Now you have a great chance to peek behind the scenes and get to know the founder of Marketigation, Hanna Hakio. This is a story of a Scandinavian girl who had a dream. The dream was to start a business of her own to help businesses with digital marketing. This is how an expert marketing business got started in a small, remote town of Townsville in Australia.
Hanna Hakio was born in a small town in southern Finland. Her childhood was surrounded by her family and relatives. Hanna was a very ambitious girl from the very beginning and got good grades at school. At first, she graduated from the University of Applied Science with a bachelor’s degree in service management & marketing. After gaining some work experience, she started to study at the School of Economics in Helsinki. Hanna chose international studies and went for exchange studies in Montreal, Canada. After she finished her studies, she stayed in Canada and started to make her career in marketing. During her career in Montreal, Hanna held numerous marketing specialist, marketing management, and marketing executive positions in technology and software fields.
On the way to start a marketing business in Townsville
During a decade in Montreal, Hanna found her soul mate, Rex. Being an international and a career-oriented couple, Hanna’s partner Rex found a job in Townsville, Australia. Therefore, they moved to Townsville early 2018. Hanna was working as a Head of marketing and operations in a technology company in Montreal at the time. It was at that moment when she had more serious thoughts about starting a marketing company of her own.
After moving to Townsville, Hanna & Rex started to develop their business further. Starting a marketing business in Townsville wasn’t so easy in the beginning, but Hanna was eager and determined to make it happen. This is how an expert digital marketing agency in Townsville, Marketigation, was founded.
What is Marketigation?
Marketigation is a local digital marketing consulting firm in Townsville. It is specialised in small and mid-market companies. Also, it has a vast experience in skyrocketing sales via digital marketing channels. Furthermore, Marketigation team is highly experienced in all areas of digital marketing. At the moment, the core team of Marketigation is still quite small, but we have a good network of partners from many specialities if required.
Today, Hanna Hakio is a Marketing Specialist and a Head of Marketing programs at Marketigation. She has a vast experience in globally helping small companies to large corporations achieve business success in North America, Europe, and Australia. Hanna is a holder of a degree in Management and Marketing, as well as a science degree in International Business and Economics. Furthermore, she is a holder of a Master’s Certificate in social media marketing, generic SEO, and SEO Manager certificate. Finally, she’s also a Google certified Search marketing specialist.
As a citizen of Canada as well as Finland and as a resident of Australia, Hanna has marketing and business experience from three continents. Being an experienced, international marketing professional, she wears different hats at ease – from hands on marketing to strategic planning. Above all, she’s greatly experienced in optimising limited marketing spend, as well as handling multi-million-dollar annual budgets.
Peers and clients describe Hanna as a confident, fair, and modern leader. Hanna’s management style is very modern – she says she hires people who are smarter than her and supports them in their creativity, learning, and ultimate performance. She is also very thorough, reliable, and an extremely hard worker. When Hanna takes a break from helping her clients do better marketing, you’ll probably see her doing sports, enjoying good food, travelling, or helping our precious environment and animals.
Expansion of the marketing business in Townsville
Marketigation has been highly successful marketing business in Townsville since its launch in 2018, and the company is currently in steep growth. Today, Marketigation is servicing local businesses from various different fields, including retail, services, real estate, tourism & accommodation, as well as B2B services. The company’s flagship services are website optimisation and conversion, Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), Google ads, content marketing, and social media marketing.
In addition to a strong local presence in Australia, Marketigation is also planning to grow its overseas business. The company recently teamed up with a new business development & marketing manager in Finland. Basic business plans have been already made and we’re really excited about this new journey.
Key points in starting a new business
If you want to start your own business, we collected our best tips for you.
Firstly, we strongly recommend you talk to some entrepreneurs or business owners that you know. This is how you can get a first-hand opinion what it requires to be a business owner. You will quickly learn that starting a business requires a lot of work. An idea doesn’t become a business without effort.
There are no limits on who can become a great entrepreneur. You don’t necessarily need a college degree, a bunch of money in the bank or even business experience to start something that could become the next major success. However, you do need a strong plan and the drive to see it through.
Here is your check list before starting your business:
- Evaluate yourself
Do you really have what it takes to be a business owner? This should be exactly what you want because being an entrepreneur can be quite demanding.
- Refine your idea
Is your idea really a good one and is it feasible? Or is it mainly your dream? If it’s the latter, perhaps there are ways to modify your dream to make it work from business perspective.
- Write a business plan
When you have refined your idea, you should write it down as a business plan. That is going to be your guideline.
- Write your company mission and vision
A mission statement is a sentence that states your business goals and philosophies. It should define what your organisation is, why it exists or what is the reason for it’s being. A company vision is an image of what you’d like your business to do some time in the future, based on your goals and plans.
- Make an outstanding marketing plan
When you have a new business, you need also to have customers. That is why you need marketing. If you don’t know how to do it, you can hire professionals to help you.
- Brand yourself
Branding yourself or your business gives you a competitive edge that distinguish your company from the competitors.
- Build your dream team
Think who are the people you want to work with, what should they be like, what kind of know-how they need to have. But also remember, you don’t need to know how to do everything by yourself cause, you can have loyal business partners to help you.
- Grow your business
Be aware that your business isn’t getting nowhere. Make new ideas and implement them.