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

However, the influx didn’t come with better quality at first. Susan was receiving more calls and application submissions, but loans weren’t being approved at the rate she had hoped.

It was time to dig into the data and optimize for approved loans.

Over the next few months, we identified the channels that were bringing the best leads to the website, and we 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 her customers were spending their liquid cash on classes to learn about flipping and were left with nothing to put towards a loan down payment. Educating customers would keep money in their pockets and increase the percentage of loan approvals.

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

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 be better prepared to manage rehab projects, leading to more successful projects and more return business for RFG.

We created a cast of characters to help educate customers

And developed a chapter-based content hub on the website filled with deep educational content for house flippers and real estate investors.

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

 RFG’s total page likes tripled over the next two years.

We hit a point in 2014 where the website was clearly underperforming. Our marketing efforts were driving leads, but the website was not converting them into loan customers at a high enough rate.

It was time to redesign the website to improve performance.

We went for a light-hearted, illustrated design style to separate RFG from the drab, stock-photo laden real estate industry. We built a custom Leverage site, with better aesthetics and load time. We also made the pre-qualification process more user-friendly and developed an algorithm to qualify potential customers through the site.

We simplified the pre-qualification form to quickly establish if the customer was a good lead or not. We made sure that RFG was receiving only qualified potential customers, thus saving time and resources.

To better educate customers, we built a house flipping learning center as well as general information about rehab loans, frequently asked questions, and resources pertaining to the flipping industry.

While we were seeing consistent growth, there were a lot of potential leads that we weren’t reaching because of a limited budget.

Susan decided it was time to double down. We increased RFG monthly ad spend and began an aggressive digital PR campaign, positioning Susan as a thought leader in the real estate lending industry.

Rehab Financial Group’s incoming leads spiked with the budget increase and Susan decided to open up lending in a handful of new states.

Brolik spent 10 years working alongside Rehab Financial Group, helping them go from targeting early stage investors, to more experienced, larger ticket clients and wholesale partners. Website traffic increased dramatically and over the ten years we achieved 567% growth in loan revenue for the company.