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! ☀