To make Hopkins Homes look, feel and sound as good as their homes

Hopkins Homes have been building award-winning properties in East Anglia since 1985. Their methodical, quality-driven approach means they build beautiful homes that fit perfectly into their surroundings.

However, their commitment to quality wasn’t shining through in their brand design and communications. 

So it was our job to show the world who Hopkins Homes really are.

Workshopping the brand

Understanding the people we’re working with and the values they hold dear is vital in brand development. So, as we do with all our clients, we started with a series of key stakeholder workshops.

We discovered that Hopkins are a team of expert, experienced planners, designers, and builders. And that their commitment to quality can be seen from their ten-year after sales service to the high-grade bricks they use. (The colour carries throughout the brick, so if the facade weathers, the overall effect of the house isn’t compromised.)

Problem was, as the workshop revealed, this wasn’t being reflected in their existing branding. They weren’t championing their own commitment to quality or their industry heritage. Their design and messaging was stuffy and they weren’t segmenting and targeting their audiences. 

It was clear the people at Hopkins did things the right way. They now needed their brand to do the same.

Content pillars

Our first step in changing that was to create a series of USPs for Hopkins that would form content pillars for our future comms. 

Centred around a brand essence we created for them - that of ‘timeless quality’ - these content pillars would inform audiences of their values and give cast-iron reasons why they should choose Hopkins Homes over a competitor. 

We combined these content themes with tone of voice guidelines, so Hopkins always know what to say - and how to say it.

Design

Our aim is always to elevate brands through design, and Hopkins Homes were no exception. Our creative team refined their brand aesthetic with new design, colour and photography principles, as well as updated typography and logo variations. 

These improvements meant Hopkins wouldn’t appear suddenly different to their audiences, but would appear more refined and more reflective of who they are.

Brand guidelines

We codified our design and tone of voice principles into detailed brand guidelines that inform their in-house teams or external agencies how their brand looks and sounds across all assets, from social to hoardings, brochures to signage. 

Asset roll-out and HubSpot

As Hopkins’ lead agency, we’ve rolled out Hopkins’ new design and tone of voice across their website, email campaigns, chatbots, PPC ads, paid and organic social, brochures, and longform SEO content.

We’ve onboarded them onto HubSpot (we’re a HubSpot agency partner) - a CRM and inbound marketing platform that helps clients raise brand awareness, attract more visitors, generate more sales and keep existing customers happy. 

The website

Hopkins’ new website predated our involvement. But through growth-driven design, we’ve analysed user insights to enhance the site’s key pages through testing, design, copywriting and CRO, so that the website is easier to use, nicer to read, and more effective at converting.

Statistically speaking

CRO implementations increased the site’s lead generation conversion rate by 80.7% and time spent on the site by 28.7%. 

Since taking over their digital advertising in late 2020, leads generated from digital ads are up 79% (from November 2020 to December 2020).

Hopkins’ social media following has increased by 140% since Woven began managing their Instagram and Facebook channels.

Total website users increased by 45% in 2020 compared to 2019.

The result

The final result for Hopkins Homes is a brand that reflects the quality of what they do, how they go about it, and who they are as people. 

Through a revamped design and tone of voice and social strategy, which all stemmed from meticulous strategic planning at the start, their brand is refined yet approachable, modern yet classical. And, even better, it’s visible.