Coventry for intermediaries
A compelling new broker positioning brought to life
An insight-led campaign to make a star of certainty – the thing mortgage brokers seek above all else.
The challenge
Coventry Building Society was already established as ‘All together, better’ for customers when the brand came to us with an exciting task: How can we make this work for our mortgage intermediary audience?
Usefully, some of the groundwork had already been laid by the Coventry for intermediaries (Cfi) team.
A good amount of broker research had been undertaken. Existing broker positioning was in place – ‘Human Experts. We’re real people who work, All together better’. And there was a strong brand visual identity to riff off.
Having familiarised ourselves with all this, our challenge became clear: unearth the killer insight, articulate the proposition, then launch it with an integrated campaign.
The solution
Our first step was to figure out the story we needed to tell – and how to tell it. Using the research, we pulled out what was coming through as the big problem to be solved:
‘Most brokers have given up hope of finding a lender that genuinely puts them first.’
By presenting Cfi as the solution to this problem (through its great people who do lots of things to ensure brokers always come first), we now had the thread needed to tell our story. And by again drawing inspiration from the research (and existing brand tone), we developed a definitive broker narrative to form the basis for all creative.
The story we were telling was to be an emotionally-driven one – so our articulation needed to strike an emotional chord. With this in mind, we anchored our narrative with the promise that ‘We’ll give you the certainty you’ve been looking for’.
This assertion then became the launchpad for our conceptual campaign development.
Bringing the story to life
Over the course of an average day, brokers perform many different roles. But whatever it is they’re doing, the one thing they’re always seeking is certainty.
To bring this to life, we leaned into the brand’s existing visual style of real-life photography layered into a papercraft world – and wove certainty deep into it. ‘Your search for certainty is over’ was born.
Bustling landscapes represented brokers’ daily realities. But scattered throughout were small signs housing the magic word – depicting Cfi’s reassuring presence in any, and all, stages of a case being placed.
With ‘Human Expert’ central to Cfi’s proposition, getting some actual human experts into our campaign seemed like a fairly sensible idea. So we worked with Cfi to hold a photoshoot (in Coventry, of course), making real-life Cfi employees the stars of our campaign.
And our ambition didn’t end there. To help make Cfi’s promise of certainty as authentic as possible, we switched out the brand’s illustrated landscapes for papercraft ones – to show off even more of the personal touch and painstaking expertise Cfi were looking to be known for.
The result of all this was a campaign big on insight, personality, humanity and credibility. And from the off, it was big on effectiveness, too.
The Results
Activity on LinkedIn drove 2.7 million impressions to a highly targeted broker audience. The channel’s carousel creative was particularly successful, with an overall cost per thousand impressions of £2.54. This is more than 27% below the £3.50 benchmark.
Digital display was more impressive still, overdelivering by an enormous 90.3% with more than quarter of a million impressions. This equates to almost £23,000 extra value generated.
Overall click-through rate was a healthy 25% above industry standard, at 0.10%. And cost per thousand clicks sat at an average of £5.26. That’s £4.74 less than industry average.
Since going live in November last year, 89% of all visits to the campaign landing page has been driven by campaign activity. Compelling evidence that by adopting a more human approach to B2B marketing, success can feel like more of a certainty.
Simon Dodd Head of B2B Marketing, Coventry Building SocietyRight from the start the team at mark-making* understood what we wanted to do. They took our research and insight and created a broker narrative that made the hairs on the back of our necks stand up. They then helped bring that to life with their creative vision, ably using our existing visual identity and moving it on for our broker audience to create something really distinctive in our market.
