Marketing managers play an important role in helping drive business growth. This is the person who promotes your company's brand, products, and services and ensures that you're reaching the right customers. Marketing managers do this by planning and overseeing a variety of marketing activities — from conducting market research and creating buyer personas to building winning campaigns.
I sat down with Markus Arvidsson, Marketing Manager at SaaS company Inuit, to learn more about how he uses inbound marketing strategies to drive business growth.
Get to know entrepreneurial SaaS company, Inuit
Tayla Fagan: Hi Markus, Thanks for joining me today. Are you ready to take us to the moon?
Markus Arvidsson: Yeah, OK!
Tayla Fagan: Can you please start by telling me a bit about yourself and your role at Inuit.
Markus Arvidsson: I'm working as a Marketing Manager at Inuit -covering all kinds of things regarding marketing and communications, the website, the PR and CRM as well. It is a broad role in an entrepreneurial company. That means I must run multiple projects and handle a variety of tasks, each day is different.
Read more about Inuit's product listing page redesign on our customer's page.
Tayla Fagan: Wow, so you're juggling quite a few different roles there. How many people help you manage everything?
Markus Arvidsson: I don't have any colleagues working in marketing communication or content. Most of the work I do myself, but I try to involve colleagues as much as possible, especially when it comes to events and articles. If I need additional support, we use external experts for things like website development and content writing, for example.
Tayla Fagan: Of course. Can you please give us a background about Inuit as a business? What's your business model and how do you help your customers?
Markus Arvidsson: We represent different vendors in the Nordics, and we build the market for their solutions, a demand from the end customers. We have partners that sell our products to the customer and/or integrate it with the customer's environment.
Our technical support for our customers and partners is an important service in our offering.
We only focus on a few selected vendors, all in IT. So, it's software or cloud services we're offering. We offer security, service management and network management, identity access management and more. Only working with a few vendors allows us to work closely and become part of the development of the products.
(Image source: Pexels)
Customer retention strategies helping Inuit grow
Tayla Fagan: How do you ensure that you're keeping up with your customer's wants and needs? How does that relationship work?
Markus Arvidsson: We have both our technical team and our sales team. We use our marketing communications to make our customers happy in different ways. Something we started doing last year and we're continuing with this year is making our newsletters to our customer's solution specific. All our marketing assets are topic-related so we can identify topics our subscribers and leads are interested in. We give our customers tips and tricks to help them understand how to use the products relevant to them.
Trainings and workshops are an important part of our content as well. To train the customers in the products they use. We usually do classroom trainings or custom ones, but the last year we did shorter training sessions online because of the pandemic. We also rely on our vendors to be part of training the customers. I am also looking into doing more surveys to understand what customers are happy with and identify any problems they may have.
Tayla Fagan: That sounds exciting, and I really like that content approach of your newsletters and training sessions working together. We also really miss our in-person onboarding sessions. We've started with webinars, but it's not quite the same as in-person meetings.
Markus Arvidsson: Webinars are something we have been working with since 2014, and lately we have increased the number of online sessions, both webinars and workshops. We have tried different formats like our TechTalk series, which we use to turn into podcasts as well. The possibilities are endless. Our blog and knowledge Hub are also an important part of our content lead strategy.
Tayla Fagan: Absolutely, though, that's when we come back to the previous concern about having all these ideas and not enough time to execute on them all.
Markus Arvidsson: Of course, but you have to prioritize what's the best fit for your business, and what you need to do to achieve your marketing objectives. You have to cover the different areas. We are covering our different product areas in our content to help support our customers as well as covering related topics to our business to generate new leads.
You have to prioritize what's the best fit for your business, and what you need to do to achieve your marketing objectives."
- Markus Arvidsson, Marketing Manager at Inuit.
Strategies that skyrocket Inuit's customer activation rates
Tayla Fagan: Of course, and customer success is so important for any SaaS company, considering the nature of the SaaS industry, we're existing in this constantly changing environment. And like you said, there's so many tactics and channels that we could use. It's a matter of prioritizing. So I'm just curious, what are you currently focusing on and prioritizing at Inuit?
Markus Arvidsson: You can’t prioritize too many things since then you prioritize nothing at all. I would say I prioritize three things and this is for the long run:
- Customer happiness
- Develop customers
- New leads acquisition
All these go hand in hand with a close sales and marketing alignment for the best effect. On top of that, I would say that branding goes into all of these priorities. When it comes to develop customers or generate new leads, we always talk about a problem that we know organizations are struggling with and give them tips and advice on how to overcome them. If some customers have a problem or interest in something, probably more customers have the same problems or interests.
The idea is to give your audience value. Whether they are watching a webinar, or reading a blog, they should get value out of it. Even if they don't use any of our products or solutions. I'd say that's what's most important. Give your audience something they can use or something they can try out going back to their job. They'll remember that you gave them value, and then they are more willing to come back when they are looking to solve another problem.
Give your audience something they can use or something they can try out going back to their job."
- Markus Arvidsson, Marketing Manager at Inuit.
Tayla Fagan: I really like that content approach of using a soft sell at the end, and focusing on offering value. Do you consider blogs a big or an important acquisition channel? What would you say is your most important acquisition channel to get more customers on board?
Markus Arvidsson: Our website serves different purposes and is both for our existing customers, and all other visitors that would like to learn something new in a specific topic or about any of our solutions.
We have our blog available for our visitors to browse around and read and get advice. In our knowledge Hub, we have content like e-books, whitepapers, most of which are gated for lead generation.
We also use webinars and physical events, when we can have them again, and these are important for getting new leads and also to nurture existing leads. Maybe they have read a blog, downloaded a whitepaper, and then downloaded another whitepaper, and then they attend a webinar and finally, they choose to contact us.
You never know where a potential customer is in their buying process, so it is important to provide them with an enjoyable experience wherever they are in the process.
Tayla Fagan: I like that balance of gated and ungated content, I think you've just explained it so perfectly. It's a complete ecosystem when you have that approach. And I think that's a really dominant strategy.
(Image source: Pexels)
Advice from Markus Arvidsson for fellow Marketing Managers
So, Markus, I'd really like to talk a bit about your personal experiences as a CMO. Do you have any personal experiences or most valuable lessons to share with other Marketers?
Markus Arvidsson: Even if it feels safe to continue doing what you know works, it eventually will stop working. Without adjusting and improving what you do, it will work less well. For me, it is important to work with continued improvements and analyzing the results. These might not be things that grab everyone’s attention but is still vital for successful marketing and communication.
The most fun for me is when I test new ideas and do things outside my comfort zone. Don’t be afraid to fail because the times it works well are worth so much more, and you will learn either way.
For myself and for most of us, time is a scarce commodity and to find the time to try new ideas could be hard, but it is still important for future success. It's also interesting and fun!
Time is a scarce commodity and finding the time to try new ideas could be hard, but it's still important for future success.
- Markus Arvidsson, Marketing Manager at Inuit.
How Inuit joined forces with iGoMoon
Tayla Fagan: What prompted you to reach out to iGoMoon for help? And can you describe the problem that you came to the team with and what support you were looking for?
Markus Arvidsson: Yes. I've been using HubSpot for marketing since 2014. In 2017, I started researching what platform I should use for our new website because the one we had needed to move to a new CMS vendor since the CMS we were using was closing down. So, I started looking at WordPress and HubSpot and finally, I decided to go with HubSpot. At that time there weren't so many agencies or people that could develop in HubSpot. Especially not in Sweden. So I got in contacted with Mattias after some research and we had some discussions about HubSpot CMS and what we could do together.
I had many ideas that I wanted to do with our new website. So iGoMoon came up with a proposal that worked for us. I had to get rid of some ideas, but the most important was realized in the first version of the website. One important idea we realized was to have relationships between different pages on the website. For example, relationships between product pages, solutions pages and the content in the knowledge hub.
We actually built most of the website on the HubSpot blogging tool. Now you don't need to do that. It's so much easier now.
We launched it at the beginning of 2018. We have made some changes last year to make it much easier to work on our website. We have developed quite a lot of different areas on the website and different pages. So it's been expanding continuously, with a lot of landing pages, solution pages and pillar pages.
Tayla Fagan: Yes, I believe we helped you with and did some work on your product page recently.
Markus Arvidsson: The product and the solution pages have been moved into HubDB. So together with some other pages on the website, they are on HubDB now. That's the HubSpot database. So, that's what we were working on together at the end of last year and that's been important for our development because it makes it much easier to work with.
Tayla Fagan: How do you like the work we did on the product listing page, is it easier to navigate?
Markus Arvidsson: The product listing page we gave a makeover for an improved experience and navigation. iGoMoon helped with the new design and the new functionality that makes it much easier to find what you're looking for. That's been a good development.
Lightning Round
Tayla Fagan: Thanks so much for sharing a bit of the background on your role and Inuit as a company. Let's wrap up with a lightning round of questions to inspire others.
(Image source: Pexels)
What are some of your favorite software and apps on your computer that you can't live without running daily operations at Inuit?
Markus Arvidsson: It's HubSpot and Canva I would say. That's the first I think of. I have moved most part of my graphic creations to Canva because it helps me speed up the graphic creation, and I even use it for videos sometimes. Microsoft Teams is heavily used since it is our internal channel for communications with colleges at Inuit. There are of course more apps I use like iMovie, Final Cut Pro, Photoshop and the Office suite.
Tayla Fagan: What's your favorite app on your phone currently?
Markus Arvidsson: I would say my favorite apps on my phone is social media apps, Spotify and Storytel.
Tayla Fagan: What is your favorite way to consume content yourself? Is it blogs, podcasts, webinars? Are you on Clubhouse?
Markus Arvidsson: I like podcasts and I also use Clubhouse a bit, but I consume all kinds of content formats. It depends on the time of the day and the surrounding circumstances. In the evenings, I prefer blogs and podcast that are better formats than a webinar. But still, the most important reason to consume content for me is the topic.
Tayla Fagan: Maybe that's the next project is getting on Clubhouse.
Markus Arvidsson: Yeah, maybe that's a new channel for us. A podcast series would be nice too.
Tayla Fagan: Well, thank you so much, Markus, and thank you again for your time today and for sharing so much with us to conclude. Where can we learn more about you and Inuit?
Markus Arvidsson: You can find more about Inuit on our website, where you can sign up for our newsletter or blog. We also publish regularly on our social media channels like LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook.
Tayla Fagan: Well Markus, that's it. I am very grateful for spending time with you. Thank you very much again.
Markus Arvidsson: Thank you. Great to meet you.
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