YIT Housing: Content strategy & marketing transformation

YIT builds apartments and whole residential areas, and also provides housing-related services in Finland and Eastern Europe.

The aim of the new content strategy was to support the transformation to customer-oriented content that promotes conversion. The new content strategy was viewed as a significant element in YIT’s overall marketing transformation, in which they are developing their entire marketing process to be data-driven and more customer-oriented.

Niina Pakkala, Digital Marketing Manager at YIT, explains why YIT wanted to proceed with building a content strategy at the same time as an extensive development project.

“We see the content strategy as a crucial and important part of taking our marketing transformation forwards. It would be very difficult to transform our marketing without a content strategy.” 

– Niina Pakkala, Digital Marketing Manager at YIT

Digitalization and improving the customer experience are priorities for YIT, and they are also central to the marketing transformation process.

The most effective strategies come from interactive workshops

We started building the content strategy together with the marketing team at YIT.

The implementation of the content strategy started already during the first meeting and continued throughout all the workshops. Even though development of the content strategy was a marketing-related project, many other people took part, including employees from sales and communications, service development specialists inside the organization, and representatives from partner organizations involved in the process.

A series of interactive workshops were included in the development process and these were prepared together with YIT. The workshops were carefully planned, and the process proceeded smoothly, which ensured that the content strategy moved forward as part of the larger transformation.

The content strategy guides daily content planning

The completed content strategy is wide-ranging and it includes motives, special requirements and broader consumer trends, which were identified through customer persona research.

The key elements of the content strategy were defined and prioritized through close collaboration in the workshops. As a result, the new content strategy now takes into account how the content relates to the brand, different types of content, content differentiation, SEO, and data and measurement.

The new YIT Housing content strategy also takes into account how future technology, like AI, might affect content development.

More customer-oriented digital content on the customer journey

The new content strategy has strengthened the content produced by YIT, making it more goal-directed and customer-oriented, and it has enhanced their digital approach. The team has gained a lot of experience and understanding in content planning, and in utilizing a customer journey-oriented way of thinking. The old channel- and product-based way of doing things will now be shaken off and left in the past.

YIT is continuing their digital marketing transformation, and they will measure success based on targets, metrics and a measurement model.

One of the major reasons for the success of this content strategy is that it was developed and tailored for YIT’s specific needs, rather than just following a pre-existing template.

“We produced the content strategy together during very intense and ambitiously iterations, while still allowing space to build a vision, confidence and patience.”

– Julia Isoniemi, Content strategist at Dagmar

You can also hear more from Niina Pakkala and Julia Isoniemi about content strategies in our podcast episode (in Finnish).