The mortgage market has changed a lot since the pandemic. That is obvious.
The attitudes, challenges and needs of mortgage brokers and their clients have changed and continue to do so. This is why marketing is even more important right now.
The most important part of marketing is sometimes less obvious. It is to be the voice of the customer – to really know and understand them.
This applies whether your customer is a broker, a consumer, or a lender. The principle stays the same.
Why is customer knowledge important?
If you don’t fully understand your customers, you can’t create a proposition and products that are right for them.
If you don’t understand your customers, how can you deliver the experience they want?
What’s more, without proper knowledge your marketing and communication will be less effective because you will be guessing about the content you create.
You’ll be guessing about the message you want to deliver – because you haven’t put yourself in the minds and the shoes of your customers.
The most important part of marketing is to listen. To understand. To gather meaningful insights that you can turn into meaningful actions to deliver a better customer experience.
Get to know your customer
There are many ways you can get to know your customer and discover what it is they really, really want.
Surveys are a popular method. While this is a great starting point, you can miss out on some valuable insight because it is a one-way dialogue.
You ask a question and get an answer. That’s it.
That is why I prefer to support this with what I call ‘customer immersion’.
With immersion, you can probe deeper into the answers you get. By digging deeper, you get to really understand the WHY behind the what, the how and the when.
It is the technique that created the iPhone, after all. Conventional research would not have created the iPhone. Instead, they sought to understand their customers’ problems and behaviours and created a solution.
Asking why is so powerful – especially when you apply the 5 why’s approach which was developed by Toyota.
This technique requires a curious mind – but curiosity can lead to powerful solutions.
Customer immersion should be on everyone’s radar.
How you do it will depend on your strategy, brand, resource, and budget.
By doing so, you can really understand what customers really think of you, what is important to them – their desires, their motivations, their behaviours, and the challenges you need to solve.
Use your own data too
You can’t talk to all your customers, but a good and proper sample size and selection process will give you more than enough insight to work from.
You can also get to know more about your customers from your data.
Email marketing data, for example, can tell you what sort of content people engage with (engagement is a crucial point, not open rates).
If you have a good system linked with a CRM, you can drill down and analyse who is attracted to what type of content and provide more targeted and personalised content as a result.
You can get to know your customers from website data too. If you use heat mapping tools like Hotjar, you can see how they actually interact with your website.
Finally, you can use your sales data to get to know your customers.
This will tell you how price sensitive they are, what products they use, who is a new customer and who has been with you for some time – and how they differ.
Putting your customer first
People talk about being customer centric. To do this, you must put your customers first.
This is important because you are not just trying to hit sales targets, you are also trying to enhance the overall customer experience.
It is important because you are looking to gain positive perceptions of your brand so you are seen as being superior to your competition.
So, put your customers first. The only way to do that is to truly know them and understand them.
Using customer metrics
My final point is to ensure you have some key customer metrics that help you measure your ‘customer centricity’.
Metrics I believe are important include net promoter score (NPS).
However, don’t just focus on the actual NPS – have a good understanding of the drivers of your score. Know where and how you can improve it.
Measure how easy you are to deal with as a company by using the customer effort score.
Measure brand salience – you want to show that your brand is being thought of and considered and if you can, show the correlation to increasing this with market share growth.
And finally, find a way to measure and enhance brand perceptions.
Final thought
The market has changed. It will continue to change. Budgets will get tougher. But one thing you should never cut back on is understanding your customer. Otherwise, you won’t get to know what they really want and what they really think.
Jeff Knight is marketing strategist and director at The Mortgage Marketing Forum
