SA Mortgage Brokers Guide to Growing Your Business Online

These days, more than ever having a strong and reputable online presence is absolutely vital for driving sustainable growth in brokerage-based businesses. In this short 3 minute read we will depict an overview of the winning strategy we used to help Richard Foggo for Finance in Victor Harbor get an estimated 35% increase in revenue in the first 6 months, as well as how we were able to automate some mundane tasks in their business to save them time and reduce unnecessary stress!

Nothing impactful and sustainable is ever achieved without a good strategy backing it. During this stage we need to evaluate your current: circumstances, business goals, target market, marketing avenues and assess their true effectiveness as well as your total market share. Once we have evaluated these factors, we can begin identifying opportunities for growth that we can then use to develop a digital marketing strategy that will work for you and your business.

Now to begin working towards your marketing goals, you must have your website’s purpose in alignment with your marketing strategy. There are 3 main ways your website can be setup to benefit your business:

1. 1. Move prospects/customers closer to a sale.
   2. Save you and your team time by automating certain administrative tasks.
   3. Facilitate digital transactions (eCommerce).

Depending on your circumstances and strategy, your website will be designed to address either 1 or a combination of all 3 of these target outcomes. In Richards case, the primary goal of the website was to move prospects closer to a sale with a secondary goal of saving Richard valuable time by automating certain administrative tasks.

To provide some guidance, here are some barebone fundamentals every small business website should have nailed down:

• • • Must have a clear primary purpose.
    • Must be structured correctly and in alignment with its primary purpose.
    • Must build trust with customers.
    • Must be easy for customers to use.
    • Must have good colour contrast and appropriate text sizing to increase accessibility and legibility.
    • Must load fast.
    • Must be optimised for all devices (especially mobile phones).

Here’s where things get exciting, once you have a website that’s optimised to convert visitors into paying customers or leads. Your current marketing channels will become more efficient since your website will help to increase your overall customer conversion rate.

Now what if you can handle more clients and customers? It simply becomes a matter of finding the best ways to get your website in front of the people that need your services and then doubling down on them.

Here are a few examples of marketing channels that small businesses can utilise:

• • • Actively Ask for Referrals
    • SEO (Search Engine Optimisation)
    • Social Media Marketing
    • Online Ads
    • Directory Listings
    • Print Advertising
    • Networking

The whole purpose of marketing through these channels is to create consumer awareness, which then leads to people visiting your website, which then aims to convert them into either a paying customer or qualified lead.

In Richards case we utilised Search Engine Optimisation to get his business showing up 1^st on Google for the relevant search terms in his target area. This drastically increased the number of people visiting his site and because we had designed his new website to convert the visitors it received, a substantial percentage of those users started converting into warm/motivated leads that have been reaching out to Richard directly!