Anette Otterdal Hilsen joins Alba as Head of Marketing

Alba has spent the past few years building a solid position in Norway. The next step is earning that same recognition in new markets.

Today, more than 1,000 operators across 16 markets use Alba. In Norway, over 90 per cent of indoor golf venues run on the platform. Earlier this year, Alba raised NOK 15 million to support international expansion, after a first quarter that performed better than planned.

As Alba grows, marketing needs to adapt too. Anette Otterdal Hilsen has joined as Head of Marketing to help shape the brand and build a marketing approach that can keep pace with the business.

For Anette, this is a return to the kind of environment she enjoys: being close to a company while it is still taking shape.

Experience from a company in scale-up mode

Before joining Alba, Anette spent three and a half years at Timma, the leading SaaS and Marketplace platform for the beauty and wellness industry across the Nordics and Baltics.

She joined Timma Norway during their early scale-up phase, becoming its first - and, throughout her time there, only - dedicated marketer for Norway.

During Anette's time at Timma, the Norwegian Marketplace grew from about 190,000 to over 550,000 end users, the number of salons doubled, and Timma entered three new markets. This gave her a great practical sense of what marketing involves when a company, its customers and its brand are all growing together.

After Timma, she moved to dentsu as Social Media Lead. Working in a much larger organisation helped her see what she wanted from her next role.

A different marketing challenge

Alba's growth brings a different challenge than the one faced at launch in Norway.

The product is well established at home. Now, more venue operators are coming across Alba in markets with different levels of indoor golf adoption, different competitors and different expectations.

At the same time, the category itself is growing. In an interview with Norwegian newspaper Morgenbladet, Alba CEO Erik Holm said that the number of unique users on the platform had increased by 250 per cent since launch, while more than 100,000 people were playing golf through Alba at the time of publication. He also pointed to demand for simulator golf growing even faster than the number of providers entering the market.

That makes it even more important for Alba to communicate clearly about what it offers, who it is for, and why it exists.

Erik Holm has also been clear that international growth should not come at the expense of focus. Speaking to Norwegian tech and startup publication Shifter earlier this year, he pointed to the company's specialisation in indoor golf as a strength, rather than expanding the product into adjacent sports simply because opportunities appear.

For marketing, the priority is to strengthen Alba’s position as the go-to platform for indoor golf venues and build that recognition across international markets.

Creative thinking backed by insight

Balancing brand building with commercial growth fits well with how Anette approaches marketing. Her experience spans brand strategy, campaign management, paid social, influencer marketing, and consumer insights across Nordic markets.

Her academic background reflects the same mix. She first got a degree in Media Studies at NTNU in Trondheim, focusing on media analysis and communication, before completing a second bachelor’s degree in Fashion Management & Marketing at the University for the Creative Arts in England.

She started her career in fashion before gradually moving towards broader roles in brand building and marketing. At Alba, she is now bringing that experience into the indoor golf industry.

From beauty and wellness to indoor golf

After several years in beauty and wellness, Anette is now stepping into a very different category at Alba.

She is also starting without much of a golfing head start. Her first proper trip to a driving range was this summer, and she got hooked quickly enough that getting her golf green card is now on the agenda.

But before that, there is one slightly unusual problem to solve: which side should she actually play from?

Anette has never been strictly right- or left-handed; she played handball for more than ten years with her left hand, but writes with her right.

So while most new golfers are focused on grip and stance, she's still working out whether she's a right- or left-handed golfer.

Building what comes next

The immediate job is to learn the indoor golf industry, get to know Alba's different markets, and build a marketing function that can keep up with the company.

That means strengthening the Alba brand internationally, while keeping the focus that helped the company get established in the first place.

For Anette, it is also a return to the kind of environment she prefers: close to the product, close to the commercial side, and close enough to decisions to help shape what comes next.

The golf swing might take a bit longer to figure out.