Meet Stian Aleksander Rusek, our new Digital Marketing Manager

Hi, Stian. Welcome to the StrongPoint team! Tell us a bit about yourself.

Thank you, I’m happy to be here! I’m a digital marketer by education – I’ve studied it all around the world. My masters degree is from Queen Mary in London, and my bachelors are from Handelshøyskolen BI in Oslo and Pace University in New York. Now, I live in Norway, and am excited to bring some of my international experience to the StrongPoint team.

After my studies I joined the biggest digital marketing agency in Norway (in terms of customers). I started in a sales role, selling basic websites and digital campaigns to customers. But in my 6 years there I was promoted 4 times, becoming the youngest senior media advisor and the youngest key account manager in the company’s history. They awarded me Advisor of the Year in 2019. I also started my own web shop 2 years ago.

Digital marketing is my passion, but outside work I also love football (I’m a Manchester United fan) and have played guitar since I was 12. I love travelling, too – I was in Mexico last March when the pandemic started, and had to cancel my plans to tour South America!

What are you passionate about?

I have always believed that digital marketing is the future, and I’m interested in the technical side as well as the commercial side. Hopefully, my knowledge and competence in both areas will help lift the StrongPoint brand and make us more available for all our customers.

I’m passionate about seeing the actual results of marketing as well. That’s one of the big advantages of digital marketing – we can track everything. It means we can see which campaigns help people, what they respond positively to, and how that helps both us and our customers to scale.

Why did you want to join StrongPoint?

I was really keen to leave the agency world and work in-house, so I could have even more control over the end-to-end process. It means I’m able to follow up on campaigns, optimise them and develop my own skills by taking ownership of all the small details.

I joined StrongPoint because it’s so well-situated for the pandemic and beyond. Grocery retail has skyrocketed, so it’s a great time to get out there and develop really strong messages that show people what we can do. It’s an interesting industry, with small margins and few key players. That means it can be hard to win market share, but once you do, there’s huge opportunity for growth. The best way to do that is to really finetune our messaging and user experience, and to work closely with our customers to understand where they are, what information is relevant to them and how we can help.

What are you looking forward to the most in your new job?

I’m keen to help StrongPoint take a more strategic and organised approach to digital marketing, and to contribute to our ambitious growth targets.

I enjoy all the elements of marketing, but am probably the best with metrics, analysis, and finding ways to improve. I also enjoy the creative part, coming up with strong messages and the best mediums to promote them. And I like the human side, too – talking to customers and seeing how we help them.

It will be vital to reach out into new markets and new customers. If they don’t know us or haven’t worked with us, they’ll be seeking out information and proof they can trust us. Going forward, we’ll be making a lot of improvements to the website and everything we do online to ensure they find us, and that we present ourselves in the best way.

How do you think the Pandemic is going to affect the future of the retail industry?

It’s had a big impact already, especially in e-commerce, and now retailers are more engaged than ever with finding new solutions. From a marketing perspective, search terms have changed a lot. Some which used to be non-existent are now massive. It’s a big opportunity for us to be able to reach the people searching for those solutions, and talk to them in the right way.

Furthermore, a lot of people are in home offices, which changes the environment in which they read and find information. People have become better at filtering digital information quickly. We need to get straight to the point and communicate effectively to keep their attention. And we also need to keep in mind that they’re not in the same room as other stakeholders, so we have to make it easy for them to share information remotely.

StrongPoint has audiences in lots of different global marketplaces with different levels of ecommerce maturity. How will you ensure you speak to all of them effectively?

Speaking to different audiences in different geographies will be a big task. We’re doing a lot of work to build personas and identify customers. What we see in the future is tailoring the message as specifically as possible to company, market, and even positions within companies.

We want to update and modernise all of our marketing. We are focusing our efforts on grocery retailers and in addition to focusing on well-known solutions such as cash management, we are also scaling our e-commerce offerings where we have world-leading solutions that the global market is in urgent need of.