Kiuas Startups – Making sense of the marketing communications jungle

August 9, 2019
Written by 
Mari Liukkonen
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An organization that doesn’t communicate, doesn’t exist. That’s why effective marketing communications is more important than ever. At the same time, it’s harder to manage different channels and communicate the right messages at the right time.

In the batch of 2019, we have two startups tackling the communications jungle in their own fields and their own ways.

Hookle develops a mobile app to make social media management and advertising easy for small businesses. With Hookle you can manage and post content to multiple channels with one tool - and promote your business online by posting ads easily on Facebook and Google. Hookle's AI guides and suggests the best action for the user to make a bigger impact. Social Splash is a unique way to visually show your social activity at a glance and keep the user engaged.

Saavu is a tool for activating your existing customers, that works through a chat instead of emails. The chat enables features and possibilities emails could never provide. Communication with your audience of customers should be interesting, intuitive and easy to relate to. Their solution gives your customers a reason to come and use your service again. 

Bringing effectiveness to the process

The ideas for both companies, Saavu and Hookle, came from the founders’ real-life experiences. The common problem was the lack of efficiency in marketing and communications. The field is often seen as a complex and difficult to approach and that leads people to use wrong channels in the wrong way.

“I noticed that people were doing things in an ineffective way,” Konsta Leskelä, Co-Founder of Saavu explains the thought behind the idea “People were using the wrong platforms for wrong messages and it just didn’t work out. ”

Tero Seppälä, the Co-Founder of Hookle, agrees with the problem: “Everyone has to communicate and be in social media, but it doesn’t have to be so complicated as it seems to be for many.”

The CEO of Wave Ventures and the Co-Founder of 6K Media Oskari Tempakka thinks that the largest challenge with marketing and communications these days is understanding what platforms and channels are truly relevant for your brand, and how these can be utilized to their full potential.

“This ever-increasing flow of content creates a demand for solutions that help users better manage both the messages they receive and the messages they push out to the rest of the world,” he explains.

With the right tools and services, marketing communications management can get way easier – and companies can save both time and money. 

User first

There are several tools available to make marketers lives easier, but many of them are too complex, expensive and difficult to use. Especially when making a solution that aims to make the user’s life easier, the user experience is everything.

“One of our core values is that our software is easy to use and even a person with not that much experience knows how to make the most out of it,” Tero explains.

Being customer-centric is a must. “You need to pinpoint inefficiencies in current workflows and collaborate with users to develop solutions that truly cater to their needs. In a field where alternative options are endless, simplicity and practicality are key,” Oskari highlights.

The user experience has to be excellent, for sure, but the users have to also feel that the solutions fill their needs. “That’s why we try to design our service to feel like normal chat conversations,” Konsta opens the way their tool works.

However, the challenge of creating new managing tools is the constantly changing media environment. New channels and new ways of communicating are established all the time. “It can be seen as a challenge, but of course it's also an opportunity for us, because we can scale our service,” Tero describes. 

Marketing communications isn’t easy. The challenge in all kind of marketing communication is that the organization doesn’t always see the impact right away.  Konsta recognizes the usual feedback: “Only after finding the right way to communicate, people realize that this is the way they should have been always doing it!”


Meet Hookle and Saavu at Demo Day 2019 on August 29th!
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Finding a co-founder - frequently asked questions answered
Introducing the Spring Batch of Kiuas Accelerator Spring 2024!