Marketing News Canada: Thinkific Appoints First CMO, TikTok Milestones, and more!

Today we feature a round-up of some big events and recent industry happenings.

• Hootsuite Marketing VP Joins Thinkific as CMO
• TikTok Reaches New Milestone - 1 Billion Active Users
• Small Businesses FINDING Earned Media Wins with PRKarma.com
• Read more below!

Hootsuite Marketing VP Joins Thinkific as CMO

Thinkific Labs Inc., a leading platform for creating, marketing and selling online courses, has announced two strategic appointments to its executive team. Henk Campher joins Thinkific as Chief Marketing Officer (CMO), and Chris McGuire as Chief Technology Officer (CTO).

“We are very excited to welcome both Henk and Chris to our leadership team,” said Greg Smith, Co-Founder and CEO of Thinkific. “They reflect a strong strategic addition to our executive ranks and will play key roles, building high-functioning teams around them and optimizing investment as we continue to carve out an increasingly prominent and differentiated position in the global market.”

Campher brings more than 20 years of marketing and leadership experience, across the communications, brand, and social impact space. He joins Thinkific from Hootsuite, a global leader in social media management, where he was VP of Corporate Marketing and led global marketing strategy, driving brand awareness and market leadership. Prior to Hootsuite, he held the role of VP of Brand and Communications at global CRM powerhouse Salesforce, where he built and led the brand and communications team.

Thinkific has also appointed Chris McGuire as its new CTO. Moving from his current VP of Engineering role within the Company, McGuire will take over the CTO position from Thinkific co-founder, Matt Payne. Payne will remain with Thinkific in the newly created role of SVP of Innovation where he will lead the exploration of unique and compelling opportunities for future platform expansion as Thinkific continues to scale and differentiate itself in the market.

As CTO, McGuire will provide strategic direction over Thinkific’s data-driven technology solutions and oversee their alignment with overall business goals and customer needs. Prior to joining Thinkific in early 2021, McGuire held CTO roles at Checkfront, an online global booking platform, and at Foodee, a technology startup disrupting the catering industry, leading teams across software development, product management, IT and security.

Chris McGuire

Thinkific’s newly appointed Chief Technology Officer (CTO).

Henk CampheR

Thinkific’s newly appointed Chief Marketing Officer.

The new executive appointments come on the heels of the Company’s recent announcement on the first-of-its-kind Fiverr Store launch which matches Course Creators with skilled digital freelancers. Earlier in the year, the Company also announced the launch of Thinkific Payments, which enables Course Creators to increase sales and spend less time on administration, and the Thinkific App Store which provides Course Creators with easy-to-access tools to enhance the functionality of the Thinkific platform.

TikTok Reaches New Milestone - 1 Billion Active Users

Despite Throughout the Pandemic, we have all witnessed the rapid and steady growth of the social media and entertainment platform that is TikTok. The popular app has just reached its latest milestone, with 1-billion monthly app users.

Despite almost being banned in the US, being actually banned in its second-biggest usage market, almost being sold off entirely and facing various direct challenges from rivals.

Since first gaining in users, the app has been replicated by countless other social platforms - such as Instagram's REELS for example! Snapchat, Facebook, Instagram and Pinterest are all in the process of trying TikTok-like options – which, given TikTok’s meteoric rise, makes perfect sense.

TikTok has gone from 54 million users in January 2018 to more than 1-billion now, meaning it added some 950 million users in around 45 months. Instagram went from 100 million actives in February 2013, to a billion in June 2018 (66 months), which is not directly comparable due to different rates of mobile connectivity, usage, etc. But it does provide some measure of TikTok’s success.

The next stage, as noted, is effective monetization, and TikTok is developing various eCommerce solutions and tools to better facilitate business, and creator funding, through a range of means. As such, all social media marketers should, at the least, be familiarizing themselves with the platform, and assessing the potential for their brands.

A billion users is huge – it’s now on par with Instagram in terms of overall users, and growing much faster. A key consideration in your planning.

Written by Andrew Hutchinson, from Social Media Today’s Article

Small Businesses FINDING Earned Media Wins with PRKarma.com

Many businesses recommend using a news release service as an effective way to communicate a new product or service to the public. The problem is that the news release model can be less effective for small businesses in several ways.

1. Most news distribution services syndicate their news across dozens (sometimes up to a hundred) of news websites.
2. News syndication is a pay-to-play model. Often the distribution service pays the syndication partner to have the news they receive posted on the syndication location website.
3. There is a lack of news distribution to local communities and cities.

“The journalists we have spoken with have all said they prefer to have the first crack at a story and would like to be the first to break the news. When news syndicates, it can take that opportunity away from them,” says John Coulman, Marketing Director with PRKarma.com.

Credit: PRKarma.com

PRKarma.com works to solve these three issues and promote better reach for smaller businesses. PRKarma provides a service to distribute news directly to journalists within a specific region or city, as well as a newsroom for your news release and media assets. Newsrooms provide journalists with an epic experience and ease of use in finding the information they need swiftly.

The newsrooms are a seamless integration into a business website, like https://www.puregoldmining.ca – The URL looks like a part of the website.

Compiled by Emma Whiten, Editor of Marketing News Canada