What makes Finnish companies use inbound marketing and why blogger is the most attractive collaboration partner

Abstract: In our ever-changing world it is extremely important to stay on top what comes to marketing and doing business. Companies needs consistently find new ways to market their products in order to keep interest of the consumer. The use of inbound marketing, especially social media platforms such as blogs, Instagram and Facebook, have increased in the past few years within start-ups as well as bigger organizations. Finland has just recently approximately 3 years ago started to see the potential of using blogs as a new way of researching customers. This “new” boom in marketing has opened up doors for bloggers to work as entrepreneurs and for companies get visibility in a different way. The amount of money circulating within this form of marketing has transformed in being rather lucrative business. The newness of it all also means that guidelines for blog marketing are not really specified which on the other hand might cause problems in the collaboration process. These interesting factors have created an interest to start investigating the area of inbound marketing, more specifically blog marketing. Relatively few studies have been made in this field in Finland most of the research is conducted as a case study on company perspective but nothing was found focusing on both blogger and company perspective.   This Bachelor thesis aims to explain what are the reasons that make companies start using inbound marketing, and especially blog marketing as one of their advertising channels as well as to examine how the process works between the blogger and the company. Research aims also to explain how can collaborations between companies and bloggers be beneficial for both of the participants. In order to reach the purpose we decided to do a qualitative research and analyze the data via several different theories such as market segmentation, reference groups. It is crucial to understand the connection between all these used theories and inbound marketing.   When conducting the research we had in total seven (7) interviews, three (3) with bloggers and four (4) with companies. All of the interviews were conducted via Skype or FaceTime and the interview language was Finnish, which was the common language for all of the participants. After going through and analysing the collected data it was clear that all the bloggers and companies had positive thoughts about the collaboration process as well as understood the possible benefits it yields for both participants.