Look at the resumes and LinkedIn profiles of today’s technology industry marketing leaders and it would seem intuitive to credit their success to prestigious business degrees, extensive experience at an early-stage startup or Big Tech, or specialized credentials in an emerging area of expertise.
Jannike Reinholdsson, Bluebeam’s regional marketing manager for Northern and Eastern Europe, boasts a resume and background that defies these expectations.
Before landing a job in construction and soon thereafter at Bluebeam, Reinholdsson was working in fashion and as a makeup artist and lifestyle blogger—experiences that don’t necessarily check the expected boxes of a would-be marketing professional, especially one focused on the construction industry.
Yet Reinholdsson is indisputably one of the construction technology company’s special marketing talents, with a fascinatingly unique background that has given her an unmatched perspective when it comes to selling software to the construction, architecture and engineering industry.
Reinholdsson has not only come of age as a marketer without a university degree in the field—she doesn’t have a university degree at all. In fact, Reinholdsson is a proud high school dropout.
Instead of formal education, Reinholdsson, who is based in Stockholm, Sweden, has built her career on pure grit and guile.
By diving headfirst into pursuits of interest to her and accumulating knowledge, experience and relationships at each step along the way, Reinholdsson has propelled herself into her current critical role as Bluebeam’s chief marketer for a region that is paramount to the company’s continued growth and success across Europe.
“Working in marketing has always been a childhood dream for me,” Reinholdsson said. “The creative part has always been something that makes me tick.”
Forging a path
Reinholdsson grew up just outside the small Swedish countryside town of Ulricehamn, a little more than an hour’s drive from the Nordic country’s second-largest city, Gothenburg.
Interested in fashion design at a young age, Reinholdsson focused her high school studies on the subject, even building skills in computer-aided design (CAD) software as part of the curriculum.
She quickly found formal education uninteresting, however, and dropped out of school before graduating. “It wasn’t for me,” Reinholdsson said of high school, adding that she’s proud that she went on to build a successful career despite not having formalized credentials.
Reinholdsson moved to Gothenburg and took a job in retail while taking some classes on the side. She then moved to Malmö, a southern coastal city in Sweden just across the eastern end of the Öresund Bridge, near Denmark.
There, Reinholdsson got a job as a team lead at a customer service company, while also starting to train herself to become a makeup artist, a personal passion. Soon thereafter, a colleague based in Stockholm called Reinholdsson about a role for one of the company’s new customers, construction firm Skanska.
“So I moved to Stockholm,” Reinholdsson said, “and I was helping out with conference technology and Skanska’s own visualization center.”
Reinholdsson’s ability to quickly learn software began to make an impression on her new client, and Skanska colleagues soon started throwing more technology her way. She started to learn more industry tech tools like Solibri and Navisworks.
“All kinds of software, it’s very logical to me,” Reinholdsson said, adding that it took her about a week to learn the two technology tools.
“After a couple of months, it was a department manager who was like, ‘Hey, you have some talent for this. Do you want to become a BIM coordinator?’” Reinholdsson said. “And I was like, ‘OK, I don’t know much about construction.’”
Reinholdsson took the offer, starting a full-time job at Skanska as a building information modeling (BIM) coordinator—an emerging and critical role in construction involving the generation and management of digital representations of built environments.
Mastering construction tech
It wasn’t long into her time at Skanska that Reinholdsson came across yet another piece of software: Bluebeam Revu.
Reinholdsson, who quickly established herself as a software expert at Skanska, learned Revu because she was asked to lead internal trainings on it and other industry tools, although she had never used Revu at the time.
The combination of working on BIM and internal software training crystalized into a robust experience in construction digitization, culminating in Reinholdsson being a member of the team that created Skanska’s Digital Hub, an endeavor dedicated to improving how construction uses technology for solving industry-wide challenges.
While running communication, social media and public relations as part of the Digital Hub initiative, Reinholdsson took part in the first Bluebeam User Group (BUG) meeting in Sweden, which Skanska hosted at its Stockholm office.
Reinholdsson’s interest in Bluebeam peaked when she discovered on LinkedIn a job posting for a regional marketing manager for the Nordics. “I read the role description and I was like, this is me; this is my role,” she said. Like with all her jobs to this point, although she didn’t necessarily have the formal marketing background preferred in the job posting, she applied.
She got the job, combining her love of technology with her childhood dream of working in the creative side of marketing and communications.
Broadcasting authenticity
Reinholdsson’s role at Bluebeam for Northern and Eastern Europe is that of a well-rounded marketer. She is responsible for everything from content marketing and social media to digital media strategy and everything else in between for the region.
Her job also involves many nuances, as Reinholdsson works to translate Bluebeam’s global marketing programs and initiatives into a localized lens that best speaks to customers in her region. “Every day is like something new,” she said.
The job is something Reinholdsson is well-equipped to do, thanks to her direct experience in construction technology from her time at Skanska, but also due in large part to her past pursuits as a makeup artist and evolution as a lifestyle blogger and social media savant.
As connecting with customers and prospective customers continues to evolve in today’s increasingly digital age, it’s become critical that marketers in the industry have a solid pulse on the channels that are effective in reaching people with messages that resonate.
For her part, Reinholdsson has spent much of her life exploring the forefront of emerging media, art and culture, and today she remains passionate about navigating the intersection of personality-driven online content creation with brand marketing.
Outside of her work with Bluebeam, Reinholdsson is a fervent content creator on Instagram (@jannikeviola), where she posts and curates content about her life, makeup and fashion, music and culture.
And although she no longer runs her own lifestyle blog, preferring instead to focus on social media, the experience taught her critical insights into how to use online publishing to cultivate an audience through entertaining and educational editorial content—something Bluebeam does with its blog, Built.
In all, Reinholdsson said these creative endeavors have taught her the value of perhaps the most important characteristic people crave these days from brands: authenticity.
Authenticity is at the center of everything Reinholdsson does, whether it’s her work with Bluebeam or her Instagram content. It’s why she loves using social media to show off her personality, her fashion sensibilities and her tattoos, of which she has many, with more on the way, she said.
“It’s important to show people who you are and then connect that to your role at Bluebeam,” Reinholdsson said. Buyers, to be sure, want to know about the product, she said, but they also want to know about the people behind the product, and sometimes the latter is more important.
Authenticity is also a big reason why Reinholdsson said she loves working for Bluebeam. “I joined Bluebeam because of the people,” she said. “Of course Bluebeam is an awesome product, but if it wasn’t for the people I would never have been trusting of the company in a sense.”
Trustworthiness is another essential characteristic marketing leaders need to focus their messaging on to customers these days, Reinholdsson said. This is yet another lesson she has learned through her experience with social media.
“Followers [on social media] want to see if you are a trustworthy person,” Reinholdsson said. “If you’re just there to sell, to make a profit, you will not stay long in any industry you’re involved with these days.”
Reinholdsson ultimately sees her role at Bluebeam as one that continuously communicates the company’s people-focused approach to technology to its customers—whether it’s through more traditional marketing channels or the growing and evolving list of new ones. She said Bluebeam’s products—and the people she works with to help build and promote them—ultimately make it easier for her to communicate that message.
“It’s a kick-ass product,” Reinholdsson said of Bluebeam. “That is so nice to work with … to actually enable people to save time and money using. To be able to take manual processes and digitalize them to improve construction workflows and help people work smarter—that’s cool. That’s why I work here.”
