Initially, Brolik guided Rehab Financial Group’s content marketing efforts and improved RFG’s online advertising campaigns. In the first few months, we were able to increase website visits by 101% and call-in leads by 41%.

However, the influx didn’t drive more loans at first. The company was receiving more calls and applications, but they weren’t translating into loan approvals. It was time to dig in and optimize for approved loans.

Over the next few months, we identified the marketing channels that were bringing the best leads to the website and focused our energy and budget on them. Loan approvals began to increase, and after six months, Rehab Financial Group had increased their loan approvals by 20%.

Susan realized that some of her potential customers were spending their liquid cash on classes to learn about house flipping and were left with nothing to put towards a down payment. She thought that educating customers could keep money in their pockets and subsequently increase the percentage of loan approvals.

Hypothesis: Educational content would turn prospects into informed, loyal customers.

And so, Flipping Houses 101 was built as a content hub to educate first-time house flippers. With Flipping Houses 101 as a resource, Susan’s customers would also be better prepared to manage rehab projects, leading to more successful projects and more repeat business for RFG.

Knowing that the topics around house flipping could be intimidating, we created a cast of friendly characters to guide our readers through the process.

And then developed an illustrated content hub on the website filled with deep educational content for first time house flippers and real estate investors.

We turned to social media to promote Flipping 101, repackaging the insights into short, attention-grabbing social media posts that drove users back to the content hub.

We hit a point in 2014 where we felt that the website was holding us back. Our marketing efforts were driving good, qualified traffic, but the website was not converting them into leads as effectively as we thought it should.

It was time to redesign the website to improve performance.

We went for a light-hearted, illustrated design style to separate RFG from its drab, stock-photo laden competitors. Meanwhile, our performance-focused development approach led to a website that loaded in 1/3rd the time of the old site.

We made the lead form much more user-friendly, to decrease friction and increase completed forms. It also serviced Rehab Financial’s need to quickly establish whether the customer was a good lead or not.

Finally, we wanted to expand on the success of the Flipping Houses 101 content strategy, so we built out a full Learning Center section on the website that pulled all our educational content into one place, while also allowing for expansion into other topics.

While we were seeing consistent growth, there were a lot of potential customers that we weren’t reaching because of a limited budget. So we decided it was time to double down. We increased RFG’s monthly ad spend and worked with them to expand the states that they served. As a result, Rehab Financial Group’s incoming leads spiked, which led to an expanded sales team and a subsequent increase in loan volume, their primary success indicator.

Brolik spent 10 years working alongside Rehab Financial Group, helping
them go from a small startup lender to a regional powerhouse. Over that
time, we helped them increase website traffic by more than 10x and achieve 567% growth in annual loan volume.