How Mortgage Lender Has Increased Loan Application Volume by 12% through Repairing their Reputation
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IndustryLoans and Mortgages
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ServicesSEO Reputation, Review Management,
Target Marketing Solutions -
LocationUSA
About
Our client is a mortgage lender in the United States. It's a mid-sized company with 10 offices in neighboring states. The client noticed a decline in the company's financial performance over the past six months.
Although the company stayed competitive, providing actual pricing and services, it accumulated many more negative reviews and had lower ratings on review management sites like PissedConsumer and Trustpilot than competitors. Despite all benefits, more and more borrowers were being influenced by negative ratings and reviews and tended to choose competitors.
It had become clear, the client needed urgent professional assistance to solve reputation management issues. The client had no in-house reputation management specialists. They decided to outsource because it was a quick and cost-effective solution.
Before deciding to work with PissedConsumer, we researched several companies offering reputation management services. In the end, we chose them because of their experience in repairing the reputations of companies in the financial industry. In addition, their experts provided clear answers to our questions and even conducted an express audit to demonstrate our critical issues even before we decided to use their services. Now we know we made the right choice and are happy with it.
Project Goals
The client's primary objective was to repair their reputation, regain customer confidence, and increase the number of incoming mortgage applications, which had declined for the past six months. For our client to achieve their goals, we needed to accomplish the following:
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Suppressing Negative Content
Pushing negative search results down the search engine rankings involved creating and promoting positive content, highlighting the client's strengths, achievements, and concern for customer satisfaction.
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Building a Positive Online Presence
Establish a robust and reliable online presence. It involved addressing negative feedback and encouraging satisfied customers to share positive reviews.
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Lead Generation Boost
Leverage new and optimize existing marketing channels to quickly increase the quantity of loan applications and quickly recover business lost due to reputation issues.
Solutions
Our first step was to perform a comprehensive reputation analysis of our client's brand. It revealed that negative feedback was present on PissedConsumer, Trustpilot, ConsumerAffairs and some industry-related review sites such as NerdWallet, Bankrate, and Credit Karma.
We focused on dealing with negative reviews on PissedConsumer, Trustpilot, and ConsumerAffairs. These were the review sites that appeared in the top 5 search results when potential customers did a Google search for client’s reviews. In addition, these platforms had the highest number of negative customer reviews and a rating of 3.0 out of 5.0 or less.
We analyzed all the negative reviews to understand what customers were complaining about. From there, we developed an online reputation management strategy to address the negative reviews. In addition to an action plan to address the negative reviews, it also included identifying issues in the company's processes that were causing a large number of negative reviews.
Addressing negative reviews
Our experts responded to all reviews professionally and empathetically, demonstrating the client's dedication to addressing customer concerns. However, the primary focus was on reviews that were no more than half a year old. Our specialists contacted their authors to discuss how to solve the problems described in a review, and offered them options, previously agreed with the client. Upon resolving the issue, we asked the reviewers to update their assessments considering the new circumstances.
After four months of work, our specialists were able to change to positive or neutral more than 50% of the negative reviews left over the past six months whose authors we could contact. Moreover, we’ve got rid of false reviews on both platforms.
In addition to addressing existing negative reviews, our team proactively encouraged satisfied customers to leave positive feedback on review sites.
SEO optimized content
We set a goal of zero negative content on branded queries and “company name + reviews” query. While the review management experts fixed the negative reviews, the marketing team activated a valuable content strategy to enhance positive search engine results with new, engaging content. This included blogging, press releases, posting to reputable news sites, and more. While fixing the negative reviews was a short-term measure, generating new content has long-term benefits.
As a result of our work, when potential customers search for client's company reviews, they see the company's profiles on review platforms with high ratings and the content showing the client in a good light.
Marketing outreach
We developed and implemented a unique marketing outreach strategy to attract new customers through the PissedConsumer platform, which has an audience of over 15 million people.
It included a newsletter and our special service - targeted advertisement. Its main feature is selecting a unique, most relevant audience for the client. It included thousands of PissedCinsumer users, who had come to the platform to read reviews about mortgage companies, and were most likely interested in finding a new loan provider. In addition to that, we promoted the client's company on our blog, social media, and through a monthly newsletter distributed to millions of users.
Ad campaigns that used audiences specifically selected for the client were most effective. Its conversion rate was 3.7% higher than other advertising channels using general audiences, which was an excellent result.
Achieved Results
Increased rating on review platforms
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