Sindeo
Head of Brand & Digital Marketing
Rebrand & reposition company to supercharge customer acquisition & investor relations
Pioneered a transformative brand marketing and customer acquisition strategy for a FinTech start-up, utilizing technology and service to democratize the consumer mortgage lending experience.
The challenge: mortgage is commonditized and dehumanized
The original branding was very tech-forward, and had lost the humanity in a process that is challenging for most people. Sindeo’s differentiating factor wasn’t the tech, but was rather the real humans acting as mortgage advisors to help people - for free - untangle the mystery of the mortgage process and find a loan that was best for them, even if it wasn’t through our company.
The solution: focus on the shared the humanity in a home search
In order to attract customers and differentiate ourselves from banks - who could drastically outspend us on product-based advertising - we changed our branding to be much more human-centered and focus on the emotional pull of finding a home. We spent a day shooting a video of a standard Bay Area home search - which is to say, walking in and out of a lot of properties - and used snippets from this video on the headers of every page on the site. (The 404 Page was my favorite: that’s the scene where they walk into and directly out of a property.)
We put the video snippets together into a longer piece for internal purposes; as a service-first company, getting the team behind the rebrand was critically important, so this video accompanied the brand identity document and we played it at the internal rebrand unveiling. Some folks were so moved by it that actual tears were shed. The site redesign was unveiled at Money 20/20 to rave reviews. The brand anthem video, as it came to be known, is above.
My time in bullets:
Branding: Directed a successful rebrand / new website unveiled at Money 20/20, resulting in measurable improvements in brand recognition, platform effectiveness, visual identity, SEO performance, PR impact, social media, online marketing and paid acquisition results.
Performance Marketing: increased online ad spend efficiency, introduced sponsored content program, dropped CAC by 50%
Creative Direction: Managed a multifunctional creative team of 10+, including contract writers, designers, marketing specialists, agencies, and video production, resulting in a cohesive and high-performing creative unit.
Writing: Did all short and long-form writing, including blog, advertising, and website copy.
Parternship: Spearheaded multi-vertical partnership marketing program that improved B2B and B2C brand awareness
Communications & Positioning: PR outreach, set company for successful acquisition by RenRen.
Long-tail SEO: Mortgage Straight Talk
This is one of 61 videos in a mortage Q&A series I produced for Sindeo, in a successful long-tail SEO effort. YouTube is the second-largest search engine in the world (and owned by Google), so the strategy here was to film videos answering the most commonly asked mortgage questions (per our SEO research), then host those videos on-site on individual pages with transcripts and strategic headers so that we could start ranking more successfully with search engines in the mortgage space.