Millennialsand mortgagesHow to market to Millennials to grow your mortgage broking business.

1944 and earlier The Greatest Generation 2,216,605 (9.3%)

1964 – 1945 (52-71)

Baby Boomers

5,340,070 (22.6%)

1979 – 1965 (37-51) Gen X 4,773,288

(20%)

1980 – 2000 (16-36) Millennials 6,970,652

(29.3%)

2016 – 1999 (0-15) Generation Z 4,476,045

(18.8%)

Australia has just hit the 24 million mark in terms of its population. By far the largest subset of this population is the Millennial – the person born between 1980 and 2000, aged between 16 and 36. Millennials make up a whopping 30% of the Australian population.

Their size is impressive, as is the business opportunity they present as they enter the home buying zone for the first time. They are entering their consumer ‘prime time’ and its critical you’re there alongside them as their first port of call when it comes to their finance needs.

They don’t come without their challenges though by way of how best to engage and attract; their behaviours and expectations are markedly different. Businesses that aren’t reshaping, repackaging and repositioning to meet these needs are simply being left behind.

Keeping up with the kidsHow to ensure you’re getting the right message across.

*Data from www.abs.gov.au

*

Different strokes for different folksHow best to communicate depending on a client’s age range.

It goes without saying a “one size fits all” approach with any sales or marketing activity is always doomed from the start. Choosing your target market, choosing the right message, the right time and the right medium is critical.

• When wanting to get in front of the Greatest Generation (born in 1944 or earlier), a good old fashioned letter is the way to go, or get time with them face to face and chances are, they can always be found at the end of a landline. Some go online, those that do best responding to more formal language, easy interfaces and larger font sizes. They are heavier users of free to air television and radio and respond well to localised print media.1

• When talking Baby Boomers (1945 – 1964, aged 51-70), they are well accustomed to having a mobile on them most of the time, the youngsters in this bracket also heavy users of social media to keep up with the kids of today, and they still respond to direct marketing; print and then soft copy. Recent figures suggest around 90% of baby boomers use one or more social media site, and 84.9% of Baby Boomers said they use or belong to Facebook.2 They are well versed when it comes to using apps so don’t be afraid to welcome them to your app if your business has one, such as the mybroker app. We’re generalising here but they love copy relating to what’s it in for them such as “Your business is important to us” and “Are you two steps ahead with your finance?”

• Gen X (1965 – 1979, aged 36-50) customers are traditionally big fans of texting and instant messaging. They were the first to rely on more than one email address with the uptake of home computers and personal email addresses, and as parents they are big on group messaging to help them keep on top of multiple calendars and schedules, and are still heavily reliant on email, mostly via their mobile device.

• Millennials (1980 – 2000, aged 15-35) love personalised information, so tailor and individualise your message as much as possible, but also differentiate the experience and the medium. A multi-channel approach is key with recent research from fico suggesting that, in order, they best engage with email, text, tailored messages on your website, and then via your app.3 Millennials tailor what they are exposed to in the digital world and are adept at using ad blockers and filtering out what they don’t want to see or aren’t interested in. They are also far more aware of their digital footprint and often cover their tracks online; clearing browser history and hiding what those around them can and cannot see.

Segmenting your customers and prospects when it comes to age is really important, almost as important as segmenting them according to finance types ie renters not yet ready to buy, first home owner, investor, refinancer, renovator etc. We’ve made some generalisations above which can be used as a guide, but it’s also critical to remember that each customer is an individual first. Understanding each of your customers’ drivers and behaviours; where they are and where they want to be is important. Reflecting that you know each of your customers each time you communicate with them will get you ahead every time.

1 http://www.aabri.com/manuscripts/10575.pdf 2 http://www.dmn3.com/dmn3-blog/boomers-and-social-media 3 http://images.email.fico.com/Web/FICO/%7B7a2b6f48-8262-4491-91c5-995d4480d774%7D_fico-millennial-insight-report-v16.pdf

Millennials have never known life without clever tech solutions. So, if you don’t have technology with smarts, you won’t have them on your books.

Get up with technology. Millennials have never known life without clever tech solutions. So, if you don’t have technology with smarts, you won’t have them on your books. Their one (or two, or three) device/s can do it all; help them talk, date, dress, shop, navigate, learn and play. They are fast paced; adopting and adapting faster than tech giants can build. Although they comprehend complex technology they expect simplicity in terms of the user interface. They are also impatient; if the solution you’re offering them doesn’t deliver online they won’t hang around. This is really important when it comes to helping your client decide on one lender or another. Don’t just let them be dazzled by the rate or the clever functionality on the lender website or app. Ensure that the back end delivers as much as the front end.

Ensure any of your email communications are functionality rich and mobile friendly. If your emails aren’t mobile friendly, chances are they’ll go straight into the trash can.

Ensure when clients dig, they like what they find. They are focused on the face behind the name. They want to know more about the businesses they are doing business with, often only supporting companies with aligned values or similar community causes. Think about what your business does to support the community, or to support other businesses, even if it’s only through the commercial lending you’re able to facilitate.

And, whilst clients are searching for information on you, ensure you’re looking outside your own website and social networks; make sure when your name or business is mentioned elsewhere online it isn’t in negative terms. If it is, do what you can to turn it around by way of countering it with positive testimonials you can ask your clients to share, or professional responses from you to show you know your stuff.

Share your successes to help them along. Ensure you’re talking about the solutions you’re delivering when you can that let your clients know more about you and what drives you. Use your business facebook page or your LinkedIn account to share success stories of what you’re able to do for those around you, make sure you’re not too salesy and ensure you’re giving the reader something for nothing such as tips or things lenders are looking for that will get their deals across the line.

Millennial subtitlesOur top tips on how to speak their language to get their business

Be honest. Millennial clients crave transparency and authenticity. Tell them the whole story and don’t hide the detail. Be upfront about the total cost of the deal, don’t try and dazzle them with headline rates without including the ongoing fees and charges. Overwhelmed with information and with choice, particularly when it comes to finance solutions, they just want simplicity. Ensure that any calculators you have on your site are easy to use and make sure everything you do is mobile friendly. Work with your compliance or legal experts to understand how you can best advertise rates, look to just publish the comparison rate where you can so there is only one headline rate, not two. Eliminate the confusion and the clutter.

Get social. Millennials often don’t purchase without socialising and they don’t consume content without socialising, both offline and online. They are more likely to travel and play in groups, and they rank the opinions of others highly, often not making big purchasing decisions without canvassing opinions of those around them. They share more information freely (particularly online) and they love information shared with them. They don’t consume quietly, often sharing experiences at restaurants, banks and shops online for the world to see; when it’s very right or very wrong in terms of the experience. Ensure you’re making the most of their appetite to share by encouraging your happy clients to rate or rank you in the right social forums. Not only will this help potential clients feel more at ease in engaging with you, it may even also help your SEO in terms of ensuring your website comes up on earlier pages than it did before given your expanding digital footprint.

Millennials often don’t purchase without socialising and they don’t consume content without socialising, both offline and online.

Building powerful relationships through your marketing such as AFG’s SMART marketing program, your social activity and your contact with each client is also critical.

Get personal. They like it when you get personal – personalise, customise and individualise all you do; leverage the transactional and life stage information your systems hold to deliver the right message, the right offer and the right solution at the right time. Ensure a client’s name is used within each email they are sent; there is nothing worse than a ‘dear valued client’ who clearly isn’t valued at all. They appreciate businesses who see them as individuals and those who understand their unique circumstances and goals – which is exactly where a broker comes in. They are after customised advice and solutions tailored to them, they want someone who gets who they are and what they want.

Work in different ways for customers to contact and converse with you; do they prefer to email, SMS, message you, tweet you, or live chat? Work out which communication methods best resonate with your younger prospects and integrate them within your sales process.

In terms of marketing offers that you send to your clients; understand the offer and which clients it will suit. Sending a client or prospect an offer that clearly doesn’t match what you should know of their needs or situation will go a long way in damaging their perception of your ability to tailor the right finance solutions to them in the future.

Content remains king. Develop content that they can share and share alike. Ensure it informs, engages and inspires the customers you have on your books and those you are looking to attract. Create a sense of community finding those with shared interests and get them talking to each other, to you and about you. They are traditionally an ambitious lot, often talking about starting a charitable foundation, starting a business or investing in property. Milk this with fodder that will appeal to start the conversation and position yourself as the investment specialist when it comes to funding investment properties in their area.

Write, share or comment on as much content as you can and push it out across your networks as often as you can, watch engagement levels through views, likes, shares and comments and adjust your timings and content accordingly. LinkedIn recently reported that affluent Millennials share finance topics a whopping 13 times more than the general population on LinkedIn4 – if its there and they like it, they will engage.

Engage in conversations, ask questions, provide a forum for your prospects and clients to engage in the conversation with you. Whether its commentary or stats on rate cuts, lender moves, new products, no-names case-studies; be helpful and be human.

Leverage their love of the new. Millennials are clearly demonstrating their appetites to engage with non-traditional finance offerings such as digital wallets, peer to peer lending etc.

4 LinkedIn – 2015 United States Affluent Millennial Research Study

Be the resource they are looking for. Become the expert and don’t assume your clients know the home loans game as intimately as you. If you ask the question on how much Australians really know about their home loans you may be surprised. Keep information on flowing on what a redraw is and how it can help, what a split loan is or what offset account is, and really – what on earth is a comparison rate and do they really matter?

Keep onside and keep them onboard. Position yourself well against the challenges and the opportunities this generation brings. They are smart and savvy and can often find ways of engaging with DIY models. To stop them doing the entire comparison piece themselves it’s critical to regularly promote the benefits achieved when you step in to source and negotiate finance for your clients. Talk to them about pricing discounts or leveraging changing lender appetites, share glowing client testimonials via short videos or quotes.

Building powerful relationships through your marketing such as AFG’s SMART marketing program, your social activity and your contact with each client is also critical. With so much choice and comparison available to them online their eyes and hearts can wander more easily than ever before, so to bed them down and keep them happy with you as their trusted adviser onside is so important.

Match your solutions with the gaps that exist. Do some work on the Millennial market and work out the sorts of products and features that will hit the spot to help with solutions that will suit. Mobile-first strategies and solutions will appeal every time as will transparency on fees, and low fees. They look fondly at convenience and ease; make as much of it as possible, as often as possible, as frictionless as you can. Take the pain away that any lenders or policies push your way and make the transaction as seamless and easy as possible; they value their time more than any other generation before them.

Cut it down. Put yourself in their shoes when it comes to content – a long press article or finance white paper may be fascinating to you but irrelevant, clunky and time consuming. Focus on a few key takeouts and create snackable content by the way of an infographic or short précis for them to scan. With the vast majority of emails being read on mobile devices and now also wearables, it’s critical your email design, content and functionality reflects these trends. Messaging needs to be brief and provide immediate benefit or value.

Keep an eye on future trends. Emails, for example, we don’t think they will die, but they will change and rapidly.

Leverage their love of the new. Millennials are clearly demonstrating their appetites to engage with non-traditional finance offerings such as digital wallets, peer to peer lending etc. Their appetite for the non-traditional should extend into willingness to finance with second tier lenders and new entrants into the Australian lending panel. Leverage this in all you do, and reinforce the broker value proposition at every turn focusing on the choice you have from Australia’s leading lenders and the hundreds of finance products at your disposal as a broker. Understand the digital solutions that sit behind each lender and ensure you know their ease of access will match your Millennial customer expectations. Ensure the back end is as glossy and appealing as their front end.

Keep an eye on future trends. Emails, for example, we don’t think they will die, but they will change and rapidly. Email technology continues to develop at a rate of knots. It won’t be long before better email predictive functionality becomes the norm. In the next few years email readers will get better at factoring in contextual information to be able to predict what customers want to see rather than displaying emails in inboxes on when they were received - known as hyper-personalisation. For instance geolocation - if a customer is walking near a particular clothing store then the store’s email may appear momentarily at the top of the queue with a particular offer, or if a client has been on a grocery store website or Facebook page the email they received from that same store earlier in the day may switch to the top of their inbox.

Customers will also be able to help steer the direction their inbox takes by triaging their emails, allowing them to rank and group certain types of emails to focus on and better ignore others. It won’t just be a matter of read or file or delete.

Marketing channels will become more assimilated, and customers will be far more in control again in terms of their media consumption. Data science will completely drive content and timing. Email content will reflect each customer’s history, behaviour, preferences and journey.

Australia has just hit the 24 million mark in terms of its population. By far the largest subset of this population is the Millennial – the person born between 1980 and 2000, aged between 15 and 35. Millennials make up a whopping 30% of the Australian population.

Their size is impressive, as is the business opportunity they present as they enter the home buying zone for the first time. They are entering their consumer ‘prime time’ and its critical you’re there alongside them as their first port of call when it comes to their finance needs.

They don’t come without their challenges though by way of how best to engage and attract; their behaviours and expectations are markedly different. Businesses who aren’t reshaping, repackaging and repositioning to meet these needs are simply being left behind.

AFG is partnering with our brokers to do just that to see their businesses grow, their prospect pools grow and broker market share continue to skyrocket.

Just how can we help you?

In summary

www.afgonline.com.au

Australian Credit Licence: 389087ABN: 11 066 385 822

ACN: 066 385 822

General enquiries1300 130 987

Perth08 9420 7888 wa@afgonline.com.au

Sydney02 8908 3600 nsw@afgonline.com.au

Melbourne03 9820 4800 vic@afgonline.com.au

Brisbane07 3846 5022 qld@afgonline.com.au

Adelaide08 8373 3872 sa@afgonline.com.au