Your Key to Your Dream Home – Using Design to Perfect Mortgage:
Residential Home Funding Corp.
WEB, GRAPHIC DESIGN, BRAND STRATEGY, PHOTOGRAPHY, VIDEO, MOTION GRAPHICS
Residential Home Funding Corp. is a mortgage banker based in New Jersey and New York with over 40 locations all over the East Coast.
Residential Home Funding Corp.’s goal is “to be the lender of choice for our customers by providing both diversified and competitive mortgage financing options with excellent customer service.”
CHALLENGE
Can a mortgage be quick and modern? How do we celebrate the home buying and refinancing process while keeping it authoritative and competitive?
OUTCOME
A strategic design of – website, messaging, collateral, graphics, photography, and video – that not only celebrates mortgages as the key to your dream home but as personalized, competitive, and quick.
Residential Home Funding Corp. went through major positive growth from when I started in 2016:
A fully redesigned website that brought them more than 3x the traffic and around 400 leads per month!
Over 400 pieces of collateral, including flyers, emails, advertising pieces, banners, posters, a booth, booklets, brochures decals, graphics, and more.
The following words are from the company’s president himself at the company annual meetings: The two years after we started working together proved to be the most successful for the company … ever!
STRATEGY
The project was initiated after I was brought on as a Marketing Designer for Residential Home Funding Corp. I attended several meetings with the then-President of Residential Home Funding Corp., Tom Marinaro, and Marketing Director Georganne Benvenuti. Together we established we needed to create an active influence and strategy for the Residential Home Funding brand.
The meeting got deep. Lots of mortgage and industry knowledge was shared. Terms included mortgage loan origination, amortization, and acronyms like FHA (Federal Housing Administration) and USDA (United States Department of Agriculture) were used.
The Marketing Director and I had all sorts of confused looks on our faces. But once we got past the jargon, we were able to surface key insights into the pain points of the first-time homebuyer and refinance clients of Residential Home Funding Corp.
“Our clients are very diverse and shop online. How do we appeal to them?”
CLIENTS & DESIGN
“We need to develop our presence online and clearly show the breadth of our products to our clients.”
Residential Home Funding Corp.’s clients are increasingly getting younger. The average age of the first-time home-buyer is 32 years old. As such Residential Home Funding Corp. needed to update its brand to meet these client’s needs. Residential Home Funding Corp. also lacked any in-depth information on all their products online.
This discovery got us started. We began working on visual content and messaging with a new design that was applied across all touch-points.
DEFINING THE BRAND
Discovery meetings, studying the competition, and research enabled me to clearly define the Residential Home Funding Corp. brand: How it should look and be experienced.
-Modern
-Experienced
-Personal
-Competitive
-Service
-Accommodating
-Central
-Efficient
POSITIONING
Understanding what the Residential Home Funding Corp. brand is helped me position the company in a way that resonated with its target audience.
PERFECTING THE RESIDENTIAL HOME FUNDING CORP. BRAND
When I do something, I try to perfect it as best as I can.
Creating the online, digital, and physical identity of Residential Home Funding Corp. with this in mind helped reflect the brand on all websites, social media platforms, flyers, advertising, and other touch-points.
As a whole, this created a more cohesive experience for Residential Home Funding Corp.’s customers both physically and digitally.
WEBSITE REDESIGN
A PERFECT mortgage experience. I redesigned the Residential Home Funding Corp. website around 2017 to really get the company caught up with the times. The goal was to increase traffic along with conversions. To do so, we needed to make changes. A LOT of changes.
The original site was stale, with little information and features offered. This resulted in the tiny amount of traffic and conversions that the site had. Once I began redesigning the site there was a spike with an almost 3x increase in page views and site traffic.
As part of my web design process, I analyzed and researched similar competitive sites in the mortgage industry. This informed and influenced the structure and design of the Residential Home Funding Corp. site.
As we continued working on the website, this traffic spike did not plateau but gradually increased from there – bringing in around 400 leads…per month! These were hot conversions that filled out a 27-page form – people that were ready and committed to getting their homes from Residential Home Funding Corp.
This form was a perfect example of success from our earlier research studying competitors. We reviewed their existing forms and refined them to get Residential Home Funding Corp. this awesome amount of new business.
In keeping with the importance of modernity on the Residential Home Funding Corp website. I ensured that the site looked and performed just as great on mobile. Having my background in coding websites from scratch before the availability of website builders is a huge help in making sure both mobile and desktop experiences are flawless.
COLLATERAL DESIGN
As a mortgage lender, Residential Home Funding Corp. is a sales company, and the way to increasing sales is through marketing.
I created over 400 pieces of collateral. That doesn’t include many custom graphics that were designed as one-off pieces. While most of these were flyers, I also created and designed emails, advertising pieces, banners, posters, a booth, booklets, brochures decals, graphics, and more to fulfill all the company’s business needs.
About 250 of the 400 pieces were customized templates I created specifically for Residential Home Funding Corp. employees to use & edit themselves. The employees were able to edit the content of the templates as needed. Images, text, contact information, headshots, cobranding with realtors and agents could all be added as needed.
MOTION GRAPHICS/VIDEO EDITING
Residential Home Funding Corp. needed to educate its clients and recruit loan originators.
Creating educational animated videos provided a way to break down the complexity of mortgages, making them easy to understand instead of using boring documents filled with jargon.
These educational videos all held the top 1-3 positions on Youtube for popular search terms in the competitive mortgage industry like ‘What is a Conventional Loan?’ and ‘What is a Renovation loan’ (The latter STILL holds the #2 spot years later)
Using videos for recruiting showed the ability and technology of the company and appealed to top producers in the industry online where they were looking for opportunities.
PHOTOGRAPHY
Residential Home Funding Corp. had a lot of business coming in from referrals. As such networking was very important and this translated to having a lot of events. Some of these events were included annual big golf outings, meetings, and trade shows.
I handled photography for a lot of these events and was able to create social media posts utilizing them that created a lot of engagement for them online.
RESULTS
Residential Home Funding Corp. went through major positive growth from when I started in 2016:
A fully redesigned website that brought them more than 3x the traffic and around 400 leads per month!
Over 400 pieces of collateral, including flyers, emails, advertising pieces, banners, posters, a booth, booklets, brochures decals, graphics, and more.
The following words are from the company’s president himself at the company annual meetings: The two years after we started working together proved to be the most successful for the company … ever!
