Mortgage broker marketing scored on settled loans, not enquiry forms.

From five places, and they behave very differently. Past clients, through refinance and rate reviews, are usually the cheapest. Referral partners (accountants, financial planners, real estate agents, builders) send the warmest leads but need looking after. Google search, through ads and the Google Business Profile, catches people already looking for a broker in their suburb. Meta builds demand, particularly with first home buyers, but its leads need more qualifying. Comparison sites and directories add volume at a price. The only fair way to compare them is cost per settled loan, which is why the CRM connection comes first.

Be specific and be quick. Specific means a page and a campaign for each loan purpose you are good at, so a self-employed borrower or a first home buyer lands on something written for them rather than a generic home loan page. It means reviews on your Google Business Profile and an honest statement of the lenders and loan types you actually work with. Quick means answering the phone, calling web enquiries back within minutes, and covering the evenings, because a borrower who does not hear back will often try the next broker.

The ones that compound. Work your existing book first: fixed-rate expiries, annual rate reviews and settlement anniversaries are reasons to call that cost nothing in media. Build two or three referral partnerships properly, with a tracked source on every lead so you know which partners settle loans. Own your suburb on Google with a complete Business Profile and steady reviews. Then add paid search for the loan purposes with the best commission and settlement rates, and Meta for first home buyer and refinance education. The same pattern is what effective marketing for loans looks like generally: segment by purpose, follow up fast, and judge every channel on cost per settled loan, not cost per enquiry.

Look where clients already are before paying to find new ones. Your past clients and the people they know. The accountants, planners, agents and builders your clients already trust, approached with a clear offer of what you will do for their clients and how you will keep them informed. Local search, where a complete Google Business Profile and a page for each suburb and loan type put you in front of people looking for a broker near them. Paid search and Meta come next, scaled once the tracking shows which of them produce settlements rather than enquiries.

Within minutes during business hours, and the same evening for after-hours enquiries. There is no magic number, but every hour a web enquiry waits is an hour for the borrower to talk to someone else, and paid leads go cold fastest. Set up instant alerts to the broker, an automatic text so the borrower knows a person will call, and a roster for evenings. Then measure median time to first contact by source and by broker, alongside the share of enquiries that reach an appointment, because that is where most paid-lead budgets leak.

Referrals are usually the highest-quality channel for brokers and are typically under-instrumented. We build the referral-attribution layer alongside the paid measurement so your brokerage knows which referral partners actually produce settled loans and which produce noise.

ASIC's guide is Regulatory Guide 234, Advertising financial products and services (including credit), reissued in June 2026. It applies to brokers and lead generators as well as lenders, in any medium, online and social included. A few rules catch brokers most often. If a home loan ad states an interest rate, the National Credit Code requires a comparison rate that is no less prominent, with the comparison rate warning. A credit licensee must show its Australian credit licence number in printed advertising. The National Credit Act restricts words like independent, impartial and unbiased where you receive commissions from lenders. And claims about choice have to be true: RG 234 gives advertising loans from a wide range of lenders, when in practice you use one or two, as an example of what may mislead. We write ads with those rules in mind, but responsibility for what runs sits with you and your licensee, so put anything new through your compliance process, or your aggregator's if you are a credit representative, and check ASIC's current guidance.

The settlement lag is 60 to 120 days from enquiry. Most ad platforms can't natively model that long a window. Loan-purpose economics differ wildly. And trail commission means the lifetime value of an owner-occupier settled in 2026 includes a stream of payments through 2031. The measurement work has to factor all of it.

High-intent Google search dominates for most loan purposes (refinance, first home buyer, self-employed). Meta works for brand-led brokerages and education-led campaigns. Comparison sites and finance directories produce volume but require careful cost-per-settlement scrutiny. The mix depends on loan-purpose focus; we model it together on the call.

Mercury, BrokerEngine, Salestrekker, Salesforce, and HubSpot are routine. If your brokerage runs on a platform your aggregator supplies, or something less common, we'll confirm on the audit call whether a direct connection is feasible or whether a Zapier middle layer is required.

Rough heuristic: established brokerages spend 8 to 15 percent of upfront commission on total marketing, with 60 to 80 percent going to digital. A $3M-commission brokerage is spending $240K to $450K a year on marketing, $144K to $360K on digital. Refinance-led brokerages typically run higher than purchase-led; established referral-based brokerages on the lower end.

Yes, on the same account as the ads. The search work covers the Google Business Profile, a page for each suburb and loan purpose you serve, structured data, and content that answers what borrowers ask before they call, such as how refinancing works or what lenders look at for self-employed income, written so AI tools can cite it as well as Google. It is measured on appointments and settlements, not rankings. Social media posting stays in-house or with a specialist we can recommend.

Budget for the media you pay Google and Meta, plus a management fee. Agencies in Australia usually take 10 to 20 percent of ad spend for management, a share that falls as spend grows, or charge a flat retainer of about $1,500 to $3,000 a month for smaller accounts and $3,000 to $8,000 for mid-sized ones. A percentage fee grows with your budget, not your settlements. We quote a fixed fee for the agreed scope in a written proposal after the free audit call, and it never tracks your ad spend. If the brokerage's spend is too small for the fee to pay for itself, we will say so on the call.