Total Mortgage site-wide rewrite
• content strategy • content design •
Context
Total Mortgage is an online mortgage lender with brick and mortar branches spread throughout the country.
Their customer base is wide, but at the time my team took on this revamp, we were seeing a huge bump in business from younger generations aging into the marketplace.
Challenge
Rebuild Total Mortgage’s web presence to create a streamlined online experience.
My role
As the sole content strategist on this project, my key contributions were:
Brainstorming in sessions with stakeholders (the CMO, several developers, and a graphic designer)
Auditing the current structure and pages to identify our SEO strengths and avoid disrupting them
Developing a consistent voice and tone
Writing all new web copy
Identifying content goals
Once I did an audit and had a handle on the scope of the project, my goals were to:
Do away with over-complex and salesy language that still lurked in many of our pages
Present borrowers with only the most important information
Uniformly deploy a modern voice that was conversational, friendly, and occasionally clever
Before & after: product page
The 30-year fixed-rate product page is a great example of the work I did site-wide. The before was overwhelming and unfocused. Plus it was so stuffed with SEO keywords, it was hard to parse.
In the after, I pared down the copy and anticipated the user’s most important questions:
Who is this loan for?
How will it benefit me?
Can I qualify?
Before
After
Before & after: refinance hub page
This page was always intended to be a resource for users looking to refinance. The before presented the user with a bunch of information about why they would want a refinance and how to get one—except, since they’re on this page, we can assume they already know they want one and have begun preparing.
In the after, I refocused the content on what the refinance process will look like if they choose Total Mortgage.
Because the audience is early in the process, I included links to situation-specific pages, buttons that take them to a calculator, and current rates.
Before
After
Before & after: communicating with borrowers
This was an automated product email that triggered when a lead was ready to be handed off to a loan officer. Because of the way the system was set up, it was possible that borrowers would be asked to fill out a form twice. We couldn’t change it.
So, in addition to making the tone more conversational, I added the aside in parentheses. It did 3 key things:
Gave potential borrowers a peek behind the scenes of a complex process
Made us seem trustworthy. This kind of openness sets a precedent for future interactions
Covered our rears. Asking them to fill out personal information more than once looked disorganized—not the impression we wanted to give
We noticed improvements in the response rate!
Injecting personality
Throughout the project, I took care to keep informational copy clear and simple (if pretty conversational).
Headers, however, gave me room to inject some of that personality my team and I had decided would be important. These are the headers for the about and technology pages.