Marketing a mortgage advice business

Aug 29
3 min read

Updated: 4 days ago

Introduction

An adviser completes a case, the client is delighted, and both parties disappear from each other's lives for five years. When the fixed rate ends, the client searches online, finds a comparison site or a bank, and the adviser learns about it afterwards if at all.

Mortgage advice has an unusual commercial shape: a valuable transaction, genuine gratitude, and then a long silence during which the relationship decays completely. Most marketing effort in the sector goes on acquiring strangers while existing clients are allowed to lapse for want of a message every few months.

1. Marketing a mortgage advice business means managing the gap

Identify the actual problem.

You are not competing for attention at the moment of need so much as trying to be remembered several years later. That is a retention problem disguised as an acquisition problem, and it is far cheaper to solve. Keeping an existing client costs a fraction of what finding a new one does.

2. Diarise every client's rate expiry

The most valuable single habit.

Contact several months before the fixed period ends, before the lender's own retention team makes contact and before the client starts searching. An adviser who is first in that conversation usually keeps the client. The lender's retention team is working from the same expiry date and will not wait.

3. Stay in contact between transactions

Something useful, occasionally.

Rate movements, what the market is doing, and what it means for somebody in their position. Contact that is genuinely informative is welcomed; contact that only appears when there is business to write is ignored.

4. Build the professional referral network

Where the best enquiries originate.

Estate agents, solicitors, accountants and property investors meet people needing advice continuously. These relationships are the most reliable source of enquiries in the sector and they take sustained effort. They also produce clients who arrive already predisposed to trust you.

5. Ask for referrals at completion

The point of maximum goodwill.

A client who has just been guided through a stressful process is at their most willing, and most advisers never ask. A specific request, naming the kind of person you can help, is far more effective than a general one.

6. Address the anxiety, not just the rate

What clients are actually experiencing.

First-time buyers, people whose circumstances are unusual, and anybody who has been declined somewhere are all frightened rather than merely price-conscious. Material addressing that reaches people a rate table does not.

7. Explain your fees and how you are paid

Transparency that also differentiates.

Whether you charge a fee, receive commission, or both, and what that means. Clients are increasingly aware that these arrangements vary, and a clear explanation removes a suspicion that otherwise sits in the background.

8. Keep every promotion compliant

Non-negotiable in a regulated market.

Financial promotions rules govern what may be claimed, how rates may be presented and what risk warnings are required. Confirm the requirements in your jurisdiction and have material checked before it is published.

9. Track where clients actually come from

Directs the effort correctly.

Referral source, professional introducer, search, or previous client. Advisers frequently spend on lead generation while a referral relationship producing better business receives no attention at all.

Look after the cases you could not help. Somebody declined today may be a straightforward case in eighteen months, and an adviser who explained why and offered to keep in touch is the one they return to rather than starting again with a stranger.

Conclusion

Treat the gap between transactions as the central marketing problem.

Diarise every client's rate expiry and make contact months ahead, stay in touch with genuinely useful information between transactions, build referral relationships with agents, solicitors and accountants, ask for referrals at completion when goodwill is highest, address the anxiety rather than only the rate, explain clearly how you are paid, keep all promotional material within your regulator's rules, track where clients actually come from, and stay in contact with people you could not help this time.