We are thrilled to present to you our Shaman Hero for the month of September -
Hedda Nero, Digital Strategy Manager at Novartis Nordics (based in Finland).
Working primarily with Approved Email in Shaman, Hedda manages the creation of strategic email content and optimal omnichannel execution across all Novartis franchises in the Nordics region (Denmark, Norway, Finland and Sweden). Hedda utilizes her expertise and experience in Digital Marketing Strategy to continuously improve customer experience and business performance through using integrations and tools such as Shaman.
We are delighted to have the opportunity to learn more from Hedda!
My name is Hedda Nero and I´m a Digital Strategy Manager at Novartis Nordics. My role consists of managing content creation for Approved Emails (across multiple accounts).
I´m based in Finland.
Could you tell us how you managed the content creation and upload to Veeva Vault (or OnCore Vault) process before you started using Shaman?What was the biggest difference you noticed when you started using Shaman?
Before making changes to content was complicated and rigid, as we did them with agencies and HTML. Now making small changes is a lot faster and simpler, making our way of working more agile and straightforward, not to mention having less costs from updating content via agencies.
What swayed you to choose our product?
The integration to our platforms and good feedback from fellow countries using the platform.
How has our product and services improved your workflow or made your job easier?
It has saved money and time for us through ownership of our own content (versus using agencies), with the connection to Vault and our CRM.
How did the time-to-market improve?
It was shortened from 2-6 weeks to a few days!
How much cost did you save using Shaman? (in%)
Unfortunately, I do not have any exact numbers, but I am 100% sure it reduced costs for us in the long term.
How would you rate the overall quality of Shaman?
How easy was it to start using Shaman?
How easy is it to create and update content in Shaman?
How fast is it to create and update content in Shaman?
How likely are you to recommend Shaman to other colleagues?
What do you like most about Shaman?
User interface is great and constantly improving and mobile responsiveness management abilities are well-designed and useful.
What would be your top 5 do´s and dont´s when it comes to omnichannel marketing?
Start small and simple when it comes to content in a new channel, and iteratively develop going forward instead of spending time to design large concepts that might turn out to be useless in real-life use.
Build strategic and operational omnichannel skills in-house or hire them, to avoid becoming dependent on external vendors and on the other hand, to be also better at buying services and platforms.
See your vendors as equal partners and build the relationship and platforms by providing honest feedback with a low threshold.
Develop the organization's hands-on skills by testing and trying out solutions and content early on, and involving those who are the main users of the content to grow commitment through ownership.
And most importantly, create a foundation from the start that allows measurement of your activities, set extremely practical and clear goals and embed a habit of frequently observing the goals and applying actions to improve them.
As a top user you must have met our support team by now. How has your experience been contacting them since you started using Shaman?
The support team is amazing and the chat feature is extremely helpful. They respond very fast and are overall super, super helpful and eager to develop the product forward which in general is a characteristic that sways me over another vendor any day!
Looking to the future
What handy features do you think are currently missing from Shaman?
The possibility to send a test email template with only selected email fragments added. Right now we need to delete the email fragments we don´t need from an email template during testing, and then we need to remember to add the email fragments back to the template afterwards.
The human behind the hero
What is your dream vacation destination?
Fidzi or just a nice cabin by the lake here in Finland.
What do you like to do when you´re not creating content?
Surf waves! I live in Finland, and we do not have that many waves, so it's always a rare delight to get back on the waves.
Tell us about a podcast, training course or ted talk that you could recommend to colleagues who do the same job as you?
I recommend HBR's IdeaCast, the topics are varied but I think it is crucial to widen your thinking by not reading or studying only themes closely related to your field of work.
If you missed our previous editions of the Shaman Hero series, take a look here