7 Strategies That Drive Business Growth
Don’t settle for the status quo. To remain competitive as a business, you’ve got to work to grow it. Here are some of our best tips and strategies for how to achieve growth as a local lender.
Make A Great First Impression, Online And Off
What are your potential clients experiencing when they first encounter your brand? Is your website’s homepage outdated or difficult to navigate? Does your business participate in the community? Are your social media pages up to date?
Be mindful of the image you’re putting out there and conscious of the messages you’re sending potential clients. Does your messaging instill confidence? Are the images you're using inclusive? Are you meeting a need? Rocket ProSM TPO provides great tools for partners, such as the Marketing Hub, which lets you create custom social tiles, flyers and direct mail assets.
Track Your Goals
You probably already have a list of goals you want to achieve as you work to grow your small business. That’s great. however, if you aren’t creating specific plans for how to meet them and tracking your success, you’re doing yourself and your business a disservice.
When you make goals, make sure you’re implementing the SMART method. Create deadlines and figure out ways to track your progress. When you miss deadlines or are unsuccessful in meeting a goal, look back at why. What hurdles were you unable to overcome? What are your opportunities for next time? Measure your success and learn from your mistakes. Make sure your entire team is aligned with your goals and get input on how everyone’s doing. When team members get behind your goals, the outcome can be powerful.
Start A Blog
Blogs a great way to provide value to your clients. It can also generate some serious leads on its own. Create educational content around the mortgage and home buying processes. At the end, include calls to action that encourage readers to take the first step with you. You could give them your phone number or email and tell them to contact you. Or, embed a link to an online form and tell them to “get started today.”
You can get some ideas for topics by checking out our past blogs. Make sure the topics are ones that your clients can learn from. These may include tips for first-time home buyers, mortgage how-to guides and the advantages of refinancing.
Cultivate A Great Working Environment
It’s hard to be successful as a business if you and your team members are unhappy. By creating a strong work culture, you’ll foster an environment where your staff – no matter how large or small – wants to provide great service for clients because they truly feel good about the work they’re doing.
Cultivating a strong culture doesn’t have to be hard. It can be as simple as regularly taking time to recognize individual achievements or thanking your workers for all that they do.
Provide Stellar Customer Service
Clients don’t just want a professional who can answer all their questions and help them get from application to approval to closing with ease – that’s the minimum. Clients also want to know that you care about getting them through that process. Emphasizing customer service within your team can be what sets your business apart from your competitors and helps you get great testimonials.
Whether this means creating resources to answer their immediate questions when you can’t or putting in the extra effort to help them through snags in the process, going the extra mile to show you care will help you to build a reputation that ensures growth for your business. Make sure to reply within 24 hours, if you’re able. Make sure you also have someone handling social media comments and messages if your business is active on social.
Get Feedback
Feedback is a gift that all business owners should be regularly seeking out. Survey current and past clients to find out what areas of your process could be improved. Utilize web analytics software to track website traffic and analyze the success of your online marketing. Track your email sends to see what’s working and what isn’t.
Once you’ve tapped into which areas of your business are lacking and which areas have had success, you can create a specific, targeted plan for how to improve and grow your business.
Automate It
As your business grows, it can become more difficult for you to continue driving that growth all on your own. This is why you need a customer relationship management (CRM) system. A CRM system helps make your interactions with clients more personalized without putting additional work on your plate.
Driving growth for your local lending business is easier when you partner with Rocket Pro TPO, a company that has a demonstrated record of helping brokers reach the right clients with the right message. We’re here to help you succeed, bringing you the most advanced products, technology and resources.