derhyzer, Author at WorldOfHyzer

Kierinki Loma – The remote retreat

And yet another field trip takes students of the Lapland University of Applied Sciences to a remote place in northern Lapland. This time the destination was a place called Kierinki Loma. The company hosts a holiday village in a small town by the name of Kierinki. It is located about 100 km north of Rovaniemi.

Old buildings have been turned in accommodation for local and foreign tourists. This focus of the company helps tourists to learn about old traditions, get away from their busy day-to-day lives experience the Lappish heritage in a direct manner.

While having breakfast in the meeting room the owner of the company and her daughter explained the basic structure and offers. This short presentation gave a brought overview and was followed by a tour through the villages. Three main stops served the purpose of discovering the environment and architecture of the beautiful old buildings, the different means of accommodating their guests and possible activities.

Round-trip

First, the holiday village with its cabins was introduced. Secondly and most interestingly the Hietala building that hosts the restaurant, the pub and the hotel was in focus of the attention.

Thirdly, the group drove a bit outside of the village, passing the Devil Fields. A nice, frozen lake appeared, and it was explained that a restaurant boat serves delicious food in the summer season. Activities that are offered by the company include summer and winter activities. Camping, fishing, boating, various events like a theatre festival and a country market as well as snowmobiling and cross-country skiing can be named besides others.

Background for this excursion of the classes “Marketing Tools” and “Marketing Project” is to learn about the destination. Its value proposition, as well as the products and services, also play an important role. Subsequently, a marketing strategy proposal is going to be developed and presented to stakeholders of the company and the village. The main goal behind this is to leverage the existing offers and create awareness for this unique, remote retreat.

How to contact them?

Information on the village and activities can be found either on Facebook or their website. Booking can be directly done via booking.com. A contact form for general inquiries is also available.

Marketing and how it’s done in Finland

How to learn about business? Speak to the practitioner!

Lapin AMK and our teachers from the class International Marketing Tools, Ritva Junna and Tuija Kuisma, arranged that this Tuesday, 25th September. Students got the chance to listen to a guest speaker and alumni student by the name of Jenni Tapio. She works in the marketing department for the Lappset Group in Rovaniemi.

The Lappset Group Ltd.

Click the logo to the companies page!

The company is producing playground, park and outdoor sports solutions for a wide variety of international companies. Its slogan is “We invite people outdoors” which is on the point. It is exactly what their business is about. Founded in 1970 they grew strongly since then, employing over 400 people worldwide. Producing in three different factories they sell via 56 dealers globally. Also, they have nine subsidiaries in Estonia, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Sweden, the UK, China and the USA. The consolidated turnover in 2017 was about 50.7 million Euro.

The main target audience for Lappset Group are various different businesses. It promotes and sells to (landscape) architects as well as professional buyers for the private sector (e.g. real estate and shopping centres) and local government boards. However, the needs of those clients always have to be consolidated with the needs of the end user. This group consists of children, teenager, parents and also the elderly. So we basically speak about families and therefore people of almost every age.

But the main question: What does a company like this marketing-wise?

Tapio presenting the company The guest speaker Jenni Tapio, Marketing-specialist for the group, provided our group of international business students with deep insights about the companies approach to organise their marketing activities. Besides introducing the action plan for 2018 that consists of Lappset solutions, brand awareness, CSR issues and inclusive design, she spoke about all their marketing activities, key performance indicators and processes. Furthermore, she depicted the marketing automation system, circle of measuring and planning, lead management by explaining the conversions. Marketing tools that are currently in use include the website, blogs, social media, catalogues, seminars, trade fairs, pricing, branding and media production.

The presentation showed how Lappset seems to have a well organised and holistic marketing concept, especially in the digital area. Processes are in place for their visual marketing, events, the website, inbound marketing activities, e-mail marketing and the paid advertising. Just to name some of the most important ones.

Automation, analytics and measurement.

The mentioned marketing automation system runs ins the background of the company website. It generates information about the customers which are divided into suspects, visitors, prospects/leads, customers and references. The purpose of it is to attract, educate, convince and activate, give impulses and engage with the target audiences. The system takes place in the following areas: e-mail marketing, landing pages, campaign management, marketing programs, lead generation, predictions and data analysis.

Key performance indicators are measured at different time intervals. Digital traffic is reported monthly, digital budget twice a year and new leads at the end of every quarter. KPI’s are measured to evaluate the performance and structurize the lead management as well as conversions. Lappset, for example, measures the brochures ordered, contact forms send, downloads of different materials and quotation requests. The company wants to increase the:

Amount of qualified leads
Amount of new content
Amount of marketing-generated business leads
Traffic from social media channels and adverts

Marketing as a potential professional future.

With a personal background in communication management as well as innovation, entrepreneurship and leadership the field of marketing always seemed an attractive and potential professional working environment. What especially catches the attention are the holistic and integrative approaches to everything that happens in the value chain of companies. Anyhow the different marketing activities have to be broken down to individual task and campaign that work together like the gears of a professional racing car. Still, the strategical, tactical and operational levels can be separated and the first two seems most interesting to work in.

The wrap-up.

Many insides could be won about the Lappset Group Ltd. during this short presentation of guest speaker Jenni Tapio. She gave an introduction to the company first and subsequently showed how their marketing works. Interesting was especially which kind of processes they have in place and how they automate as well as measure their activities. It was enlightening on which KPI they focus and how they do lead management. Jenni Tapio shared different fields of marketing and therefore probably increased the interest of our course on various job perspectives.

Have a freezing phantastic week.

Best regards

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A wish you a wonderful autumn day!

“Network learning” about content marketing

A different approach that fosters the power of communication

Many executives and business gurus swear that networking is one of the main keys to success. Undoubtedly the exchange between individuals helps to learn, make new experiences and foster individual strengths and expertise! But what exactly is it? And how can it be utilized to grow your business and grow personally?

Investopedia.com says: “Networking is a process that fosters the exchange of information and ideas among individuals or groups that share a common interest. It may be for social or business purposes.” Due to the fact that this article is only partly about networking, additional information on that topic can be found here. However, a form of networking is exactly what happened at Lapin AMK last Thursday, 20^th.

Whats a learning café?

Branding discussion — Learning about branding!

About 45 students from the class “International Marketing tools” got together to experience a concept called “Learning café”. Often also called “world café” or “knowledge café” it is a structured conversational process where participants get together in different groups for an easy and fast way of knowledge exchange. It followed five different steps.

Get together with your group
Create a mind map together based on the reaction papers
New groups (one student stays at home)
Everyone in the group explains the most important issues of the reaction paper for the others
Every (home)group creates a conclusion and presents it for the others.

In an informal but methodically controlled proceed the group learned about five different topics, related to marketing tools, in one afternoon.

Discussing marketing tools

The topics included branding, digital marketing, social media marketing, content marketing and the zero moment of truth. Working in the expert group for content marketing the findings regarding this tool are discussed subsequently. More information about the other topics can be found by following the links or looking at the pictures provided.

Referring to a little booklet which is called “Astonishing tales of content marketing” by Jason Miller, the group learning interesting facts about the topic. Content marketing comes in many different forms but generally works online, integrating various forms of reach media and different channels for the distribution. Furthermore, some ingredients seem to be crucial.

Using the strategy is about delivering valuable and relevant content to the target audience by using the power of storytelling. The entertainment and education of the recipient are in the focus of this approach. Branding and awareness are the basic goals and they are often reached through leveraging the viral reach and the word of mouth. Selling the products of the company only happens secondary because the audience is appealed to the company.

The main points which crystallized in the discussion are:

One powerful, relevant massage
Consistency over all used channels
Creative, innovative and valuable content
Appealing visuals
Co-creation and cross-promotion
Establishing communities
Leveraging virality

Because content marketing can be produced in different forms, the group had a long discussion about what the borders of content marketing are. Broad possibilities make it difficult to define and it is hard to find the one right answer.

Do it again?! Sure.

The learning café started out in a deep discussion about on selected topic, followed by short explanations of every group’s topic and concluded in short presentations in which every group presented their poster which was created in the initial discussion. Provided coffee, tea and an incredibly tasty blueberry cake resulted in a Café-like atmosphere that helped to easily get conversations going.

The results of the other group’s discussion can be found in many different blog posts which will be shared on this blog as soon as they have been created. Deep insights were delivered in a fun environment. As a first-time participant of a learning café, I became a fan of this approach which is based on social interaction and a very convenient way to learn about various topics in a comparably short period of time.

To conclude this article the following five statements, try to recapitulate important statements for each topic. However, they are not supposed to give a full understanding. They are supposed to be an inspiration to read and learn more about different international marketing tools and get in content with other people in the group in order to grow your network!

“Branding is all about creating a unique image for a company, product or service in the customer’s mind.

“Digital marketing uses many digital technologies to deliver the intended marketing message to the recipient in a fast way and convenient way.

“Social media marketing is a relatively new form of marketing that may utilize every possible social media to reach the target audience.

“The zero moment of truth is the point in every sales/buying circle when a (new) customer starts to research about a product.

And last but not least…

“Content marketing uses creative, entertaining and educational storytelling to raise awareness and create a strong brand.

If you have any unanswered questions or just want to take part in an additional learning café or a tea party at our wonderful housing in Kuntotie, please do not hesitate to contact me via e-mail.

Enjoy your day and stay curious!

Cottage weekend coming up!

Alright everyone, being in Finland for three weeks now everything becomes more familiar. People and culture do not seem that different anymore after making a lot of new experiences. However, there are still many more to come.

On the next weekend (14.09.-16.09) about 60 exchange students of Lapland UAS are going on a Cottage weekend together. The cottage is located at Leirikari, which is basically in the middle of nowhere.

Even though the program for the weekend is not published yet it should be really exciting to see a little landscape, meet new students and get to know each other better. I guess in the business world you would call that either networking or teambuilding.

Keep reading this blog and find out what happened there next week.