in this article we're going to describe how we ran a pilot program for a small aggregation group and tripled the volume of their organic traffic. Since that time we've developed a mortgage broker website that is infinitely more powerful than the experience we used during the experiment, and we've developed a leading framework that provides aggregators, franchises, or larger groups, an amazingly powerful managed experience while permitting full website content-control by the broker.

If you don't want to read any further, understand that we provide a self-hosted and aggregator-delivered website experience for mortgage brokers that is designed to provide a highly automated and integrated experience which actually delivers traffic, and the aggregator maintains control over blocks of website content, with that content taking on any shape or form in any location.

To answer the question, "How We Tripled the Volume of an Aggregator's Broker Website Network in a Week", we did something that hasn't ever been done at the aggregation level before: we provided brokers with a website that worked.

In order to illustrate why the program was a success, and to identify why a website is important, we first have to look at why it's important for brokers to have a leading digital presence.

Your Website is Vital

We talk about the virtues of a powerful website all the time, and this emphasis is primarily driven by our disdain for the unethical end of the marketing spectrum touting the self-indulgent message suggesting that your website isn't important, or more specifically, isn't necessary for successful Facebook marketing. While technically true, your ability to successfully convert online visitation is seriously compromised if you don't have a full-stack, integrated, immersive, and education-driven marketing funnel. Simple as that.

We know it's simple to get traffic onto your website - you simply throw money into it - and it's relatively easy to drive specific segments of your market with a sound SEO Strategy, but your website is near worthless if it lacks sufficient encouragement into your marketing funnel, or fails to support your active funnel experience. Your website should be a dynamic and educational resource that provides a powerful, immersive, and persuasive experience that showcases your expertise and authoritativeness... and we're required to fill our website with call-to-actions on every page-load in order to capitalise on engaged user traffic.

Broker websites are usually the typical 10-page experience that rarely sets them apart from any other business (and they usually even fail to position a business as an actual broker). Those common front-page messages of 'service', 'trust', and a 'panel of lenders' often falls onto deaf ears; unless you can support your claims with a website and funnel that substantiates these bold claims a user will simply bounce elsewhere. The user-experience isn't gimmicky 'marketing-speak' used in a sales pitch - it's a real-world psychological truth. Your online experience matters.

Many small businesses are often drawn towards dodgy lead-generation services thinking that it's an answer to their pipeline woes, while the similarly-themed and dead-end pay-per-lead investment is a short-term and often non-compliant 'fix' that does nothing to actually build a business. Most of your paid leads are also talking to another broker, and if that somebody else provides a better funnel journey than you, you're not going to convert that client.

We can categorically state that your website is still your most valuable marketing asset. Any messaging that suggests otherwise is a flawed, self-serving lie used to assign value to other mediocre services. Backed by decades of experience, we can categorically state that those that have a powerful website, immersive marketing funnel, and strong content strategy in place will always achieve more volume than an equally positioned broker.

Again, any messaging contrary to the above is flawed.

Smaller Marketing Budgets - Bigger Results

Sadly, most online business is usually dominated by those with deep marketing budgets and a team of in-house marketers that are armed with the necessary knowledge and skills to create a persuasive online presence, and their message is supported by video, audio, a rich blog, and other engaging media that clearly sets them apart from the ocean of alternatives. However, smaller brokers often don't have the capacity or budget to deliver the same experience, and their digital footprint rarely provides a journey for an actual mortgage client. Our experience changes this.

As we'll come to describe in a scheduled article, we're providing businesses with a scalable mortgage broker website with hundreds of consumer-facing pages and thousands of back-end pages that will actually deliver ready-to-go organic traffic supported by a completely integrated funnel experience. We're giving you the last website you'll ever need for a price that is lower than virtually any other websites on the market. Better still, it's constantly updated with features and tools, and supported by the leading digital strategists in the business. It is the only Facebook-ready marketing funnel-centric experience in the market.

The Marketing Funnel is a Competition

First, and as mentioned earlier, any consumer that is seeking a financial service will talk to more than one broker. As part of a recent NPS survey we ran for a largish client that returns around 2500 Facebook leads per month, we asked how many brokers they spoke to before landing on our client specifically, and a staggering 87% said that they interacted with or considered more than one Facebook advert, and of that group, over 90% said that they had spoken to two brokers or more in the last three months.

To assign our own credibility to the long-standing industry claim that a client will visit your website up to nine times before making a commitment, we asked the same question of our survey participants, with the average coming in at six visits. The survey supports what our analytics tell us every day: those that have a sound content and video strategy, and those that create an immersive funnel experience will return far more business, and a powerful online journey will often (and almost always) hijack the experience provided by inferior 'marketing programs' or impersonal lead generation services.

The Aggregation Experience

Aggregation groups are in the aggregation business first and foremost, while support, marketing and training generally resides on the periphery. So, aggregators generally aren't positioned to provide the features necessary to empower their brokers with a high-end marketing or website presence that actually generates business. In fact, in most cases there's little to no oversight on how independent businesses operate... and this is how it should be, but it's clearly in the vested interests of an aggregation group to provide the tools to their brokers that'll actually attract brokers into their group, and improve upon the volume of those that are already part of the group.

A CRM is certainly part of the pitch that'll draw brokers into your group, but we've found that offering a suite of persuasive marketing tools is an enormous value proposition. Your brokers will invariably be drawn to guys like us, and many of the unfortunate others will end up in an unmanaged realm of non-compliance via the vast array of poor products made available to the market, so having an integrated experience provides you with the necessary compliance-based oversight needed in order to protect your organisation. Your brokers will never have to compromise your licencing with low-quality or non-compliant third-party interference.

We know that the website features necessary to generate a persuasive experience are difficult to implement, but those websites that are generally provided to brokers via aggregation groups often provide a bottom-of-the-barrel experience, and they'll often attract a significant fee (that we find extremely difficult to justify). Brokers deserve better.

The Aggregator Advantage

We don't take on larger aggregation groups very often, and this is mainly because it's a minuscule market. The franchise group is more fluid in nature and tends to gravitate towards our services because of their own limited resources, and it always delivers brilliant and measurable results.

The biggest problem with industry-supplied websites is that the product supplied to brokers aren't very good, and they're not designed to attract, engage, or convert traffic. They don't showcase the expertise necessary to build partner relationships, and they're very static in nature (and do nothing to support good SEO). While the existing generic websites supplied to brokers often allows upline groups to maintain control over content, that content is normally priced in such a way that it limits a business in their capacity to brand their own website, or even take control of their own content. This is unacceptable.

If a website is to work as intended it should reflect a broker's positioning, culture, brand, and expertise - not possible if the broker has no control over content. On the flip side of this, brokers are busy and don't necessarily have the time to update their website as often as they'd like, or as often as required to maintain a 'fresh' presence, so having managed content features comes at a huge advantage.

Our aggregation website changes this juxtaposition.

While Yabber in isolation is an amazing tool that provides the industry's leading digital and Facebook experience, it's the 'Aggregator Advantage' product that provides a marketing backbone for aggregation groups. This white-label service includes as many components as is necessary to 'fill in the gaps', and it obviously includes a very powerful website for all participating brokers that is designed to do one thing: grow their business. The website includes automated modules, live product data, comparison data, lead magnets, and conversion elements everywhere.

The website we make available to brokers as part of any Advantage product gives brokers complete self-hosted control, but certain elements are assigned to dynamic blocks of content that are managed by the aggregator. This enables new products, cashback, rates, videos, or any other asset to take center-stage while other areas of the broker website are untouched and void of any interference. The scope of sections assigned to an aggregator are determined in consultation based on the amount of content control you wish to maintain.

Our Advantage website changes everything.

Tripling Results Isn't Difficult

The pilot program included a large amount of training, and as much phone support as was necessary to ensure brokers had the features that were required to make a success of their program. Regular webinars were conducts to encourage brokers to navigate the various marketing pathways we know returns results. This dedicated phone support and ongoing training is an essential and default part of the game-changing product, and is integral to the success of participants.

The aggregator components of a website, once positioned, pulls in content from a single aggregation source, meaning that brokers always have up-to-date and qualified information presented on their website. The broker components are managed by a website plugin (updated when required with the click of a button). As you add new features to your broker website features, you simply push out a new update, provide a little training, and sit back while your brokers reap the rewards (we obviously manage this on your behalf).

What sort of information can you include on broker's websites? Generally, anything. Any landing page tools, full and complete landing pages, downloads, forms, images, offers, and live product data, can all be managed remotely, meaning you're always able to force best practice on certain areas of the forward facing components of broker websites. Bottom line: there's no feature we can't introduce.

Statistics & Data

All websites that are part of an Advantage product have their own statistical data available to them, but at the aggregator level you also have access to all statistics, users, conversions, page-click stats, and other metrics required to properly assess the performance of all your assets. This essential knowledge positions you to capitalise on the data and structure your marketing based on identified interactions or emerging trends.

The Broker Website is the Chameleon of the Website World

The website we provided brokers has the potential to return amazing results, and it's not because it is an SEO-optimised powerhouse filled with hundreds of pages or conversion elements. As described in an article detailing our Conditional Content ideology, the website has to capacity to change shape based on the interactions of a user. Forms and other subscription-type assets that you'll find on every page will escalate based on previous transactions (with conditional redirections to a higher-converting second page). Massive automation is provided on the back-end to provide SMS notifications, (compliant) email follow-up, and possible CRM integration. Every element is crafted to convert - something no other similar experience provides.

Our mortgage broker website is more than just a website. It's a real-world lead-generating business tool.

The Cost & Process

What's more impressive than the results we're seeing from the program is the cost. The website and custom aggregation plugin is delivered for a fraction of the cost of comparable products, and each website is installed and customised on demand.

In our ongoing effort to improve upon the horrible Facebook marketing provided to the industry, the website is packed with funnel features including dedicated landing pages, integrated automation (SMS, email, CRM, SalesTrekker integration), and it is supported by the arsenal of Yabber's high-end digital marketing and social features.

If you represent a group of brokers, we assign dedicated inbound number phone support on our end to reflect your brand, and work with you to support your brand.

Conclusion

We're doing something that has never been done before: we're offering an enterprise-level experience for a very low subscription, and lower than the products you're probably familiar with. For the first time ever, we're providing aggregation with a website experience that actually works as it is meant to.

The mortgage broker website we've designed for aggregation groups outperforms others in the market and generates more business. Guaranteed.