Leah Brunskill, Senior Marketing Manager at MFS, discusses the firm’s marketing strategy and how it’s standing out in a B2B market.
FSF: Tell me about the company and its overall marketing strategy?
Leah: MFS is a short-term specialist finance lender. We started out in the bridging space and then launched buy to let mortgages at the start of 2022. We’ve been around since 2006, and have grown ever since to become one of the UK’s leading specialist lenders.
Marketing-wise, things have changed quite a lot in the last 4 to 5 years. Initially it was very focused on print advertising and digital banners, as well as research and blogs.
Over the last four years though, we’ve had to adapt to Covid, and now obviously rising interest rates. All of this is very new to lots of people. Fortunately, our strategy has responded to this, and has come into place with an education-first approach.
The reason is, whilst our products are really simple, they can appear quite complicated. Bridging and buy-to-let can have overlapping terms, but there’s obviously a lot of specific things that you can do with each.
We’re trying to educate people on exactly how we can be useful, because at first glance, things aren’t black and white. So, we’re explaining how people can potentially use specialist finance for their circumstances – this is the situation you may find yourself in, and here’s how our products can help.
During Covid, the focus was on moving really quickly and helping people with their portfolios. Back then, people had to search for information on the best products for them. When interest rates were low, and the high street banks were keen to lend out at low interest, that made it quite easy for people.
They’d get a fairly standard buy to let mortgage for their buy to let property, fix it for a couple of years, and move on. Now, some of them are having to look at specialist finance for the first time to help them make their next step.
For example, people with adverse credit are going to potentially find it more difficult in the current market. It may be harder to get the funding they need for their property purchases. So that’s what we’re trying to basically push out there – that specialist finance can help.
It’s the same for brokers as well. A lot of brokers are seeing residential mortgages slowing, or are having to diversify their offering. We want to be able to speak to both the clients and the brokers to explain what our products can do, and what it means for them. So, our marketing strategy is very much education first. Everything else follows on from that.
How do you stand out in what has traditionally been a fairly straightforward B2B market?
I think currently it’s about being honest and to the point. That’s how you stand out. Everybody is trying to be clever. Everybody’s trying to do the next best thing, including ourselves. But I think now when people are just searching for information, you can actually stand out by saying less. People aren’t here for the fluffy stuff. They’re here for the information they need.
How does brand fit into this?
Obviously, everybody wants to put lead gen first and brand awareness second. But ultimately, if you don’t have a brand, you’re not going to generate leads that fully understand the product, or fully understand exactly what it is they need. I think brand awareness is the first step towards qualified hot leads.
How do you ensure the right content is reaching the right people?
For us, segmentation is king. If you can segment your audience efficiently, you’ll be telling them what they need to know at all stages. We’re going to be talking to some people who barely know us, and barely know bridging. It’s important to deliver the right information, at the right time.
We essentially segment by utilising our current database. We’ve been around since 2006, so we’re not new in this market. Therefore, we have a database of people that could be interested in our products, whether they know about them or not. We can split that out further, and work out what different groups want to know.
We also look at the data on our website. We’ll analyse where we are getting the most clicks, what portion of our database are clicking on a particular blog, and which blogs did they totally ignore? Are they clicking more on the calculator? What about case studies?
That enables us to segment further down. So, for example, we know that some of our database will have come from connections we’ve made at events. If we know they went to a specific event, it means they’re interested in that event’s specific topic. Therefore, we can feed them with the right kind of content.
If we know that they have worked with us before, then we’re obviously going to talk to them about complicated cases we’ve done, as opposed to introducing them to bridging.
What do you have planned in the next 12 months?
We’ll be looking into utilising new forms of media. I think people are far more open now than they were a couple of years ago on trying new channels. That’s not necessarily signing themselves up for Instagram but saying, ‘I am going to listen to a podcast’ or ‘I am going to get on this live chat and ask my question there’.
We’re going to play with all of that and we’re going to speak to people on video, we’re going to speak to people on audio, and see what we can do with VR.
In terms of more traditional stuff, we’ll do some of the big expos, we’ve got some really exciting stuff planned for those. The company more generally is on track for its goal of a £1.5 billion loan book by the end of this year. We have had a lot of new funding this year and we’re using that to help people in the market. So, I think with where we are as a business this is quite an exciting time for us. Obviously, as the high street banks start to pull away, that’s where we can really come in and help.
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