For those of you old enough to remember the lyric or you’re a fan of 80’s music, will know this comes from Duran Duran’s seminal album which went to number two in the album charts in May 1982.
But what’s this got to do with mortgage advising. Simply RIO stands for Retirement Interest Only Mortgages, which are going mainstream with High Street lenders now.
I want to take a look at marketing these in your Practice.
If you went back in time to 1982, you would have made some cold calls using the phone book, sent some leaflets through the post, put up a poster in your window or sent a fax. As we know you were in control in those days, you had the knowledge, the buyer didn’t.
Now in 2018, the buyer is firmly in control, so you have to market differently. We follow their buying process.
I’m in the market for a RIO for my own property purchase this autumn. My first port of call was my Broker, Charlie. After our initial meeting I wanted to do some research of lenders and scheme criteria, so I headed to Google.
What I found is a lesson to you on how to market in 2018 onwards. After keying in my search terms a page of links appeared, mostly news articles about RIOs, the FCA page and the Post Office. These all have good “Google Juice”. At the top of the ads was a link from a firm called Viva.
They had used Google’s Adwords to climb to the top of the page, probably paying Google a few pounds for every click they received. My click cost them £2 most likely.
Onto their webpage I found brief information and cleverly, a form for my email address and phone number and an adviser would call me.
This is where they made a grave mistake because they were trying to take back control from me the buyer. Wrong. I didn’t want a pesky phone call from a broker I wanted information. They could’ve made available a document containing valuable material in return for my email address, or put lots of useful data and lender criteria on their page. Chances are I’d still use them for the mortgage because brokers have access to deals not available to individuals. Getting my info would’ve drawn me closer to them.
But they ran scared and tried to take back control.
The aim of the customer clicking on your splash page is to get their email address, so you could provide them with a steady stream of useful information relating to their search.
And when they’re ready to take the next step, they will. Remember the buyer is in control and doesn’t want to lose it.
Did I mention faxes earlier? An invention some 50 years’ old and many businesses still have the grey plastic box in the corner of their office. Chances are it’s still switched on and they make a joyful noise when receiving a fax. So perhaps you could use this method of contacting business customers if they advertise a fax number. It’ll sure make a stir in the office as did Simon LeBon singing from the fore of that sailing boat in the video. Or is it the aft section – have a look https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e3W6yf6c-FA
