A lender with a local touch that builds communities up

The Story

Eric and Michael Bernstein knew they had something special when they moved to Austin and founded LendFriend Home Loans in 2018. National brands and big banks dominate the mortgage lending landscape—often forcing potential homebuyers to work with lenders who can’t call themselves a part of the communities they serve.

LendFriend flips that premise on its head, opting for an approach grounded in community engagement, deep expertise in local markets and, most importantly, an obsession with great customer service. With a desire to one day become a national brand, LendFriend understood that the first and most critical step was to become a household name in Austin.

The Challenge

In 2021, LendFriend surpassed $376 million in funded loan volume, achieving an exponential growth rate that required a deeper understanding of its short- and long-term marketing strategy that leveraged its natural differentiators and placed greater emphasis on the brand’s founders and its desire to deepen its community roots.

Rather than guessing which strategies and tactics would carry them to regional and national prominence—and greater profitability—LendFriend enlisted Red Fan to evaluate its marketing efforts to date, identify gaps in its communications programming, and design and execute an integrated marketing strategy.

The hallmark of executing an integrated marketing communications program is the ability to get it right the first time. To do this, LendFriend engaged Red Fan to conduct our Integrated MarComm Lab, a six- to eight-week evaluation process examining the competitive landscape, deploying data-driven audience identification methods, and defining the core channels and tactics that would accelerate LendFriend’s marketing communications to match its business growth.

The Solution

Over the course of seven weeks, Red Fan:

  • Held several working sessions with executives to establish a communications baseline: What has worked so far and why, what brand fundamentals—including mission, vision, values and positioning—were in place or needed adjustment—identify short- and long-term business objectives.
  • Conducted a company-wide survey to determine the brand’s effectiveness in communicating to all of its stakeholders.
  • Conducted a survey exclusive to the executive leadership and marketing teams to identify gaps, strengths and opportunities for go-forward communications.
  • Leveraged our data science team to analyze customer data to determine target audiences by demographic, geography, evaluation criteria for home buying, and recommend specific marketing tactics for each.

 

The project culminated in a custom communications playbook outlining LendFriend’s integrated marketing communications for the next year, including:

  • Marketing goals, objectives, strategies and tactics that emphasized brand awareness, customer communications, content and enhanced visibility for LendFriend’s founders in the Austin community and beyond.
  • Data-driven channel and communications recommendations that targeted LendFriend’s top audiences in the channels and media they use most frequently.
  • Recommendations for corporate sponsorships to build local brand awareness.
  • Community engagement and philanthropic recommendations for the Austin market.
  • An events and awards strategy, complete with evaluation criteria and recommendations.
  • A market entry blueprint for future expansions.
  • A 60-day communications timeline for immediate transition into strategy execution.

The Results

Following the conclusion of the Integrated MarComm Lab, LendFriend and Red Fan immediately executed on high-priority communications elements, resulting in:

  • Four pieces of earned contributed content from LendFriend founders Michael and Eric in key trade and local publications, including HousingWire and Scotsmans Guide.
  • Execution of a content strategy highlighting LendFriend’s expertise in the local Austin real estate market and in specific neighborhoods.
  • Nurture campaigns for long-term lead generation and management.
    Announcing LendFriend’s expansion into its new, larger Austin headquarters to local media, including the Austin Business Journal and Community Impact.
  • New partnerships with local community organizations, including the ABC Kite Fest, the Austin Chamber of Commerce, Blues on the Green, and I Live Here I Give Here.
  • A thought leadership and media relations campaign that has led to interviews and/or coverage in The Wall Street Journal, Fortune, The Real Deal and Mortgage Professional America.
  • An awards campaign that led to LendFriend being recognized as one of Austin’s “Best Places to Work” in the Austin Business Journal.
My brother and I founded LendFriend to be different than your run-of-the-mill mortgage lender or bank. Customer service, community, empathy and passion are core to our values as a brand and as people. We needed a partner who both shared those values and who are as passionate about their clients as we are about ours. Red Fan was the perfect fit in that respect. In the few months following Red Fan’s Integrated MarComm Lab, we’ve already seen impressive results in building local brand awareness, securing thought leadership articles in major local and trade press, and deepening our engagement with the Austin community.
Eric Bernstein
Co-Founder & President