Who are Funding Options?
Funding is the fuel companies need to grow, adapt and survive. But all too often, businesses can find it hard to secure the finance they need – there are too many confusing products, complex application forms and long waits.
When set up in 2011, Funding Options set about to transform the business finance market. Their aim… to make sure every business owner could make an informed choice and have access to instant funding decisions.
Since then Funding Options have helped more than 10,000 businesses get the finance they need, quickly and easily. That adds up to over £0.5B in funding for businesses across the UK and the Netherlands.
Studiomade’s role
Over the course of the last two years, Funding Options have been developing and building their technology stack to help offer clients even faster funding and even greater transparency for their partner lenders. This development was to be launched as new product ‘Funding Cloud’.
We were brought on-board to help develop a launch campaign for Funding Cloud and support the positioning of this new product. Funding Options wanted support with message refinement, as well as establishing how this launch was going to be communicated to key audiences of businesses and lenders. The Studiomade team were also tasked with developing a look and feel that was appropriate for the core brand, but that still had a note of difference and was complementary. This approach would then feed into an overarching product video/animation created by Studiomade providing an explanation to the Funding Cloud at a glance.
As part of this launch, Funding Options also wanted to integrate a fresh messaging tone and creative into their social activations for both their SME and Advisory audiences and required a number of animations that could be run as paid and organic social advertising for both the Dutch and UK markets. Retained creative support by Studiomade over a period of three months helped to provide this content creation.
Our approach
The timelines on the project were quite condensed meaning that we wanted to pin down the messaging as quickly as possible so that this could feed into all the other elements of the launch. Our role was to help review and refine the overarching messaging, delivering a strategic narrative and story that best reflected Funding Cloud’s position in the market whilst also outlining the key qualities that the product that is provided to its customers.
Product messaging
We began our work by identifying the product advantages of connection, speed and empowerment… and set about crafting messaging that would appeal to the key audience groups.
For lenders more granular concepts around transparency, customer matching and real-time views of customers were chosen – while for businesses we opted to highlight the lack of red tape, precise fund matching and also the breadth of the lender network that is available. We really wanted to emphasise all the benefits in a more simple tone of voice, empowering both sides and providing confidence in the Funding Cloud product. Our language and strategic messaging was then flowed into the Funding Cloud digital presence as a destination for customer engagement.
Look and feel
With the messaging in place this really allowed us to begin to sculpt a visual style for the look and feel of the campaign and product launch. Funding Options had internally begun the process of stripping back their core brand elements so that they could build a new directive moving forwards.
This provided our team a degree of freedom to inject new creative elements and develop a best practice for animation and video that could be used in the future, however we still needed to ensure that this resonated with the rest of the Funding Options brand and didn’t then step so far away as distract from other communications.
We utilised the core colour palette to create a soft and approachable visual style (whilst also establishing a print-based style guide for brand consistency) that could be owned by Funding Options and alongside this created visual motifs for businesses and lenders so that they could be easily identified within the video. These audience groups continued to be signposted within other communications as well as associated live event(s) presence.
The result
The work that we delivered for Funding Options allowed them to launch their new technology product in a clear, cohesive and exciting manner. The messaging framework that we crafted alongside a fresh visual look and feel will continue to be used across wider communications going forward, allowing the company to build on their brand awareness, and increasing their customer base.
As the wider brand develops we continue to work to deliver further brand engagement.
