Home. Made. was designed to capture audiences with stories that resonate and intrigue by inviting listeners to consider not just their own perspectives on the meaning of home, but also what it can mean for others. By introducing the brand in ways that inspire trust, the primary goal of Home. Made. was to challenge what it means to be a mortgage lender and elevate our level of meaningfulness in the eyes of our clients.
Home is, ultimately, what Rocket Mortgage as a brand helps people to achieve. To build trust, we needed to show consumers that we care about the stories they create in their homes. But home looks different to everyone, so it was important that we told a wide variety of stories about Americans from all walks of life. This meant specifically seeking out individuals from minority or other underrepresented groups and sharing their stories about what home means to them.
In each episode, Emmy-award winning host Stephanie Foo introduces a new story and a new perspective on what home really means. From the artist who drew himself out of prison to the soldier who became a farmer to cope with PTSD, each episode aims to grow client trust by authentically connecting with diverse groups that tend to be underrepresented in the organization’s overall engagement strategy. This parallels an organization-wide drive to support ethnic and underrepresented communities by showcasing people from those groups in a majority of episodes.
From the outset, we knew that the goal of a podcast series was not to encourage last-touch conversion but to help build the brand in ways that traditional advertising couldn’t. We purposefully chose not to include hard calls to action. Instead, meaningfulness was built through the emotional impact of the content, which meant it had to be authentic.
Home. Made. has been promoted through podcast networks, social media, paid ads, and internal comms, with a strong emphasis on organic channels and word of mouth. Each episode is accompanied by a cohesive blog and content strategy that dials in to keywords and frequently searched topics to generate an extension to the podcasting experience that keeps clients engaged.
Home. Made. has allowed us to reach and impact audiences we otherwise might not have with meaningful content that keeps them engaged with the brand. The series has maintained an average audience retention rate of over 85% across 120k downloads, meaning that on average listeners have listened to 85% of each episode. This positions Home. Made. as best-in-class for podcast engagement.
The series has also seen more than 4 million impressions and achieved a new and noteworthy ranking on Apple Podcasts. Articles associated with the podcast as part of the larger content strategy have had more than 50k additional unique views.
As one Apple review states: “Absolutely excellent. I had no real idea what I was expecting from a Rocket Companies podcast. Knee-jerk expectations include an analysis on the housing market, projections on growth, frugal methods to fatten your purse. Instead, I got a wonderful narrative filled with pivot points that connected – and stuck with me – for the greater part of the week.”
