It’s that time of year again: planning your marketing spend and projecting sales for the upcoming quarters. The challenge, however, is that there’s too much conflicting information out there.
Do you focus on a pure content marketing play, go heavy on social, spin up an outbound team, double down on your SEM and marketing automation, or just shotgun it, business as usual?
As you should know by now, the he Mortgage Bankers Association (MBA) expects to see $1.2 trillion in mortgage originations during 2014, a 32 percent decline from 2013. While MBA expects purchase originations to increase 9 percent, it expects refinance originations to fall 57 percent.
MBA also upwardly revised its estimate of originations for 2013 to $1.7 trillion from $1.6 trillion to reflect shifts in lender market shares reported in the latest Home Mortgage Disclosure Act (HMDA) data release.
MBA expects that purchase originations will increase to $723 billion in 2014, up from $661 billion in 2013. In contrast, refinances are expected to drop to $463 billion from $1.08 trillion in 2013.
For 2015, MBA is forecasting purchase originations of $796 billion and refinance originations of $433 billion for a total of $1.2 trillion. So, how do you get more leads in this type of environment?
No wonder a CMO’s job security is often in question. There’s a lot of pressure to get everything right while constantly seeking the next silver bullet that will drive profits for stakeholders. And every marketing activity can’t be directly correlated to driving leads.
But figuring out the most effective methods for generating B2B sales leads should be top of mind for companies looking to connect ROI to their marketing efforts. That will ensure that you’re feeding the sales machine, and, as every marketer knows, that means more support for the equally crucial but longer-term marketing activities that are harder to attach to a quarterly goal.
“We expect mortgage rates will increase above 5 percent in 2014 and then increase further to 5.5 percent by the end of 2015,” noted Jay Brinkmann, MBA’s Chief Economist and Senior Vice President for Research and Education. “As a result, mortgage refinancing will continue to drop, and borrowers seeking to tap the equity in their homes will be more likely to rely on home equity seconds rather than cash-out refinances. We will potentially see a small increase in refinances toward the end of 2015 as the Home Affordable Refinance Program 2.0 (HARP) expires but HARP activity during 2014 will still be low. While on paper the number of HARP-eligible borrowers appears large, the reality is these borrowers have been unresponsive to numerous attempts to encourage them to participate in the program and are less likely to do so now that rates have gone up.”
So, what is the average lender or mortgage technology vendor to do? Earlier this year, MarketingProfs ran a series of articles on B2B lead generation. The following infographic should help distill the trends that B2B marketers will be riding to find success in 2014.
