Cinia

This story isn’t about deliverables. It focuses on how we work together with Cinia and how the way we deliver our services benefits the entire organization.

You’ll find comments from Johanna Virmavirta, Growth Marketing Lead at Cinia as well as Ella Hellman, Marketing Strategist at Advance B2B, and Anna Vikström, Content Marketing Specialist at Advance B2B.

What Cinia needed help with

Overall, Cinia needed to shift the way they do marketing and find a way to better target their audience and customers. In more detail, they needed:

• “Steady and professional marketing work”.
• With a small marketing team, more time to do everything.
• More glue and coherence between all business units with marketing.
• A more strategic approach to content ideation and production

What we brought to the table

Interestingly enough, when Cinia started working with us, they also worked with Johanna … as an employee of Advance B2B! One thing led to another, and Johanna is now on the other side of the road, leading Growth Marketing efforts at Cinia and being the first point of contact for our collaboration. Here’s what Advance B2B brought to the table, first with Johanna on our team, and now, with Ella Hellman and Anna Vikström in AB2B team:

• A strategic approach to marketing
• An agile way of working in sprints
• A goal-setting framework and metrics
• A content production that’s aligned with the value Cinia delivers
• Ongoing assistance with HubSpot development

“Shifting how the organization approaches marketing”

Cinia offers unique expertise for the most demanding IT infrastructure challenges. Its solutions cover: 

• Networks and connectivity 
• Cybersecurity 
• Software development

At the beginning of our collaboration, we only worked with Cinia Software Solutions. Later, as Johanna Virmavirta joined the cross-company marketing team, she realized that the marketing team wasn’t effectively running the marketing show.

The show was run by business unit leads themselves, leading to uncoordinated actions, gaps there, and overlaps here. Impulsion and gut feeling were driving the race instead of proper data-driven marketing.

A strategic partner shouldn’t just deliver some quality work.

They should deliver it on time and stress-free for the customer. This goes without saying in theory, but it is much more difficult to find in practice.

The Advance B2B team isn’t only a helping hand to Cinia’s marketing team; they are a trusted partner with much-appreciated ownership and project management skills.

Day-to-day work often means that you have no time to take a step back and think. This is especially true in smaller marketing teams, where every minute counts, and each member needs to develop multiple skills to keep up with a high-intensity pace. Whether on our website or during sales calls, we claim that our people can stir things up with out-of-the-box thinking. Well, it turns out that it’s not just something we say; it’s something we do.

When Johanna was asked about the strategic value Cinia gets from Advance B2B, she went straight to out-of-the-box and quality thinking. AB2B team assists them with the following:

• How to approach marketing with more strategy. 
• How to lead marketing so that it impacts not only one team but an entire organization.
• How to measure everything the light marketing touches.
• How to use the Ideal Customer Profile to make more informed decisions.

Not only is Johanna happy to get such moral support as a hardened strategic marketer herself, but she also mentioned that “all of the above was new to the organization”, pre-Advance B2B.

Through our partnership, we work with Cinia’s cross-organizational marketing team, sales development team, and software solutions business unit, and we’ve been working on new initiatives that have already been showing valuable results for them, including:

• Ideation, production, and design of a brand-new research paper (in Finnish) on product development
• A quarterly newsletter (in Finnish) that explores a diverse array of current topics and cases related to cybersecurity, both from Finland and around the globe.
• The production of a podcast (Kyberturvassa - in Finnish) to give Cinia’s busy audience a chance to receive industry expert news and advice in an easy-to-consume format.
• HubSpot Sales development: our HubSpot experts are working closely with Cinia’s sales development team to customize the platform so that it really supports our marketing and sales work. 

Our AB2B team also appreciates how much Johanna and her team acknowledge that we’re always learning from what we do together. 

Our HubSpot Sales development is a perfect example of this; “as we develop better processes and provide more business insights, we’re also gaining a deeper understanding of their business, which they feel is making our cooperation more strategic”, said Ella Hellman, Marketing Strategist at Advance B2B.

What’s more and, as cliché as it sounds, this is only possible because we’re all on the same page and want to follow the same book. "The cooperation with Cinia has been incredibly rewarding. Cinia appreciates the long-term value of strategic marketing and understands that achieving great results requires laying a solid foundation. They recognize the importance of deeply understanding their ICPs and building brand awareness before diving into lead generation, and this can be seen in the deliverables we've created together. In my opinion, this approach sets them up for lasting success.", said Ella Hellman.

There’s more than what meets the eye

As part of our regular working style, we always save time for our teams to meet internally (meaning, without taking time from our customers) to go over the plan, ensure we’re on track with our deliverables, and plan the next steps so that we always work ahead of time rather than against the clock.

Johanna and her team greatly appreciate this, as it shows that she is taken care of and considered.

Each collaboration has two sides: Cinia and the team learn from us, and we learn from them.

Finding the right team for Cinia

Beyond the deliverables, working with an Agency means finding the glue between the people. Why? Well, we believe that a working team can achieve anything.

When Johanna joined Cinia, we found out that the team we had assembled wasn’t the right fit. Cinia needed a more holistic approach, and after discussing it together, we quickly assembled a new team, and it’s been going strong ever since.

Agile marketing operations work for organizations with complex sales cycles

In the past decade, we’ve worked with B2B organizations of all sizes. Our experience with Cinia is no different from what we’ve experienced before; agile operations aren’t just interesting for startups with short sales cycles and/or low-to-no-touch sales.

If well implemented and rigorously followed, agile methodologies, ways of working, and thinking will unlock growth bottlenecks for all organizations out there.

Good content can be a game-changer in all industries

Different industries and audiences call for different content assets. However, regardless of the format of said content, we can say with certainty that even the most technical-oriented, demanding audiences will enjoy clear, easy-to-digest content – as long as it’s strategically valuable for them.

As Johanna puts it, it’s the “small things” that make a big difference. Working with an agency first means working with people. When asked what makes Advance B2B special to Johanna, she said that it’s our no-bullshit approach.

“You deliver what you say you’ll deliver, and, alternatively, our team at Advance B2B will tell us when they can’t deliver something (...) No bullshit, that’s exactly what you are. I like that you know how to communicate and how to say ‘rough things’ in a nice way. And you always keep your promises.”