FOMO Mortgages

Scaling A Startup Using Sponsored Partnerships

Launching A Mortgage Brand

Mortgages. It’s a saturated space and let’s be honest here, not particularly sexy.

So how do you make a splash as an independent start-up?

The 2112 team was faced with this challenge when our client of four years, Maxim Financial Solutions, asked us to create a new mortgage brand capable of becoming a major player in the industry.

As ever, we focused on getting the brand quick recognition using the power of collaborations.

Introducing FOMO, let’s start with the results.

FOMO Mortgages branding, the startup Twenty One Twelve helped with their channel enablement, go-to-market strategy and leads

Results:
4 Months From Launch

FOMO Mortgages' monster with a big round FOMO 'F' above it.

15,000 Strong Database

Starting from 0 subscribers, we built a database of 15k UK individuals, including 10k within a month of FOMO's launch. We also gained zero party data on all subscribers, allowing us to personalise communications with them.

SQL Generation

By month four FOMO was reliably generating over 60 sales qualified leads per month. This was achieved using a mix of sponsored partnerships and a very modest online advertising budget. The system was repeatable and scalable.

Social Media & Partnerships

In four months FOMO gained 1200 Instagram subscribers. We also leveraged LinkedIn to create referral partnerships with IFAs and independent estate agents. By the end of the campaign FOMO was in talks with multiple partners.

FOMO Mortgages' purple furry monster peaking through an open door.

How We Did It

We designed and built the FOMO brand to be as far removed from the average mortgage broker as possible. The result was a four-point strategy:

Visual Tone & Identity

Should be fun, down to Earth, people’s champion. No complex jargon whatsoever.

Leverage Partnerships

In a low-trust industry, who could we partner FOMO with to quickly gain awareness and know, like, trust for the brand?

Lead Magnets

True to the brand, attaining new data should be done in a fun, informative way.

Purpose Driven

To Differentiate FOMO further, philanthropy was seen as a core component of the brand.

The Finer Details

Brand & Tone Differentiation

A brand needs a voice. The worst thing it can be is vanilla.

The 2112 team worked with FOMO to create their name, marketing strategy, tone of voice and marketing collateral.

As a small, independent firm in a very saturated market, FOMO’s issue revolved around how to differentiate themselves from the competition when there is very little to distinguish their services from those of their competitors.

Most of their competitors use template websites, with lots of jargon-heavy text.

We decided to strip the copy right back and assume the user has a degree of intelligence - if they land on FOMOmortgages.com they’re not overloaded with product information, we assume they’re product-aware to an extent. Instead, we focus on their pain-points in a very conversational and, at times, almost colloquial style.

We extend this style across all of FOMO’s collateral, from their email marketing, press releases and print collateral to their PPC campaigns and social media marketing. Consistency is key.

Twenty One Twelve uses collaborations to help brands quickly gain awareness and traction within their ideal audience.

By partnering our clients with complementary but non-competitive brands, we gain clients' know, like, trust within new audiences by virtue of association.

There are three types of collaboration we deploy, for FOMO we elected to use a Sponsored Collaboration, where we pay to partner our clients with a bigger name to expedite the building of awareness and trust.

Partnering Lastminute.com

We felt this kind of collaboration would help immediately differentiate FOMO from the sea of sameness that is mortgage brokerages while allowing them to quickly gain a foothold in the market.

To this end, we used a sponsored collaboration with lastminute.com to take FOMO to over 10,000 subscribers, over 1200 Instagram followers, 100 inbound leads and multiple conversions; all in under three months.

No mean feat for a brand with no-trust within a saturated market. After deciding to pursue a Sponsored Collaboration, we achieved these results in four simple steps:

1. Selection: first of all, we created a list of brands who we believed to have the assets necessary to position FOMO in a strong way in-front of their ideal target audience.

After creating a shortlist of around three brands, we began to talk about the commercial and creative reality of working with them. This included analysing the cost, reach, strength and how we could engage with each brand. In the end, we decided that lastminute.com ticked all the right boxes thanks to their creative flexibility and flexible pricing structure. We proposed this to FOMO, who concurred with our recommendations.

2. Activation: after agreeing the commercial structure, we ironed out the finer details of the creative activation, which would take the form of an online, cross-channel competition.

While competition data can be poor, we advised both FOMO and lastminute.com that we would be putting in place additional steps to ensure strong commercial outcomes.

3. Zero-party data: once an individual entered the competition, we offered them extra-entries for taking a series of actions. This included getting entrants to willingly provide commercially relevant data, such as when their initial mortgage term ends and where they are in the home buying process.

Data we then used to segment the competition entrants, empowering us to personalise the communications sent to them, which includes an on-going email newsletter.

4. Cross-Channel: using a multi-step competition also helped push FOMO’s new subscribers to take cross-channel actions. This included driving them to follow FOMO on Instagram, where we gained 1200 followers.

Reaching 15,000 Subscribers

The success of our partnership with Lastminute.com taught us two things:

The right partner could deliver quick traction for FOMO

Correctly structured competitions could deliver results

This gave us a template for success and following our partnership with Lastminute.com, we used partnerships and competitions to quickly scale FOMO’s database to over 15,000 UK individuals.

Google Ads - 33% Conversion rate

Google Ads for mortgage brokers isn’t easy. The market is incredibly saturated.

We decided to bet on the fact that the strength of FOMO’s brand, its USPs and the slick UX of the website would ensure we could leverage Google Ads to create high-intent leads for FOMO, despite the brand’s relative infancy.

By utilising localised search ads and refining the campaign over time, we consistently generate FOMO remortgage and life insurance leads with a 33% conversion rate.

Building The Digital Experience

In order to support the flourishing yet expensive Google Ads campaign, we needed to offer a better digital experience than our competitors.

To further optimise the website performance and differentiate FOMO in the eyes of the user, Twenty One Twelve has built intelligent forms on the website which allow users to get an instant mortgage ‘best buy’ based on their individual circumstances.

This increases the users dwell time while giving them a better experience than they’ll find on many of FOMO’s competitor’s websites.

Further to this, we have added a live chat feature to the site, which instantly connects users to an advisor. Another build which has helped generate organic leads.

Philanthropy

Consumers like brands which champion a purpose. They don’t want it shoved in their face, or too much virtue signalling, bandwagon jumping or high horsing. They just want to know the brand is well-operated and gives back.

With FOMO, we added a philanthropic element to the brand to mirror the values of its founder and to endear it to consumers. If you remortgage through FOMO for example, a donation will be made to Ecologi to help offset your carbon footprint.

Progressions

With constant optimisations being built into the FOMO website and new campaigns taking place on a consistent basis, we expect the broker to continue winning market share and establishing itself as a trusted and liked financial advisor.