Looking for smart marketing strategies for a down mortgage market? The best ideas may be closer and cheaper than you think. Stop throwing money at declining sales production and investigate these 3 killer strategies you can start using today.

However, here is a word of caution. When looking to shave cost from your marketing budget avoid short-cuts and gimmicks, they will ultimately cost you more and yield little. The smart way to create an affordable marketing strategy with tight budget is to look for inefficiencies in traditional marketing methods. Here are a few gems most neglect:

Create and Own the Local Mortgage Web

Web technology is getting easier and easier to use. The emergence of simple and free blogging services can put even the most technology challenged business person on the Web and effectively marketing. Here are some examples:

* Blogger
* WordPress
* TypePad

Set-up one of these simple websites and start talking about your local mortgage and real estate market. The result, soon you will be at the top of Google search results for your local community–controlling the local mortgage and real estate business. Add to this free professional mortgage news, information, and rates using a variety of mortgage calculators and widgets and your website will have the credibility and authority of much bigger websites.

These larger mortgage websites are forced to focus on national volume and neglect the little local markets. Yet, these are exactly the people you want to serve.

Marketing inefficiency number 1.

Buy Aged Mortgage Leads

On to the next pocket of mortgage marketing inefficiency–aged mortgage leads. Big mortgage companies buy thousands of leads a day, but mortgage lead providers often over compensate demand. This leaves hundreds of customer inquiries a day unplaced and customers unserved.

These mortgage leads quickly drop in value as they age, but the customer is still looking for help. The opportunity for your mortgage business is that as these customer request age their lead price drops dramatically. However, their interest in getting a mortgage is still very much intact.

Aged leads combined with a focused lead management strategy is a strong marketing strategy for closing more loans for a fraction of the cost of more traditional online lead generation campaigns. The extra benefit of course is helping a customer that would have otherwise been abandoned–talk about a loyal and trust-based relationship.

Marketing inefficiency number 2.

Don’t Forget Your Past Clients

Here is my favorite marketing inefficiency to harvest in hard times–your own customer database. So often we forget that our own customers have changing and evolving needs. The economy has been in radical change over the last several months. I will guarantee that many of your clients have a completely different financial picture.

Telephone, email, contact them. They need you to ask them if their current financing is still appropriate. More importantly ask them if their mortgage financing can protect them from a long economic decline.

Marketing inefficient number 3.

Times May Be Hard, But Continue Marketing

Times are certainly hard, but don’t forget marketing is how you touch prospective clients in need. So, don’t stop doing it. Just reposition your marketing to hit pockets of value, saving money without hurting sales.