How Bekki made a lesser-known mortgage brand impossible for the finance press to ignore
PR approaches: data-led pr ◠ Reactive pr ◠ thought leadership
Before launching Belta PR, I spent a year leading digital PR across the mortgage vertical at RVU, working closely with the small but mighty in-house SEO and content members to build Mojo Mortgages’ authority and organic visibility.
Starting from a relatively clean PR slate, I combined Mojo’s internal data, mortgage expertise and the fast-moving financial news agenda to give journalists a reason to take notice.
The goal? To turn a lesser-known mortgage brand into a credible, recognisable voice across the national, personal finance and mortgage press.
The Belta approach
In a crowded industry, having expertise isn’t enough. You need something worth listening to.
Mojo was competing for attention in a mortgage market full of established brands, experts and commentators.
So I focused on what could make it harder to ignore: exclusive customer data competitors couldn’t replicate, useful mortgage expertise and reactive commentary ready to go before the biggest financial stories broke.
The result?
In just one year, I secured coverage in:
Financial Times / The Guardian / The Telegraph / Sky News / Forbes / Daily Mail / Your Mortgage / The Negotiator / Big Issue / Homebuilding & Renovating / Yahoo! Finance / City AM / This is Money / House Beautiful / Styluist / IFA Magazine and many more.
450+ pieces of coverage, including 300+ backlinks
+513% increase in keyword rankings in positions 1-3
+105% increase in organic traffic
+109% increase in organic traffic value
I joined RVU, the group behind household names including Uswitch and Confused.com, to lead Digital PR across its mortgage vertical.
While those brands already had huge recognition, I spent the majority of my time with Mojo Mortgages, a much lesser-known name that hadn't had consistent PR activity for several years.
For me, that was a pretty exciting place to start.
Years without consistent PR
meant one thing: opportunity
As the sole Digital PR lead at Mojo, I built its strategy from the ground up, combining original data campaigns with reactive PR and the expertise already in its mortgage team.
The challenge wasn't finding things to talk about. In mortgages, everyone has something to say. It was finding reasons for journalists to listen to Mojo.
Here are some of the digital PR campaigns I created over a year:
Turning Mojo Mortgages’ data into a map of first-time buyer Britain.
We hear all the time that first-time buyers are getting older. I wanted to know exactly how old.
Using Mojo's internal data, I calculated the average age of a first-time buyer across different parts of the UK, right down to the month.
Then I went further, analysing average deposits, loan sizes and mortgage terms to uncover how the experience differed across the country, including when buyers could expect to finally become mortgage-free.
It gave me national and regional stories backed by something competitors couldn't simply recreate, and started conversations across first-time buyers, and aspiring ones.
1974 vs 2024: just how much harder is it to buy a house today?
For another campaign, I went back 50 years.
I compared the reality of buying a home in 1974 vs 2024, looking at everything from salaries and house prices to everyday outgoings, disposable income, deposits and how long someone would need to save before they could afford to buy.
The aim wasn't simply to say that buying a home had become harder. Everyone already knew that.
It was to show exactly how much harder, and what had chaned for the average buer over those 50 years.
Revealing where buyers were most at risk of missing the Stamp Duty deadline.
Ahead of a major Stamp Duty deadline, buyers across England were racing to complete in time.
I analysed the average turnaround time for local searches across 369 councils, then combined that with the average conveyancing period to predict how long buyers in different parts of the country could expect to wait between sale and completion.
That allowed me to identify where buyers were most at risk of missing the deadline and potentially paying thousands more in Stamp Duty.
And because the data covered hundreds of councils, one national story gave me relevant local angles across the country too.
Getting ahead of the Bank of England base rate changes, and budget news.
Not every opportunity needed an original dataset. In mortgages, some of the biggest stories were already sitting in the calendar.
Ahead of Bank of England base rate decisions, I followed market predictions and worked with Mojo's mortgage experts to prepare commentary for the most likely outcomes before the announcement.
I did the same ahead of the Spring and Autumn Budgets, anticipating the announcements most likely to affect buyers and homeowners and preparing different responses in advance.
Then, when the news was confirmed, all I had to do was press send.
Within minutes, Mojo's expert reaction was in the inboxes of mortgage and personal finance journalists. And within 20 minutes, I regularly secured coverage across property and personal finance titles, as well as the money sections of national news websites.
Turning everyday mortgage questions into media stories.
Some of the best opportunities were hiding in the questions Mojo's mortgage experts were already answering every day.
I turned that knowledge into useful stories around everything from improving your credit score before applying for a mortgage to unexpected ways to overpay and reduce your mortgage faster.
It gave Mojo a consistent stream of relevant stories between the bigger campaigns and breaking-news moments, while building the visibility of the experts behind the brand.
450+ pieces of coverage in one of PR’s most competitive industries.
Mortgages is a crowded media space, with banks, brokers, comparison sites and some of the UK’s biggest financial brands all competing for the same journalists’ attention.
In just one year, the strategy secured more than 450 pieces of coverage, including 300+ backlinks, across national news, personal finance, property, homes and mortgage trade media.
And importantly, this wasn’t PR working in isolation. Working closely with Mojo’s SEO and content teams meant the activity was built around the wider organic strategy too.
And the results went beyond the headlines:
+105% in organic traffic
+562% increase in keywords ranking on page 1 of Google
+513% increase in keywords ranking in positions 1-3
Don’t just take
our word for it:
I can wholeheartedly say that Bekki is in the very top tier of Digital PRs I’ve worked with. She is a master of her craft, and is tenacious about getting links. Focused on link quality as well as relevancy, she doesn’t pad out her activity with low-quality links. Her reporting is clear, concise and target focused.”
Nathan Thompson
SEO Lead
MOJO MORTGAGES & USWITCH