Today we have selected Alexander Högman to take his interview. He is CEO and Co-founder of Mediatool.
First of all, how are you and your team doing in these COVID-19 times?
Despite the pandemic, the team and I are doing great, thanks. When COVID-19 comes, you naturally start thinking of how it will affect your business. But fortunately, it’s turned out to be a great year for Mediatool when it comes to new clients and growth in our company with new employees. It turns out, a tool like Mediatool was needed more than ever before for marketers.
Tell us about you, your career, and how you founded this company?
I worked in Marketing for 10 years, and during that time, I was frustrated that I couldn’t find a way of collecting data and understanding it in conjunction with targets and budgets. And I was bogged down by different spreadsheets, overwhelmed by emails, and had to work with so many different tools for our marketing activities.
Then I felt like there had to be a better way to manage all those processes and bring everything together in one central place, to give me overview and control. After lengthy research, I realized that there were no modern tools to solve this problem, so I decided to fix it myself and bring a solution to marketers having the same issues as me.
After a while, I was lucky enough to meet my outstanding co-founders, who could develop this cutting-edge platform that serves global brands and agencies today. The road was not straightforward; we fought, built a platform, and scrapped the first version! Then we built a new, more dynamic platform with the help of feedback from hundreds of marketers and agencies.
With the foundation of this feedback and countless hours spent thinking, building, and selling, we now have the most modern tool within this area, and we continue to go from strength to strength.
How does your company innovate?
The Marketing industry is constantly evolving, which means that brands and agencies need to do the same. At Mediatool, we build very close relationships with our customers and potential customers to discuss challenges they’re facing so we can build new solutions for them and ensure they have the most innovative tool available.
The reason we built Mediatool was to become a helping hand to marketers and advertisers, and we continue that ethos today, making sure we’re one step ahead so that our customers can evolve and keep up too.
How has the Coronavirus pandemic affected your business, and how are you coping with it?
When it comes to our employees, they worked some days at home and some at the office, which has always been a part of our culture even before the pandemic. The employees are handling it great, and we love to meet up for ‘out-of-house lunches.’
Business-wise, we found that global digitalization was accelerated due to the pandemic, which we can see in our pipe. More companies are facing the same issues as my co-founders did when we started Mediatool. They are looking for a platform to consolidate all their marketing data, give them actionable insights, and easily create reports to present their marketing efforts. And as I mentioned before, we’ve been fortunate to experience a lot of growth in our company during this time.
Did you have to make difficult choices, and what are the lessons learned?
The hardest time was when Covid-19 just hit, which turned a lot of things upside down. While all brands in the world paused every project and discussion, we needed to oversee costs and organize what would eventually come. So, unfortunately, we needed to let some employees go and put everything on pause for a moment.
What specific tools, software, and management skills are you using to navigate this crisis? We’ve been using remote-friendly productivity tools now as we have offices in different locations and some remote workers. So we mostly worked as many did during Covid-19, even before it all started.
We also want to give our employees the best tools to organize their work from home. To help us during this, we’ve been using Slack to communicate, Google Meet for meetings, and ClickUp for task management. We also use Miro as a virtual brainstorming tool. And of course, we use Mediatool daily for our marketing activities.
Who are your competitors? And how do you plan to stay in the game?
We don’t have any direct competitors at the same modern level as Mediatool. Still, some companies specialize in certain areas of our platform, like Mediaocean, Sqad, or Bionic.
Our platform is very user-friendly, and we’re constantly working on our UX/UI to develop that and make it more personalized for each user.
Your final thoughts
Our ethos is that with the right marketing data by your side, the opportunities are endless. By freeing up the mental load of consolidating and reporting on data, Mediatool gives you control and clarity to navigate, change and deliver your best results yet. We want to help marketers be the best they can be at their job. From our experience, the best marketers are innovative, open-minded, and constantly challenging the status quo. And to ensure our customers stay afloat in this industry, we are here to assist them in leading that change.
- Spokesperson: Alexander Högman
- Company: Mediatool
- Website link: www.mediatool.com
- LinkedIn Link: www.linkedin.com/company/mediatoolcom
- Facebook Link: www.facebook.com/mediatoolcom
- Twitter Link: https://twitter.com/mediatool
- Link to our explainer video: https://mediatool.com/intro-video