Relaunching a new software platform for the mortgage market

Tech Mahindra is an international company that provides IT and business process outsourcing services to an impressive list of clients, including Morgan Stanley, Credit Suisse and Goldman Sachs.

As you’d expect from a multi-billion-dollar revenue company, it has subsidiary businesses all over the world.  In the UK, one of these is Target Group.

We were approached by Target’s marketing manager, who had been a client of ours at another company many years ago and valued our creative thinking and tenacious approach.

In short, we were tasked with launching a new fully digital platform called the Mortgage Hub to UK lenders, which simplified the mortgage application process for their customers and prospects.

This was a challenging brief for a number of reasons: 

  • the target audience was very small (there are 300 banks and 45 building societies in the UK)
  • the audience was polarised between organisations that actively embrace technology and already have similar software in place, and those that were resistant to change
  • the involvement of so many partners in the project added an element of complexity to the briefing and approval process
  • the product had already been ‘soft launched’ several months before we were appointed, reducing the potential impact of our activity

We held a number of virtual brainstorms and were in agreement that our key objective was to challenge the thinking of the more ‘traditional’ organisations.  With so few people to target, we presented a raft of ideas for eye-catching, memorable and persuasive mailers.

Ideas included sending Target prospects a pair of slippers and saying, ‘Comfy isn’t always good’, while another mailer concept asked, ‘Is your mortgage application process turning people off?’ and was accompanied by a light switch.

Sadly, lockdown put paid to these ideas because our targets were working from home and we couldn’t reach them at their home addresses.

As a result, we had to direct our creativity into a digital and print advertising campaign; media relations; and email activity.

Keen to mirror some of the thinking behind our mailer ideas, we presented a number of creative concepts. The team at Target loved all of them and opted for the ‘safest’ route – a series of quotations from successful businesspeople about the importance of embracing change.

Media space negotiated and booked, our designers set to work producing artwork for print and animated digital versions of the advertisements, along with a series of animated social media posts, all adhering to strict brand guidelines.

Meanwhile, our PR team went into action.  Theirs was a particularly tough gig, given the tiny number of publications serving the target audience, the difficulty of reaching journalists in lockdown and the fact we had nothing new to give them as the product had already been launched before!

Undaunted, they secured coverage, commentary and by-lined thought leadership articles in all key titles including Mortgage Financer Gazette, Mortgage Introducer and Society Matters.

Halfway through our 12-week brand awareness activity, we were asked to promote an online webinar-cum-demonstration of the Mortgage Hub.  To drive numbers, we acquired a database featuring email addresses of decision makers at UK banks and building societies and created an email campaign urging them to reserve their place.

The event attracted over 80 attendees, all of whom were pre-qualified by Target and deemed to be ‘high quality’ contacts. 

Following our activity, Target Group successfully signed up its first lender to the platform and is in discussion with a number of other prospects.

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