Get noticed and make sure to Tweet about it

Hello and welcome to read my blog!

Hope you all have a successful and instructive week behind. Our week at school has been about learning search engine optimization, using Twitter and finally presenting our team work's results for the client company SSM (Suomen Suoramainonta).

SERP & SEO

On Monday we got a lecture held by Mercy Maina, former student from Laurea and nowadays student in Lappeenranta University of Technology. Google has recognized Maina as an AdWords and Analytics certified professional, meaning that she has passed multiple exams that assess that her product expertise.She has worked for example as a digital marketing and sales manager.

Maina was giving us tips on how to get more visitors to your blog and how to analyze your visitors and their behavior. In her opinion, it is important to be able to accurately describe the target persona of your blog or home page. Integrated Marketing & Content Strategy Ginger Zumaeta advices in her LinkedIn article, how to create an exact target persona in 8 steps.

A search engine results page (SERP) is the list of results that a search engine returns in response to a specific word or phrase query. Each listing includes the linked web page title, the linked page URL (Uniform Resource Identifier), a brief description of the page content and links to points of interest within the website.

There are 3 main types of results on a SERP

• Pages that the search engine spider has crawled and indexed

• Pages that have been manually added to the search engine’s directory

• And pages that appear as a result of paid inclusion. The highest-ranking hits generally link to the most useful information; links grow less relevant as they move farther down the list.

Depending on the number of web pages that contain a particular word or phrase, a SERP might show anywhere from zero to millions of items. In most cases, search engine users will look at only the first one to three pages of hits. Web designers and site owners use search engine optimization (SEO) methods to make their sites and pages appear at or near the top of a SERP. Maina's recommendation is that if you want to be found on the internet, the best location is on the search result page 2-3.

By aligning the content you publish with your customer’s interests, you naturally attract inbound traffic that you can then convert, close, and delight over time.

Your search engine optimization strategy can be divided into two different categories: on-page SEO and off-page SEO. Both are crucial to the success of an SEO campaign, but they're on completely different sides of the fence when it comes to improving your search engine rankings.

Two main buckets that search engines look at when evaluating your site compared to other sites on the web, are:

1. On-page: what is your site/page about? One of the most popular ways that search engines worldwide tend to rank websites is by looking for the prominence and frequency of certain keywords and phrases on various facets of your site, and assigning an appropriate degree of weight accordingly.

2. Off-page: how authoritative and popular is your site? Off-Page SEO is the use of keywords off your site. Search engines use mentions of your site, business name, and keywords used on other places across the web in order to determine your ranking in their results.



Great ways to optimize your off-page SEO value on your own include setting up social media accounts on popular sites like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Google+ so that interested parties can follow you and share your posts. As with on-page SEO tactics, always make sure that you keep your preferred keywords and phrases in mind when you update your social media accounts. Always make your social media updates as helpful, interesting, and relevant to the consumer as possible and feel free to engage your followers in conversation if a question is asked. Like Mercy Maina said, useful content is a key; if you have content, you have traffic!

SEO expert and Google Adwords specialist Karthikeyan Maruthai have written in his blog about 10 Must Know Off-page SEO Techniques for 2017. I find Maruthai's tips very useful and up to date.

In addition to being able to draw people to your site, you must also be able to analyze the number of visitors and their behavior on your page. To measure the results of your ads, you have to have the data. Google Analytics provides a great help here. It can show your visitors traffic sources, behaviour, interests, age, gender etc.,all in the same place. This analysis helps you to create a custom audience and content according to their needs.

Tweet you little bird

Monday's another lecturer was Vesa Robertsson, CEO at Linked by Music. He told us about the use of Twitter and the benefits of the service for both private and corporate use. The main advantages are that Twitter is free, you can follow anyone, and it reaches huge masses without knowing people personally. 

I also hooked up for Twitter! Please don't hesitate to follow 😄

To get the best out of Twitter:

• Tweet regulary, reTweet Tweets you find interesting and relevant

• Repost to other user's Tweets and use hashtags to gain visibility. 

• You can create public or private lists to manage users. 

• Create account for colleagues etc. Even if they don't manage them themselves.

• Follow different hashtags with different acccounts.

• Cross Tweet and like each others → Much more visibility.

• Use for example "TweetDeck" to manage multiple account on one page.

• Unfollow them who don't follow back.

• Just make it active!

Presentation for SSM

On Wednesday, the day before the client company's visit at school, our team Di6iBrainiacs gathered to prepare the presentation for them. Teamwork was efficient and we were finally ready for presentation.

On Thursday we then got to present our suggestions for the development of SSM's social media and web pages and we also got to listen to other teams' ideas on the same subject. The company representatives were really impressed with all the teams' ideas and hoped they could continue to cooperate with the students in the future. Later this spring, teams will visit the SSM's office and present the ideas to a slightly larger audience in the company.

Before that, we have plenty of time to refine and prepare a presentation even better! I'm excited that we get to visit the SSM's office, because I think the company visits are by far the most interesting things throughout the course.

Next week we will do a workshop for a quite different company, so it pays to be tuned again. Have a sunny weekend you all!

Ideas worth marketing

Howdy you all! Weather not as flattering as last week, but the feeling remains in the ceiling. So let's see what's been up this week!

Visit at a marketing agency

This week started by really interesting company visit at TBWA\Helsinki, which is part of TBWA Worldwide agency network, better known as the Disruption Company. The company describes itself as the only truly international marketing agency in Finland, with years of proven record of combining first-class creative planning, analytics and technology. Together with their clients, they create disruptive ideas that make brands meaningful in the modern culture. They believe that brand behavior is what brings brand strategy to life.

People in TBWA (and me too) believe that marketing, brand and business strategies, once fully integrated into each others, form a winning strategy. By combining their leading-edge, data-driven approach and the insights of their global TBWA network, they take clients business' to the forefront of the industry, helping brands to become ever more agile and adapted to the digital transformation and operate at the speed of culture on a global scale. With TBWA's unique Disruption Strategy method and tools they have helped many of their clients to reposition themselves in the market. They've worked with the likes of Twitter, Netflix, AirBnB, Slack, Nissan and Neste.

The visit was very productive and the lecturing guys, Henri Valtere and Steve Brown, gave a very warm image of the company. As I understood they are very willing to have students for an internship to their company.  Since I am also really interested in marketing, I may have to get familiar with this option better!

Web presence

On Thursday morning we got lecture from Ilkka Kurkela, who previously was also a teacher in Laurea but some time ago moved on to other tasks in University of Helsinki. Ilkka is such a positive and open minded person, and it was really great for once to get to hear his thoughts about digital business. 

As a main point Ilkka wanted to remind how important visibility is for a successful business. As the customer sees only the tip of the iceberg of the organization's operations (product or service), and 95% of the whole image is hidden, you got to make sure that you focus on your strengths and make them very well presented in your marketing. Marketing is therefore a promise delivered. Today, a very important and confidence-inspiring thing in any business is, of course, web presence. That's become necessary for every company and the better you take care of it, the better you will probably succeed. 

Masterful Marketing website have listed in their article 6 critical elements to guarantee a successful web presence, and here they briefly are:

1. Solid strategy. Developing a web presence strategy is not a difficult exercise as it should be integrated into your overall marketing strategy.
2. Coherent and consistent brand. To ensure people always recognize your web properties and to build a recognizable expert brand, be consistent in all you do including using the same design elements such as color, images and logos.
3. Continuous participation. You have to be present regularly to respond to questions, participate in conversations and acknowledge those who mention you on social sites. You also need to keep content flowing regularly, updating your blog, offering new content to your visitors and sharing content from others you find interesting.
4. Relevant content. If you create a content strategy that defines what you are going to write and a content marketing strategy to define how you will use that great content to gain visibility, you will be more likely to be found when your audience is searching for a solution.
5. Ongoing optimization. Search engines change how they index web pages frequently, so you need to produce new content and incorporate basic SEO (Search Engine Optimization) components to stay visible and highly ranked in the search engine results.
6. Religious review. Periodically do a review of your web presence to be sure all listings are kept up to date. If something changes, update it across all properties.

Influencer marketing

Later on Thursday there was a lecture by Riikka Nuutinen from Drum PR agency. She mainly told us about the benefits of influencer marketing. Most important of those benefits are that it noticed very well, it feels trustworthing and it gets brand presence in more channels with no strings attached. Through influencer marketing, a brand is able to borrow an influencer's credibility & brand value, content creation skills and last but not least; audience.

Example ways to implement influencer marketing:

• Product seeding
• Content creation
• Long-term sponsporships
• Events
• Channel takeovers
• Product or service development.

The process of influencer marketing starts with finding the right influencers & contacting them. Then you need to plan the concept, agree on the details & price, implement the marketing and finally, measure the results. Nuutinen reminded to think about goals and metrics already in advance. Such an important point was also to remember that afterall in any marketing, you need to be the one looking after your brand. Therefore it's important to make a clear agreement about what you're going to get through your marketing.

Top 3 trends coming up related to influencer marketing

• influencer platforms and networks
• new pricing and contract models
• B2B influencer marketing. 

Well, that's all for now, but also next week very interesting events in the offing, so stay tuned.
Have a super new week everyone! ☀

A week full of action, fun and sun

Hello all readers!

Based on all the sunshine that we have got during the weekend here in Helsinki, I'm starting to believe that spring really is on its way. As I had all the weekend free, I couldn't resist from just walking around outside and wondering that awesome weather. Also the other joggers seemed to have new energy from the Sun and awakened from their winter torpor 😃 I like! But then, let's have a look of what all I have learnt about digital business and business generally this week. And maybe some other things!

Laurea Game Jams & Business Jams

Monday this week Aida Hubanic, motivator, mentor and entrepreneur introduced herself to us. Aida has also graduated from Laurea and is currently studying for the master degree. Her work experience is mainly from advertising companies. For example she has been as a project manager for Microsoft, Nokia and Sonera, and currently for OS/G MarCom.

This time Aida had actually come to present us an event called Game Jams,which she participated as a student in Laurea for two years ago. Game Jams have been organized for several years around the world and are a powerful instrument to stimulate innovation in the creation and development of educational games.

To put it briefly, Game Jams is about developing an idea into a potentially innovative solution around specific themes. When Aida participated in the event on 2015, the theme was "Adopting healthier lifestyle", and the event was organized in 9 countries, in 12 different locations. A winner team of the event will be awarded from every location, after which the winner teams will participate in the final event called Business Game Jam in Barcelona. In Laurea all the students participating the Game Jams, additionally get 5 credits.

For Aida's team's big surprise, "Hungry Cells", the application that they invented in the event, actually won the price to participate in the final game in Barcelona. And that's not all; they won the whole game also there in Barcelona. Aida told that their competitive strength was especially standing out from the crowd in many ways. First of all their team consisted of people of very different ages from 20 to 50, and that's why they could come up with very diverse and inventive ideas from the very start. They also stood out  by coming from Finland, far north of Europe. It really had impressed all the organizers in Barcelona. Aida's team also wanted to stand out at the different steps of the game; for example they presented their pitch as a rap song and their business model and product box were quite different from the other teams'.

Aida praised the event a lot and recommended to participate it if ever possible. It really sounds like a very interesting opportunity, I think.

Motivation and self management

After lunch break Aida told us more about her own life and some about personal branding and self management. Her family moved to Finland from Sarajevo to escape the war in the 90's. Aida's experiences from the war were really touching and sad, but she has succeeded to turn her past to a strength in her career with the good story.

Aida has also used her life story while doing her master's thesis. She has participated in many kind of projects with many kind of companies during her studies and realized that she has zero motivation to work with somebody else. She knew that she had something in herself already that she can work with and that there must be something that she can do with her personal life story and experiences. In the beginning of her thesis she just wasn't sure where to start and how. So she ended up to make a mind map and analyzing herself. Listing all the things about herself in the map she realized that she is much more than just her education and work experience. Hobbies, the family, all the experiences in your life, they all have a lot of matter to what you currently are. Using the mind map method of herself, Aida happened to develop a tool that can also help other people in self management.

Developing the mind map, Aida turned it into 3 E -puzzles. These three E:s come from words "explore", "expand" and "execute". In this method you first just put your name in the middle of the paper. Then you go to the:

• 1st stage, which in you find and list your unused resources and unshakable possibilities. The idea is to explore to see who you are and analyze yourself. 

• The 2nd stage is to liberating yourself from limitations and developing self growth. You expand your perception of yourself, so that you write about yourself going even a little bit further. 

• The 3rd part is to execute, which means that you build your own story and concretise your thoughts and dreams. After finding out and analyzing yourself it's about taking actions and making concrete things. Make a plan based to your story, what is possible to do? To sum up, it's all about exploring your vision and expanding that into actual plan and executing it.

Aida also wanted to remind of taking care of the personal brand. It requires, whether you're online or offline, that you're aware of your appearance, you are active, share your values and create your own brand associations. According to Aida, writing your own story manages you to the right direction, because so that you could get along with somebody else, you first have to know yourself and your own strengths and weaknesses. Get to know why you want to do something and how you do it, learn time management and believe in what you do. 

Aida shared with us a very useful motivational list:

• Boost your energy and drive.

• Turn your weaknesses into strengths.

• Change your negative and doubtful mindset.

➸ Learn to give compliments but also to receive ones! 

Visiting e-commerce fair

On Wednesday and Thursday we got an opportunity to visit at E-commerce fair in Helsinki. On Wednesday I mainly just walked around wondering the event and tasting some tidbits at the neighbouring Fastfood, cafe & restaurant fair. 

This eggcup was probably the coolest thing that I found at the fairs on Wednesday.

However, I also participated in one mini- lecture on Wednesday. It was held on the Shop Stage by a famous, Finnish real estate agent Kaisa Liski. She was telling her views about good customer service and being a good salesman. 

One thing that Liski wanted to emphasize was that the digital support measures alone are not enough to close the deal with a customer. The actual deals are made when meeting customers. Of course it requires that the seller enjoys the sales situations and knows how to win customers to his/her side. It's also important to be aware of that nowadays there are no stupid customers. They are nowadays usually very, very smart and they know exactly how a sales person should act and serve them right. So, don't ever, ever, underestimate the customers, but treat them like they all were your regular ones. Also, don't let show if there's any problems with the synergy or the atmosphere in your company. It's not the customer's issue in any case.

According to Liski, a sure way to a successful trade is to make needs assessment carefully. Ask the customers, what are their needs this time, what do they know about your thing in advance, what do they like about it, what could be better? Make a quick "psychoanalysis" for every customer and know how to serve them all as well as they want you to, even if there are many customers at the same time.

A good salesman can make a comprehensive needs assessment and provide some expert advice. A good salesman doesn't talk about his/her own issues or preferences to a customer, and never shows if is having a bad day or if there's any problem in the organization. Liski sees that salespeople are born to be salespeople, but being a great salesperson is something that you can only practice to be.

A good day's dessert in BasBas

On Thursday I decided to go and listen mini-lectures at he actual E-commerce stage. The first one was from Matti Riivari from Maestro. His topic was "What undermines the profitability of an e-commerce". So, here the top 4 things to chip away the profit margin:

1. Logistics and inventory management. E-commerce storage can be distributed to stores. Picking up of products can also be organized to stores that often are located very well.
2. Information costs; including maintenance, modifications and upgrades. More than half of the e-commerce companies use more than 2 different information systems. The bigger the company is, the more the  importance is emphasized. This matters a lot especially for a long time operated web stores.
3. Double work. Needless double work significantly lowers profitability and it emphasizes as well in B2B as in B2C companies. The process of selling and buying should be written down to Excel, so that it could be seen, what different kind of operations mean to the financial adimnistration.
4. Discoverability. 34 % of CEOs and 16 % of sales managers sees the discoverability as a thing that reduces the profitability. This view emphasizes especially in the small companies and in the companies with a short e-commerce history.

According to Matti Riivari, the things worth of thinking and putting into action in e-commerce field are:

• How can you enhance internal logistics operations? Logistics and inventory management are not only transport and shelf rows.

• Count all the costs caused by double work. A large part of it can be removed by an effective overall system.

• Find out what information costs exactly are and centralize the entity.There shouldn't be extra costs!

• Where do you invest in discoverability? Would it be sensible to create a whole new base and stop being found with headwords like "auction".

• Be available online and in street level shops. Customers want to have both and the cooperation brings a lot of benefits.

• If you are a B2B dealer, feel free to move on. The market is about to change, so act in time!

Another lecture was about Resource Bank's cooperation with companies JYSK and Tokmanni. Country managaer of JYSK Oy and development manager of Tokmanni were telling how Resource Bank's financial solutions for the customers have promoted their sales. Speeches were quite brief and to the point, so I don't have much more to say about them. I just learned that financial solutions in e-commerce really increase sales and customers' average purchase value.

All in all the whole week turned out to be very interesting, and after this fair experience I think that I got some courage to visit some other this kind of fairs on my free time in the future as well!

Law Week

Hi Everyone!

What comes to our digital business course, this haven't been the most active week for my part. I spent nearly a week at my childhood home in Central Ostrobothnia, and therefore couldn't participate on Monday's lecture about law. That's pretty sad because I see that legal affairs are kind of important things to know when it comes to business or any marketing.

Anyway on Monday our team Di6iBrainiacs started to work with three exercises about law. In the first part our task was to make a short review of what should be taken in consideration, if you want to establish a shop online. We studied about cancellation right in distance sales and notice of cancellation, confirmation of order in distance selling and information to be provided prior to the conclusion of a contract.

In the next exercise we were asked to visit a website of an online shop and find out what kind of a description of a person file and form of a cancellation right they have on their page. Our team chose Verkkokauppa.com's webpage, and our common opinion was that the pages were really easy to read and understand. They weren't trying to mislead customers, but provided very clearly all the required information that law demands.

Our third exercise was to prepare a presentation about recognisability of advertising in blogs. The legal regulations and praxis in case of blogs are very similar to any other sort of marketing. Below I have listed the most important aspects from Consumer Protection Art that an enterprise and a blogger need to consider when marketing in a blog:

• Marketing shall clearly indicate its commercial purpose and the party on whose behalf the marketing is carried out. 

• A trader who seeks to advertise a product through either a professional or amateur blog is obligated to obey all legal regulations in his or her activities.In practice this means that a company has met its obligations with respect to the recognisability of the advertising when it has instructed a blogger to act in such a way that no hidden advertising is practiced. 

• A company that sends products to bloggers, hoping that positive reviews might be written about them, should instruct the blogger to act in such a way that cooperation or receiving gratuitous benefits should be disclosed openly in connection with the posting.

• Advertising must be recognisable as advertising at first glance without closer examination. Vague expressions, such as "some of the products have been received via the blog", or "product x dropped through my mailbox" shouldn't be used because the reader can't know on the basis of that information if it involves advertising or not.

• When writing about a product, a reference to the company that markets it must be made each time that the product is mentioned, or if it's otherwise significantly connected to the post. Having mentioned it in a previous post is not sufficient.

Pinpuff.com's blogger Anja Logožar have also listed in her blog post three key legal issues online marketers need to know about. Very briefly they are:

1. Data collection and privacy. Make sure your customers know that you will be collecting data from them. Prompt them to comply to your data collection policy, and once you collect the data, keep it safe on a reputable storage provider. Also, make sure to protect yourself from liability in case of data loss or a security breach.
2. Intellectual property. Make sure to protect your services and products and have trademarks and copyright, but do not infringe the intellectual property of others. The most common way many marketers infringe on intellectual property is by using images that are protected. In order to avoid this use stock photos or free images
3. Advertising. The regulations you should follow are: do not use any misleading marketing messages,do not use deceptive advertising. speak truthfully about the product and do not leave out relevant information about the product, abide by the advertising standards: you should compare products fairly and transparently.

Alright, this was all about my law week's thoughts. Next week I'm gonna pop to the e-commerce fair in Helsinki and I really hope that after all the inspiring lectures and meetings there I have learnt a lot and have some fresh thoughts to share with you too! 😊