a sort of “directory” for the rest of the site. You want people to be able to find what they want within 5 seconds of landing on your website if at all possible.

Try to look at your website from the perspective of someone who doesn’t know your company and may not even know what you offer. If you look at it from the perspective of someone who already knows everything there is to know about your mortgage brokers marketing business, it makes it much harder to optimize for your visitors.

If you find it hard to distance yourself from your business this way, an effective way to do it is to create a customer “avatar” that you can use as a model for your typical customer.

Create a fictional customer who has most of the traits of your typical client. Give them a name, consider their age, their sex, what kind of knowledge they have about your product, their income, how many kids they have, etc. The more complete this avatar is the better.

Then, whenever you are writing something for your customers, whether your website, an email, an article or any number of other types of content, write it as though you’re addressing that fictional customer directly. This can really help to filter out the stuff that’s either unnecessary or confusing and get right to the point you want to make.

We’ll talk about how to get the people who are searching for what you offer to actually visit your website shortly (in fact, that’s really the ultimate goal of everything in this book) but as far as personal connection and interaction goes, the internet has one very useful tool for this – email.

One of the most critical things you should be doing as a marketing mortgage broker on your website is some kind of lead capture – getting your customers’ names and email addresses so you can contact them via email.

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