With six branches across Greater Manchester and Cheshire, Vernon Building Society is a regional mutual with deep local roots and strong ties to its community and partner charities.
Rather than competing directly with national lenders on headline savings rates, Vernon has developed a range of distinctive mortgage and savings products designed for specific customer needs – including specialist lending for students, holiday lets and buy-to-let landlords.
Creode has supported Vernon across creative, performance media and organic search, helping promote different products at different times of year in line with evolving commercial priorities.
The challenge
As a smaller building society, Vernon faces constraints that shape every aspect of digital strategy:
- limited paid media budgets
- strong geographic targeting around branch catchments
- specialist mortgage propositions rather than mass-market products
- savings products that don’t compete primarily on headline rate
- developing ad copy that qualified the right users without reducing reach
Success depended less on scale and more on precision targeting, relevance and timing.
What we did
We built a paid search approach designed to make the most of a modest budget while supporting Vernon’s changing priorities across the year.
This included:
- structuring campaigns around specialist mortgage audiences
- focusing activity within branch catchment geographies
- removing low-intent and non-qualifying search demand
- introducing Performance Max as an incremental growth channel rather than allowing it to absorb brand traffic
- running activity across both Google Ads and Microsoft Advertising to extend reach efficiently
Alongside campaign delivery, we developed custom reporting dashboards to improve visibility of performance and support clearer decision-making across the marketing team.
The impact
Instead of chasing volume, the strategy focused on reaching the right borrowers and savers at the right time.
This allowed Vernon to:
- promote specialist mortgage products more effectively
- adapt campaigns quickly as priorities shifted
- improve efficiency within a tightly controlled budget
- increase transparency around performance through tailored reporting
The result was a flexible acquisition programme aligned with Vernon’s regional footprint and specialist lending strategy.
Creode understands how to make digital work for a regional building society. They’ve helped us target the right audiences for our specialist mortgage products and improve visibility of performance across our campaigns.
George Dunn, Marketing Manager at Vernon