For the Love of Marketing. Karoliina Ranne.

Last modified

May 14, 2024

Hub

Interview

Created by

Erki All

"For the Love of Marketing" is a series of interviews with our clients. In these discussions, we aim to understand marketing trends and identify effective strategies.

In this feature, we have an insightful chat with Karoliina Ranne, a skilful marketing leader at NEXD.

Karoliina Ranne shares her journey, from landing her first office job post-university to discovering her passion for marketing. She discusses her experiences of working remotely and busts common misconceptions about being a marketing leader.

Karoliina also discusses the future of the marketing landscape, how to measure SEO success in NEXD, the challenges of reducing carbon footprint in marketing, and her strategies for stakeholder management. She provides a glimpse into some tough decisions she had to make as a marketing leader and shares her top B2B SaaS marketing advice.

Karolina Ranne Marketing Lead at NEXD

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www.nexd.com

What sparked your love for marketing? Was there a particular moment or experience that ignited your passion for this field?

“It was during my first office job post-university, that I was working as an assistant to a CEO in a tiny startup and was also handed marketing tasks without knowing anything about it. Although it was very much just Googling stuff and trial and error, I ended up getting good feedback on my email marketing skills which prompted me to consider marketing as a career choice. It was sort of a happy accident.”

You recently took the plunge to work from abroad. Was the experience how you imagined it to be?

“I didn’t have particular expectations but I learned quite a few things which should be different to make working remotely a success. However, I decided I wanted to try again next winter.”

What's a common misconception about being a marketing leader that you'd like to bust?

“I’m not sure if the misconception is about being a marketing leader or a marketer in general but there is a stubborn belief that one marketing person should be able to do all various marketing disciplines themselves. Which is crazy! You don’t expect a family doctor to be able to perform surgery!”

What do you foresee shaking up the marketing landscape in the next few years, and how can businesses stay ahead of the curve?

“I think it’s difficult to predict much, the field is always changing. AI is definitely here to stay and it’s also important to never forget your target audience and adjust tactics accordingly.”

When it comes to measuring SEO success in NEXD, what are your go-to metrics? And how do you make those numbers sing to stakeholders?

“The main number is increasing our organic traffic as our sales cycle is really long and it is difficult to link a specific signup to our content. The running hypothesis is that if we get more relevant people on our website, we should see conversion numbers tick upwards.”

NEXD also helps to reduce carbon footprint in marketing. How big of a communication challenge is this?

“There is a lot of noise around this topic, which is further muddled with some companies doing greenwashing and the lingo with sustainability terms not really being clear to the audience. So it’s quite a big challenge and we just need to keep repeating it until it makes sense.”

Give us the scoop on a marketing campaign you spearheaded that brought in serious ROI or fueled market expansion. What was the secret sauce behind its success?

“As we have a very small marketing budget our ROI is quite quick to come. Unfortunately, I don’t have any secret sauce to share, it’s all quite standard.”

Stakeholder management can be a tightrope walk. How do you cultivate strong relationships with key players to rally support for your marketing endeavours?

“I am lucky enough to be trusted that the work I do is good, so I don’t have to stress about stakeholder management much.”

Tell us about a time when you had to make a tough call as a marketing leader. What factors weighed into your decision-making process?

“I’ve yet to be in a situation where marketing can be described as a tough call, just do your best and use common sense, the rest will come.”

If you could distil your top B2B SaaS marketing advice into a single tweet, what would it say?

Don’t try to do everything yourself, accept help from other specialists.