The housing market of today defies analogy. Is it a roller coaster? A small boat on violent seas? If it were a stage production, would it be a comedy or tragedy? Both?
Despite unsold inventory, tepid demand, and shaky consumer confidence, there is still opportunity in the helter-skelter housing market of 2025. But to use another analogy: in a pond with few fish, only the cleverest anglers get a bite.
What’s needed is a new approach to marketing home loans, a comprehensive strategy designed to reach and entice buyers in a sea of sellers.
The Ultimate Main Street Guide to Home Loan Marketing in 2025
Unfortunately, there’s no magic bullet for better home loan marketing. Instead, effective campaigns will use a data-driven strategy, a multi-channel marketing approach, and a dash of creativity.
Here’s how you can carve out an advantage when marketing home loans in your community.
1. Create Targeted Audiences to Catch the Right Fish
A wider net may catch more fish, but it won’t always catch the fish you want. In a tight housing market, data can help us weave an ideal net for the borrowers most likely to convert.
So, who’s buying homes? According to the business forecasting company Kiplinger, Millennials with growing families and first-time homebuyers from Gen Z are driving demand for homes in 2025.
When it comes to HELOC loans, meanwhile, Millennials and their Gen X predecessors are more likely to bite – that’s according to consumer financial services company Bankrate.
But age is not the only indicator. Depending on your community, any number of data points can help you tailor campaigns for maximum effect, including:
Assets & Account Balance
Credit Score & History
Income (Direct Deposit)
Debt-to-Income Ratio
Equity Intel Score
Current Home Equity
Chances are good that your institution has some of this information on file. And for the finer data points, third-party providers are more than happy to help. With the right marketing platform, you can segment audiences for a list of the most likely prospects.
2. Take Your Home Loan Message Online with Digital Marketing
The digital transformation of the financial services industry is a popular subject these days – and for good reason. Financial institutions that adapt sooner are more likely to reap the rewards.
Given what we know about buyers this year (young professionals, growing families), digital outreach is an absolute must. Foot traffic and word of mouth still count for something in 2025, but to reach the right audience, you need the right channels.
Email Marketing Best Practices
Regardless of who you’re speaking to with your email marketing campaign, there are a few best practices you’ll need to remember.
Messaging for Home Loan Emails – Baiting the Hook
What do first-time buyers and HELOC loan candidates want to hear? What kind of message engages each audience? The answer comes down to their thinking and their motivation.
For Prospective Homeowners – Mortgage Focus
Interest rates are a major concern for buyers in 2025. Modern shoppers are educated on the housing market. They’re willing to accept a 6.8% interest rate now because they know refinancing can bring it down later. They’re also laser-focused on keeping monthly mortgage payments as low as possible.
Including an online mortgage calculator in your targeted emails is a great way to get the conversation started. Tracking clicks can also help with retargeting – using phone calls, promotional print, or further emails to engage with those who used the calculator but didn’t convert.
For Existing Homeowners – HELOC Focus
Some homeowners are happy right where they are. But after years of building equity, they’re short on savings – and at a time when home improvements, travel, and recreational vehicles are more popular than ever.
To strengthen your HELOC campaign, keep the possible outcomes at the core of your messaging. Prospects want to hear about flexibility and affordability, of course, but they’d rather hear about how they can use that money – for emergencies, tuition, life-changing vacations, or even a new boat.
3. Leverage the Power of Print Marketing
Digital marketing may be a fast lane to consumer engagement, especially among your target audience for home loans this year. But here’s the catch: wave after wave of emails, social posts, and targeted ads have desensitized us slightly to purely digital campaigns.
Ultimately, it’s gotten easier to tune out the digital noise. We hit the unsubscribe button, glance past targeted ads, and stop engaging with social channels. A digital campaign will put your message in front of the right person, but it won’t necessarily catch their attention.
This is where multi-channel marketing comes in.
Print Marketing Completes a Digital Marketing Strategy
Compared to space on the internet, ink is expensive. But promotional postcards can go where digital channels dare to tread. While each channel has individual advantages, they’re most powerful when combined. To demonstrate, here’s a small thought experiment for you.
Let’s suppose that a new restaurant opens in your area. They send you an email with a promotional offer, but you delete it as a matter of habit. The next morning on your way to work, you hear a radio ad for the restaurant before passing a billboard with their name and logo.
When you log into LinkedIn at lunch, you see a boosted social post for the restaurant, and when you get home that evening, you find a postcard in your mailbox with the same promotional offer from the email before. Now, how likely are you to visit the restaurant?
This is an example of how the multi-channel marketing stars align to create a sense of saturation. Your home loan campaign doesn’t have to include billboards and radio ads, of course. But combining print with digital can only increase the scope of your campaign while generating not only awareness but familiarity among your target audience.
4. Let the Creatives Cook: Professional Graphic Design & Copywriting
Let’s be honest, not every institution has an ongoing need or budget for a complete marketing department. But that shouldn’t hold you back from putting your best foot forward.
Your people have worn too many hats for far too long, and despite their best efforts, a more experienced touch could pay dividends.
Benefits of Professional Graphic Design
Graphic designers can use your brand colors and logo to make a compelling message pop, but they can also establish your brand as a trusted source for financial services. Best of all, they create campaign collateral in a consistent manner for increased awareness and authority.
Ask yourself what separates your emails, promotional postcards, and other collateral from your nearest competitor’s. If you don’t know the Pantone® code for your brand colors, you need professional help.
Benefits of Professional Copywriting
Similarly, copywriters employ the correct tone, rhetoric, and talking points to make the most convincing argument in a limited space. Effective writing shares less with painting a picture and more with making a cocktail – it’s about combining the right elements in a limited space for perfect balance.
Here again, consistency is key. Your messaging should sound like it comes from a single individual with a dependable attitude. That’s hard to achieve when you’ve got three different people (or a generative AI assistant) coming up with campaign messaging.
Make the Most of the Housing Market Moment with Connect by Main Street
These tips and best practices can take an underwhelming home loan campaign to the next level. But for long-term success, you need a marketing and engagement hub built for community banks and credit unions. That’s where Connect by Main Street comes in.
Powered by experience, supported by a dedicated team of creatives, and built with your audience and products in mind, Connect combines data, email, and print to make engagement easy.
Sources:
Carbonaro, Giulia. 2025. “US Housing Market Wobbles during Major Homebuying Season.” Newsweek. May 20, 2025. https://www.newsweek.com/us-housing-market-wobbles-major-homebuying-season-2074451.
Ayers, Carla. 2025. “Will 2025 Be a Good Year to Sell Your House?” Kiplinger. 2025. https://www.kiplinger.com/real-estate/will-2025-be-a-good-year-to-sell-your-house.
Ostrowski, Jeff. 2024. “Survey: Younger Homeowners Are More Willing to Tap Home Equity for Nonessential, Big-Ticket Purchases.” Bankrate. Bankrate.com. August 2024. https://www.bankrate.com/home-equity/home-equity-insights-survey/.
