Welcome to the 102 new subscribers who joined Marketing For Geeks since the last issue. Big thanks to everyone who shares MFG with their network.

ICYMI: In my last issue, I shared Bumpa’s growth story featuring the brilliant Precious O’Dahunsi.

In today’s issue, I write about how Chicken Republic engineers virality, using the Every Citizen Must Collect campaign as a case study. Plus guest insights on the marketing funnel, AI writing, and friction reviews.

Let's dive in!

🔑1 Interesting Thing

Between August & September, something interesting happened at Chicken Republic outlets across Nigeria. Customers started walking up to cashiers and whispering a phrase: "Every citizen must collect." Those who knew the secret code got their ₦2,300 refuel pack for ₦1,500. Those who didn't watched in confusion and mild envy.

The code itself is part of Chicken Republic’s brand story. If they are a Republic, then customers are citizens. And every citizen deserves democratic access to value meals. Hence, every citizen must collect.

Here’s how Chicken Republic used secret marketing and paid media to engineer virality and earn organic buzz.

They pulled 4 levers:

1. Exclusive/Secret Marketing

2. (Light) Gamification

3. The STEPPS Framework

4. Influencer marketing that didn’t look like influencer marketing

Exclusivity in Marketing

When most people think of exclusivity, they think luxury. But exclusivity isn’t reserved for high-end brands. Even mass-market brands built on affordability (like Chowdeck) can successfully leverage exclusivity in marketing.

There are 5 types of exclusivity that brands can play with:

1. Access-Based: Invite-only communities, beta programs, VIP lounges

2. Information-Based (aka secret marketing): Secrets, codes, insider knowledge

3. Time-Based: Limited-time drops, flash sales, “first 100 customers”

4. Quantity-Based: Limited editions, numbered products

5. Identity-Based: Communities that have clear criteria for membership (e.g. income, gender, class, seniority-level)

Luxury brands typically rely on #1 and #5, while mass brands use #2, #3, and #4.

When luxury brands use exclusivity, it sounds like “You can't sit with us unless you're worthy.” Customers have to earn access with status signifiers like price & connections.

When mass brands use exclusivity, it sounds like “Psst, want to know a secret?” The secret is technically available to everyone; you just need to know about it.

The “secrets” with mass brands aren’t really secrets. If they were really secrets, no one would find out about them, which isn’t great for a mass-market brand. Instead, they layer just enough visibility on it that it can it can be found. The goal is FOMO.

Secret marketing works in various industries, not just food. For example, ProveSource & Wix have “secret” discount pages that you can only see by searching their brand name + discount (e.g. ProveSource discount). To make it feel secret, these pages are hidden from their general website architecture. But they turn them into open secrets by making them accessible to search engines only.

In Chicken Republic’s case, the code is an open secret you could access easily via social media. Hidden, but not really.

Chicken Republic did the same. The code was discoverable on social media; obscure enough to feel special, but accessible enough to spread. Later, when the campaign peaked, they dropped the secrecy entirely, opening the discount to everyone, code or no code.

Gamification

Behavioural economics tells us people enjoy the process of earning rewards almost as much as the reward itself. That’s what Chicken Republic tapped into.

Suddenly, the process of buying a plate became a little more fun. You could lean over, mutter your secret code to the cashier and wait with bated breath for them to acknowledge it. The cashier gives you a nod of acknowledgement, shouts “nice nice” and you pay the discounted price. At the end of it, customers leave feeling a little more euphoria and excitement than they normally would.

This gamification was a critical factor in the campaign’s virality. Because it was gamified, people felt more compelled to post online about it.

The STEPPS Framework

Wharton professor Jonah Berger spent years studying why certain content goes viral while other content dies in obscurity. His research identified six key factors that drive sharing behaviour, summarised in the acronym STEPPS: Social Currency, Triggers, Emotion, Public, Practical Value, and Stories.

S - Social Currency: People share things that make them look good. Knowing the Chicken Republic secret code gave customers insider status. When they shared it with friends, they appeared smart, connected, and in-the-know.

T - Triggers: Triggers are cues in the environment that remind people of a product, brand, or idea. Chicken Republic created triggers with aggressive digital marketing, including creating a dance challenge around the campaign. The more frequently people see triggers, the more likely they are to talk about it.

E - Emotion: The campaign created multiple emotional hits—excitement from the "discovery," satisfaction from saving money, and pride from being part of the secret club.

P - Public: If people see others doing something, they are more likely to adopt it themselves. Chicken Republic got influencers to post videos of themselves using the code in stores. When other customers witnessed the code in action, it created curiosity for them to learn more.

P - Practical Value: People love to help others by sharing useful information. And what information is more useful than ₦1500 rice and chicken? Chicken Republic’s campaign had significant practical value that people naturally want to share.

S - Stories: The campaign created a perfect story structure: "You won't believe what happened when I said this secret code at Chicken Republic..."

Covert Influencer Marketing

People hate when paid marketing looks like paid marketing. It’s one of the biggest hurdles in marketing → How do you sell to people without making them feel sold to?

When people feel sold to, they put their barriers up immediately and distrust seeps in. How can they trust that the influencer is telling the truth when they were paid to say it?

That’s why Chicken Republic leveraged covert marketing for this campaign. They had influencers make posts as if they “discovered” the secret code on their own and decided to share with their followers.

This initial paid investment turned into earned media for Chicken Republic. For the uninitiated, earned media is the publicity a brand gets organically, without paying for it or fully controlling it. It’s press mentions (like this article😁), word of mouth, and social media shares.

By getting influencers to post content that appeared organic, they spurred regular customers to post as well, creating virality.

It’s not the first time Chicken Republic has done this either. When they ran a promo campaign to announce their exclusive deal with Chowdeck, they used Hauwa to kickstart the conversation in a way that felt organic.

How To Steal

People have long debated whether virality can be engineered. Chicken Republic’s Every Citizen Must Collect campaign proves not just that it can, but how it can.

1. Start with something remarkable that’s actually useful.

2. Design for shareability (STEPPS).

3. Gamify the customer experience; make it fun for them.

4. Seed the conversation with advocates and influencers

5. Make it easy for customers to co-create.

TL;DR (Too Long, Didn’t Read): Virality isn’t random. Chicken Republic’s “Every Citizen Must Collect” campaign showed how secrets, fun, and FOMO can turn paid media into earned buzz.

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💭3 Insights

#1. Marketing funnels are not the customer journey. They’re a marketer’s guide.

This is a guest insight by Oluwanisola Eludoyin, a Growth Manager working across industries to drive user acquisition, retention, and market expansion. Find Nisola on LinkedIn & Twitter.

When I first got into marketing, I used every funnel I saw.

Awareness > Consideration > Conversion.
Acquisition > Activation > Retention > Revenue > Referral.
AIDA. Loyalty. Desire. All of it.

But the higher I went, the less these funnels made sense. They leave too much to guessing. What exactly counts as “desire” and “consideration”?

Upon reflection, funnels are not the customer journey. Funnels are how we deliberately guide users with tactics and channels.

A customer journey map is how users actually discover and adopt your product. A funnel is how you, as a marketer, plan to guide them.

While Dave McClure’s pirate funnel (AARRR) was evidently a step forward for us all, it still has some blind spots: referral and revenue don’t belong at the “end.”

• Revenue is part of activation. If your activation strategy works, it should naturally cover revenue.

• Referral is a retention tactic. Loyal users refer — so placing it at the end makes things messy and repetitive.

Thus, I decided to trim the fat. Here’s what I use → AAAR

Just four stages: Awareness, Acquisition, Activation, Retention.

● Awareness - make users notice your product

● Acquisition - bring them in

● Activation - get them to use the product

● Retention - keep them coming back

Why this matters

Unfortunately, expectations are quite high for marketers. And they often stem from a misunderstanding of what marketing really entails. With fuzzy funnels, these expectations get even more misaligned.

AAAR solves that by giving everyone clarity. Founders and managers know what to expect, marketers know how to measure their impact.

If you’re a Growth Manager like me, you can put your work into perspective by fragmenting how you would oversee and execute all four stages. You can then set metrics such as your North star, signups, MRR, retention rates, etc

Whatever your role is, you can simply attribute it to a stage(s) in the funnel and track the related metrics.

In addition, AAAR can also be flexible. It applies across industries and business models:

• In operations-led companies, marketing can drive awareness/acquisition while ops teams handle activation and retention through calls, service delivery, follow-ups, etc.

• For B2B products, marketing also drives awareness and acquisition while the sales teams activate the users and operations retain them.

TL;DR: If you’ve ever felt confused by funnels, simplify it using the AAAR method. It will help you draft better GTM strategies, define clear metrics, and never feel out of place.

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#2. You can make AI writing sound human.

Editor’s Note: Favour Yusuf shared his AI writing guidelines with me and they felt good not to pass along. Favour is a top-rated Upwork creator who writes the Get This Money newsletter. He also built an automated AI writing system you can purchase on Selar.

We know AI-generated content when we see it. It’s not the overused em dashes like everyone claims. Instead, there’s something about the rhythm, the word choices, the overly-polished flow that screams “AI wrote this.”

Favour has cracked the code on what makes AI writing feel artificial and how to fix it. Here are a few highlights that stood out to me (original doc is linked at the end).

1. Tell AI to write like you’re still figuring things out
   Instead of sounding like a declarative textbook, write like someone learning in public. Be curious, thoughtful, and exploratory. It’s okay to say “I’m not sure yet, but here’s what I’m thinking.” That vulnerability instantly makes writing feel human.

2. Avoid AI’s favourite tics
   There are certain patterns AI falls back on, and avoiding them is half the battle:
   ❌ Rhetorical questions (“The result? Improved conversions.”)
   ❌ Forced juxtapositions (“It’s not just about X, it’s about Y.”)
   ❌ Corporate filler (“leverage,” “synergy,” “game-changer”)
   ❌ Overused intro lines (“Picture this…”)
   ❌ Command phrases (“Remember,” “Keep in mind…”)

3. Add small, real details
   That’s what signals to our brains that the writing is human and not AI. Mention where you were, when it happened, or how it felt.

   “Last Tuesday, I was working from a noisy café in Victoria Island” will always sound more real than “Recently, while working remotely.”

4. Throw in human imperfections
   Use contractions. Throw in an aside (like this). Mix up your sentence length. Let your thoughts breathe. Even end a paragraph on a feeling instead of a conclusion.

You can copy Favour’s guide as a writing instruction into AI tools and get better content immediately.

Read Favour's full guide

TL;DR: AI writing sounds fake because it’s too perfect. Real writing breathes. It hesitates, explores, and admits it’s still figuring things out.

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#3. Treat friction reviews as a recurring process.

This insight was originally a LinkedIn post by Josephine Inika. Josephine’s post was inspired by my story on Bumpa’s growth. The rest of this insight is written in her voice.

Last month, in Marketing for Geeks, Lade interviewed Precious O’Dahunsi (Product Growth Manager at Bumpa). Precious shared how adding friction (plus a reverse trial) increased their onboarding completion from 27% to 50%.

That made me wonder: what if we treat friction the way we treat design or budgets? A friction review as a recurring practice; a focused audit with three sections:

1. Impact-focused:

   1. Has this friction improved the quality of outcomes (not just the quantity)?

   2. Did it reveal or indicate clearer signals about user intent/fit?

   3. Are there second-order effects (e.g. fewer support tickets, higher retention)?

2. Efficiency-focused:

   1. What is the time or cost tradeoff of this friction vs. before?

   2. Has it reduced noise, or has it added unnecessary steps?

   3. What’s the drop-off rate at the point where the friction is introduced?

3. Human-focused:

   1. How do users/customers describe the friction?

   2. Has this friction built more trust, or eroded it?

Like most things in marketing, operations, startups, and business generally, categorising a thing as good or bad is often too narrow a lens. When you call a decision “good,” you stop interrogating it. When you call it “bad,” you miss out on what could be learned. Both labels are too final.

Instead, framing decisions as “helping” or “not helping” helps you to look at context and outcome, and ask better questions like: helping who? helping what goal? helping at what stage?

Friction might look “bad” to Marketing (conversion drops) but “helpful” to Support (fewer spam signups).

What isn’t helping today might help six months from now. What helps in early-stage scrappy mode might hurt when scaling.

So, next time you’re in a sprint, roadmap, or budget review, try running a friction review alongside it. See what changes🤞🏾

TL;DR: Friction isn’t the enemy, it’s feedback. The goal isn’t to remove it, but to understand when it’s helping and when it’s not.

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Could Chowdeck Really Deliver Hilda Baci’s 22,619-Litre Jollof Across Lagos in One Day? We Ran the Numbers — A thought-through breakdown that answers its titular question well.

How to Get High-Paying Clients to Choose You (Before They See Your Portfolio) + Free Resources — Everything you need to start making $1k per month by one of Nigeria’s top-rated Upwork freelancers

Welcome to the 280 new subscribers who joined Marketing For Geeks since the last issue. Big thanks to everyone who shares MFG with their network.

ICYMI: In my last issue, I shared some noteworthy Children’s Day messaging from Nigerian brands.

Today is for Funnel Vision, where I write a case study on a campaign, project, or product by speaking with the marketing professional behind them.

In this issue, I look into Bumpa’s growth story with Precious O’Dahunsi, Product Growth Manager at Bumpa.

What To Expect:

• Bumpa’s early days

• Product marketing at Bumpa

• Feature adoption tactics

• Improving user onboarding & activation

• Working with engineers as a non-technical person

The first time I encountered Precious O’Dahunsi, she was teaching a free product marketing webinar for Treford. I was a content marketer; she was a product marketer who’d transitioned from content marketing. After her class, I decided to transition into product marketing too.

3 years later, my career path has mirrored Precious’ eerily. She went from content marketer to product marketer to product manager to product growth manager. I followed almost the exact trajectory.

But my career growth happened across different companies; Precious had grown within the same company she was growing. Precious O’Dahunsi was Bumpa’s first full-time marketing hire; today, she leads a product growth team to solve activation, retention, monetisation, and growth problems for Bumpa.

If I were to scour the earth, I would not find a person more qualified to tell Bumpa’s growth story than Precious. So, I reached out and we spent 2 hours breaking down Bumpa’s growth playbook.

Bumpa’s Early Marketing

At least 32% of e-commerce in Sub-Saharan Africa takes place through social platforms like Facebook, WhatsApp, and Instagram1. But these platforms weren’t built for e-commerce, which means they don’t truly enable success. That’s where products like Bumpa come in.

In Bumpa’s early days, customers would often mistake Bumpa for a marketplace—one that could help them find new customers. This is because before Bumpa, their only experience was on social platforms with in-built distribution. But Bumpa is not a marketplace. It doesn’t connect you to new customers; it only enables you to manage their experiences and your operations better.

This distinction is critical, because it was one of the early problems Precious had to battle in Bumpa. She was marketing to people whose previous experiences were with distribution channels.

“When we first started, some people came with the notion that we’re a marketplace like Jumia. Then, I used to liken Bumpa to Instagram cos that’s what they could relate to. You don’t join Instagram and expect to automatically get followers. You have to create content, push ads, and engage with people. So, [I said] Bumpa is a tool that’ll work amazingly for you if you put in the work. But you can’t sit down and expect it to bring sales.”

Bumpa never directly positioned as a marketplace, but people misinterpreted their messaging to mean so. For example, Bumpa used to use the tagline “The easiest way to sell online,” which people misinterpreted to mean that Bumpa would help increase sales (presumably by exposing them to more users).

“We didn’t position as a marketplace, but people interpreted it that way because of a preconceived understanding of certain words. Copy like ‘make sales everywhere’ or ‘the easiest way to sell online’ used to attract a certain kind of user. It attracted lazy users and brought unique retention problems.”

After this, Precious learnt to steer clear of any messaging that could be misinterpreted.

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She might not have realised it at the time, but this was product marketing work. Even though she was a content marketer at the time, Precious unofficially laid the groundwork for Bumpa’s messaging.

A year later, Precious had to fight for this messaging, and she learned an important lesson about documentation. Because she had never documented this insight, a new growth marketer joined the company and advised a switch in messaging.

“It’s because there was no documentation saying ‘don’t do this, don’t do that.’ We didn’t have it [the messaging insight] documented, but it was commonly understood [in the early days].”

Because the initial experiment wasn’t documented, the marketing team had to try the flawed messaging again, only to come to the same conclusion as before. After this experience, Precious became more gung-ho about documentation and cross-team communication.

“After that discussion, I realised we needed to document more to ensure whoever comes after us follows these guidelines. I was already in the product team at this time, so I set up a weekly sync conversation between myself and the marketing team.”

In engineering, there is a term for a senior-level technical expert who plays a critical role in setting technical direction, solving complex engineering problems, and often mentoring other engineers. This person is typically a long-timer who can explain why core systems are the way they are and who protects the long-term health of the codebase.

As Precious speaks, I can’t help but wonder if this concept also applies to marketing. And if product marketers are, in some ways, the “principal marketers” in organisations. Certainly, the term “Principal Marketer” would be an apt description of what Precious’ role has evolved to become, even as she pivoted from marketing to product.

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I have started this story from the middle. But to understand why Precious often acts as a principal marketer, I need to start at the beginning.

Day 1-7 At Bumpa

In ideal scenarios, a new hire would spend the first week familiarising themselves with their new role & organisation. But when Precious officially joined Bumpa, she was already familiar with it, having done some contract work for them previously, including writing scripts for paid ads.

And so, when Precious began executing on her first day, it made perfect sense. Bumpa wasn’t new to her; she wasn’t new to it. And she’d worked with Bumpa’s CEO months beforehand, writing for his other project, Consonance Club.

On Precious’s first day, she created the Gift From Bumpa brand persona and wrote their first set of articles.

Gift From Bumpa - Defining Bumpa’s Brand Persona

By the end of Week 1, Precious had built the groundwork for Bumpa’s brand persona. She tells me the story of how the name came to be.

“They wanted to create an official email for me and there was already a Precious in the company. I knew that this email would be used to send out marketing content for the company and become part of the brand. So I first thought it should be a “B” name, like Bimbo, Bolanle, Bernice. But I decided to use my name; or one of my names that I hadn’t really used.”

When Precious chose the name “Gift from Bumpa,” she did not realise that it would provide an unexpected advantage for their emails. Bumpa’s newsletter got great open rates because customers would read “Gift from Bumpa” and think that they had received a gift from the Bumpa team.

Apart from choosing the name, Gift defined Bumpa’s brand persona. She wanted a consistent persona that people could relate to. Something that was casual without being too informal. Unconsciously, she built the persona to reflect her own voice. Finally, she coined Bumpa’s “your business best friend” tagline.

All of her work paid off. Customers began to get attached to the brand. In fact, a customer once wrote to “Gift from Bumpa” that her emails were uplifting.

“I mean, I put my personality into the newsletter, but I had no idea that for some people, it was uplifting. It was heartwarming and part of the excitement. I no longer write the weekly newsletters, but I still remember that.”

Day 8-31

Precious’ first few days were off to such a strong start, so I ask what the first month was like. She tells me that it wasn’t always execution; they also talked a lot.

“We used to do a lot of long standups at the time. The entire company could fit into one stand-up then, so we used to do that every single day. Engineering would talk, marketing would talk.”

Email marketing was one of Bumpa’s early acquisition channels. So Precious spent her first month sending cold emails to a list of SMEs across different demographics, with the help of a contract marketer. This was separate from the engagement emails she would send to users.

These cold emails, as well as some community marketing, exposed Bumpa to a new demographic and expanded its user base.

Day 32-365

Three months into the year, Bumpa had seen a 792% increase in its user base. Their efforts were bearing fruits.

There were direct and indirect drivers of this growth. The biggest indirect driver was the personal brands of Precious and of Bumpa’s CEO. They had become marketing channels for Bumpa. It wasn’t planned; they never set posting guidelines. They just loved posting about the product (and what work at Bumpa was like). It didn’t take long for people to associate them with the brand.

Posting on her account wasn’t part of Precious’ job description. But doing things outside her job description wasn’t strange to her. Throughout the year, she handled varied tasks. Whatever needed to get done that she could do.

“I became a UX writer. We made some UX changes and I’d contributed to things like error messages across the app. I also did mini GTMs here and there to launch new products. There was a lot of copywriting for designs going on socials or ads. And then SEO articles to get traffic.”

At this point, Precious’s job title was just “Content Marketer.” But—as is typical with early-stage startups—everyone on the team had to work on the margins. The customer support person was doing a little product work. The product designer was also a product manager. The CTO, an introvert by nature, was conscripted to act in video ads. The CEO had his hands in multiple pies.

But it paid off. By the end of the year, they’d hired 2 new marketing team members, organised a physical event, and even put up a billboard. They’d worked with influencers like KieKie. They were running steady ads on Facebook and Google. They’d grown. Bumpa could no longer fit on a single standup.

Product Marketing at Bumpa

Precious was doing product marketing before she knew what product marketing was. When she was a Content Marketing Manager, she’d defined product messaging and planned GTM. So when I ask her about the difference between content & product marketing, I am not surprised at her answer.

“There’s a funny belief I have that might be peculiar to me and Bumpa. I feel like product marketing is content marketing on steroids. It’s content marketing with ridiculous amounts of data, focus, and technicality. For me, I think everything is content marketing in some regard.”

Precious explains what she means by focus. Content marketers typically have to do marketing for the entire product. They look at the product as a bundle. But with product marketing, the product is a sum of its various functionalities. And sometimes, product marketers focus on one specific functionality at a time.

“Content marketing was very widespread. But with product marketing, the conversation could be ‘this week, we’ve not seen a lot of traction for this new feature we launched.’ And then we identify the problem. What does the usage data say? What are the drop-off points? Maybe based on that, we do a survey. Based on that, we start thinking of solutions. Maybe something on social media, maybe a UI change, and so on.”

Some tasks often overlap between product & content marketing, like how-to articles. When Precious was a content marketer, she had written how-to articles for specific features on Bumpa. But her approach was straightforward. Step 1, 2, 3, CTA. As a product marketer, she faced how-to articles again. But this time, her approach was different. She wrote articles with a deeper understanding of each functionality on its own and as a part of Bumpa.

“For example, if someone wants to learn how to record sales on Bumpa, I’m not going to tell you ‘open your app, do this, do that.’ I’ll also include what other features or functionalities are attached it [that could increase the value to you]. So, in that one article, you’ll learn how recording sales impacts the analytics you have every month on Bumpa. I’ll link it to how recording sales means you get receipts and invoices automatically. I’ll talk about benefits of using it to apply for grants.”

Another difference, says Precious, is that content marketing campaigns were very public-facing while product marketing tasks are often only pushed to users. Rather than working with influencers or pushing ad campaigns, Precious was working on onboarding new users and improving adoption.

Bumpa Wrapped

Precious tells me that one of the product marketing projects she had fun working on was Bumpa Wrapped. The first thing she admits is that it was not an original idea; she was inspired by Spotify Wrapped and wanted to create a version for Bumpa.

At the time, she didn’t have access to a lot of data to make Bumpa’s version as specific as Spotify’s. She had to get creative.

“It was very dramatic. I did 5 persona cards that were similar to report cards. I just used one parameter to divide users into these 5 cards with basic data from the backend.”

She then worked with a designer to put the cards in graphics and add them to their email provider. Two days after Christmas, when everyone else was bonding with family and preparing for the new year, she was on a call with her designer for hours.

Even though it was a basic, bare-bones version, it worked well. Users loved them and shared on social media.

Now, Bumpa collects a lot more data points and shares the Wrapped via an in-app experience rather than email only.

Product Growth Management at Bumpa

Bumpa, like many all-in-one tools, contains multiple products within itself. So it only made sense for them to structure teams across products as they grew. Most of the product teams in Bumpa have product managers, engineers, product designers, and the occasional marketer.

Since Precious had already started doing some product management while she was a product marketer, it made perfect sense for her to join (and lead) a product team as well. But her team doesn’t have a separate product manager and marketer; they just have her. A Product Growth Manager.

Some people call this title a Growth PM -> A product manager who is focused on solving growth problems through product changes and experimentation. This is exactly what Precious does at Bumpa as well.

There is no better way for me to illustrate Product Growth Management at Bumpa than with a story Precious tells me about increasing adoption for Bumpa’s Campaign feature. She had previously shared this story on her Medium, but she does me the favour of telling it in more detail.

“There are some events that have transformed my career. What we call canon events. I’ve had maybe 5 of these in my career. This was one of them.”

Increasing Feature Adoption For Bumpa’s Campaign Feature

We have already established that Bumpa is a multifaceted product with many products within itself. One of those “products” is its Campaign feature. This feature lets business owners send emails & SMS to their customers.

It’s a great way for business owners to, for example, notify their customers about upcoming promotions. But it only had a 5% adoption rate -> only 5% of Bumpa users used it. And so the feature was assigned to Precious’ product team. Their task was to increase adoption.

Precious tells me that no one expected much from the feature—or from the task. Campaigns wasn’t a revenue maker compared to Bumpa’s other offerings. But Precious was determined to prove herself.

If a product marketer were presented with this problem, their approach might be to improve messaging and send more communications to users about the feature. But a Product Growth Manager isn’t limited to comms alone. So, the first thing Precious’ team did was to audit and fix the Campaigns feature.

They added a counter to the SMS, improved its reporting, added a preview feature, and switched providers.

Video snippet from my interview with Precious. She tells me how she and her team increased adoption for Bumpa’s Campaigns feature

Optimising the feature meant that its value to users improved significantly. So Precious decided to increase the pricing.

“We’d kept the SMS price the same since Bumpa first started. So I increased the price and created a tiered system where the price got cheaper the more units you bought. The goal was to encourage more purchases. On the outside, the product looked pretty much the same, but we’d made a lot of internal optimisations to make it a better product.”

After optimising the feature like a Product Growth Manager, Precious communicated it like a Product Marketer. She created workflows that notified users about the feature and nudged them to try it. She updated product articles to link back to the SMS feature. And she instructed customer-facing teams to tell users the feature was much improved.

“If you’ve been using the app for about a month, you enter a workflow system where you get a message like ‘hey did you know you can send an SMS?’ And when I created articles about how to run sales & promo on Bumpa, I’d mention that before you run the sale, you should send SMS or emails letting your customers know in advance. And I linked this back to the Campaign product.”

And it worked. Usage increased by 200%. Feature adoption went from 5% to 20%. Users were buying more SMS & email credits. Revenue from the feature increased by 100% month-on-month. Precious’ team had achieved this within a couple months with zero ad spend. They had exceeded expectations.

But then came a problem. They had gotten more attention, but it came at a cost. Users were sending messages to more customers than the team expected. Thousands of messages were getting sent out by users. They hadn’t planned on this much success. And so, the system got overwhelmed, and it began bleeding out of the Campaign feature and extending to the entire app.

The issues got to such a point that management decided to disable SMS temporarily. All of Precious’ team’s hard work was gone. Naturally, Precious says she felt “righteous anger.”

But after going through the 5 stages of grief, she understood the decision. Despite the increase in adoption, Campaigns still wasn’t Bumpa’s top feature or revenue driver. It wasn’t the core thing users came to Bumpa for, yet it was negatively impacting the experience with more important features. Precious and her team went back to the drawing board to question where they went wrong.

“I asked my technical lead: Did we overlook something? Why did this happen? Why do bad things happen to good people? He told me different jargon to reassure me. A month later, he sent me a tweet from a US PM who said we can try to retrace steps after things happen, but we have to also accept that some things just happen and there’s nothing you can do about it. If you build something to cater to 100,000 people and you get 1 million people, there’s no way you won’t have issues. And in the early stage, you won’t necessarily see what the infrastructure is like to cater to edge cases.”

Despite it all, Precious is proud of the work her team did. It was one of the successes that was fully theirs. From ideation to optimisation to finding 3rd-party SMS providers and creating pricing systems for more revenue.

Today, the Campaigns feature is slowly being rolled back into Bumpa. Emails have been reactivated; SMS is set to come back in a few weeks.

Solving Onboarding Problems at Bumpa

The Campaigns feature isn’t the only thing Precious’ team worked on. One of their other major problems to solve was onboarding. To understand the onboarding problem, Precious explains that there are various contexts I need to understand.

The first context is that success for a Bumpa merchant could mean different things. For some, success is recording sales digitally so they don’t lose paper records. For some, it’s analytics, so they can see revenue, profit, and sales metrics easily. For others, it’s issuing invoices and receipts. But the most common use case for Bumpa users is to first get out a live e-commerce website. Because of this, having a live website is a key activation metric.

The second thing Precious explains to me is that Bumpa used to create websites for users by default. By this definition, one could say Bumpa’s activation was practically 100%. But that’s an incorrect definition, and Precious proves it by telling me customer stories.

“There were some people who were even on paid plans who said they didn’t know they had a website. Mind you, the website was right there in the app UI. It’s the first thing you see on the page; it’s in the email workflows. It wasn’t necessarily bad communication on our end, people can just be like that.”

The final thing you need to know is that Bumpa used to have reverse trials; where users were automatically placed on free trials upon sign up.

All of this background context is important, because Precious’ solution to Bumpa’s onboarding problem might seem antithetical or even counter-intuitive. But they all make perfect sense when you understand why.

There were 4 things Precious and her team did to improve onboarding completion at Bumpa. The first was the most obvious. The first solution to most onboarding completion problems is to reduce the length of the onboarding process. Precious and her team did this.

The second solution was almost as obvious as the 2nd. Precious’ team split user journeys based on their reason for signing up. They recognised that the website feature was the major value for most users, so that was a central track. But once they entered the product and had their website, onboarding became split into different tracks.

Now, for the antithetical solutions. We’ve established that website creation used to be automatic. From the outside looking in, that might seem like a perfectly seamless solution. But Precious knew better.

In 2011, researchers at Harvard coined a term called the IKEA Effect. It’s an aptly named cognitive bias where people place more value on things they invested effort into creating.

Precious’ 3rd solution was to force users to take certain actions before they could access their website. The IKEA Effect in action.

“Now, when you sign up, you have to do 4 things before we release your website. For example, you can’t see your website till you’ve added at least one product to your catalogue. You also need to add payment details so there’s no ‘where’s my money’ issues.”

Precious tells me this is an example of good friction. When most people hear about product friction, they assume it’s all bad. But some friction is good. Good friction refers to obstacles or resistance intentionally built in to increase perceived value, engagement, or long-term outcomes.

“People have to have the idea that they’re creating something [the website] by themselves. For those who didn’t know they had websites, it’s because they were never involved in making it. But now you have to make a bit of investment before you unlock it. So even though some people–who were not serious in the first place–dropped off and didn’t finish launching their websites, awareness for the feature skyrocketed.”

Precious is irrefutably right. This was good friction.

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The final change that Precious’ team made was on the reverse trial. They reversed the reverse trial, going back to regular opt-in free trials. Precious explains why.

“One peculiarity with B2B SaaS is that people can create an account but not need you at the time. In e-commerce, it’s even worse. Users may have goods from China they’re waiting for. Or they may be waiting for edited product photographs. There are so many variables for businesses. So it was just a hunch at the time. I said ‘if we give these people free trial at a time when they don’t need the paid features yet, then it’s wasted on them’. They won’t see the value we’re trying to get them to see.”

If there were any doubt that Precious was right, the results cleared it up. When they started, onboarding completion was about 27%. When they were done, it had grown to 50%. More than that, they drastically reduced support queries about payment methods. Precious says she also no longer hears stories about users who don’t know they have websites.

Working with Engineers as a Non-Technical Person

It’s never easy to manage a team of people whose expertise you have limited knowledge of. Precious had started her career in content marketing, and now she was leading a team made up mostly of engineers. There was no way I’d let her off the call without asking her how she managed this.

Precious affirms that it’s not an easy thing, but shares the thinking frameworks & structures that help her make it seem so frictionless.

The first is that she tends to think in first principles and processes.

“If I’m not technical and I want to build a product, what do I do? I’ll explain the idea. What’s it supposed to solve? What is it going to do? It will probably not have the jargon, but I just need to explain exactly what I want. I ask about the consequences of doing what I want to do. I ask about the resources we need. I consider if the resources invested will be worth the results.”

The second thing feels like a natural continuation of the first. After Precious has defined her product requirements, her technical lead helps break down the technical requirements, implications, and barriers.

In Bumpa, the technical lead is the most senior engineer within a specific product team. They call out issues and think of technical implications—aka technical debt. All technical leads in Bumpa report to the head of engineering.

Sometimes, if she doesn’t understand what an engineer is saying, she goes to ask her technical lead. “This is what this person is saying. What can be done about it?” This helps her to catch engineers on their BS and keep accurate timelines.

The 3rd thing that helps Precious is that she is not afraid to look stupid to her team. When she doesn’t understand something, she asks her engineers to lay it out for her like she’s 5. Everyone needs help, she reasons. Even her devs.

“Even the engineer might not have all the answers. Sometimes they have to call a senior dev who has worked on a similar product to ask for advice. One time, I was implementing something with an engineer but he was finding it difficult to implement. We brought someone else in for advice and he brought a resource we hadn’t looked at before. We looked at it and were able to implement. So if engineers themselves need help, why won’t I?”

Everyone is learning together on the job, she says. So why should she be afraid to show she’s learning too? She simply asks questions and goes to do her research.

The final thing is that Precious knows her team. She has been with Bumpa for years. Her developers feel like her guys. She refers to them this way on the call. She speaks about them almost like rambunctious siblings who she can call out, fight, and speak freely with.

Long Stay At Bumpa

Precious has been at Bumpa for over 4 years. She was there when they only had about 100 users. She’s there now that they have 100,000 users. And she has played a big part in that growth.

I ask her the secret for her long stay. What does Bumpa do to keep her tied to them?

Two things, she says. The first is that she works with “truly brilliant, amazing people”. One less-discussed HR truth is that top talent prefers to work with top talent. In fact, amazing employees will only really thrive when they work with other brilliant people. This appears to be Bumpa’s secret.

It is also clear that Precious likes her colleagues. In a previous article, Precious has said she doesn’t think of work as family. During her call, she indicates—both directly and indirectly—that she does now, to some extent. Work is still work (your family can’t sack you), but you can build meaningful relationships that extend past work alone.

Precious speaks of her colleagues fondly and says they are bonded, not by work alone, but by the personal milestones they’ve witnessed. Over the past 4 years, she has attended their weddings and naming ceremonies. They’ve shared both joyful and painful moments. When you spend 8 hours a day & 5 days a week for 4 years with a group of people, you are bound to become attached to them.

The second reason for Precious’ long stay is far less emotional. She might love her colleagues, but she loves her career too. So, Bumpa lets her go on what she calls “transfer windows” to aid her career and give her more varied experiences. She is honest with Bumpa’s CEO about moments when her job satisfaction decreases, and they find a workaround to fix things.

A third reason that Precious doesn’t directly tell me, but that I suspect, is that she receives fulfilment from seeing the work of her hands directly improve people’s lives. Throughout our interview, she shares various stories about how Bumpa has impacted customers and the excitement she has felt on receiving feedback. She doesn’t need to tell me; when I search “Bumpa” on Twitter, I see raving reviews.

There you have it. A look at how Bumpa grew to 100,000 users; and how they sustain and expand that growth.

You can find Precious on LinkedIn or Twitter.

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On May 27 every year, brands across Nigeria try to tap into the marketing potential of Children’s Day. Children’s Day is one of those rare cultural moments that has broad appeal, high emotional value, and low risk of controversy or backlash.

Some brands rise to the occasion, capturing the joy, innocence, and wonder that Children’s Day represents. Others make a lacklustre attempt and fall flat on their faces.

So what makes a great Children’s Day Campaign?

Personally, I judge every Children’s Day campaign using five simple criteria. A great one should hit at least four of them:

1. It feels like it’s for children (or childhood) or is clearly about them.

2. It taps into at least one of the emotions associated with children & childhood — joy, innocence, creativity, nostalgia, protection/empowerment, hope (for the future).

3. It connects the moment to the brand authentically.

4. It has a playful tone, portrayed visually or with words.

5. It’s thoughtful and doesn’t feel like a brand simply ticking a box.

But not every brand sells to children. So, should every brand still show up?

Yes. One of my favorite things about Children’s Day is how flexible it is. You don’t need a kids’ product to take part. After all, everyone was once a child.

That said, different brands should show up in different ways depending on their relationship with children. When it comes to Children’s Day, I think of brands in 3 categories:

1. Brands with children as the primary audience
   (e.g. toy companies, snacks, edtech for kids)
   For these types of brands, Children’s Day is extremely important. That’s why they’re the most likely brands to run special campaigns, events, or giveaways on the day.
   Approaches to try

   1. Speak to kids directly through playful, vibrant content

   2. Organise fun offline or online events

   3. Involve kids as creators, not just subjects

2. Brands with parents as a major audience
   (e.g. banks with kid accounts, telcos, FMCGs)
   These brands don’t have a direct relationship with children, but parents form a huge portion of their target audience.
   Approaches to try

   1. Celebrate parent-child bonding moments

   2. Show how families use the brand together

   3. Encourage parents to do something special for their kids

3. Brands not directly relevant to children
   (e.g. B2B tools, productivity apps)
   These brands have zero relationship with children. So, instead of forcing a connection, they can focus on the spirit of childhood and use elements like nostalgia in their marketing.
   Approaches to try

   1. Share childhood throwbacks

   2. Highlight the childlike curiosity or creativity that still fuels your team

   3. Use humour or a light tone to bring the message home

Noteworthy Children’s Day Ads From Nigerian Brands

Now that we’ve set the context of what makes a great Children’s Day ad, let’s dive into some of the most noteworthy ads this year.

1. Daystar Christian Center - 10/10

Daystar is a mega church in Nigeria, with the tagline “raising role models”

I didn’t expect a church to make it to this list (and with a perfect score), but Daystar did too good a job not to make this list.

Daystar’s ad is brilliant and does an amazing job of tying their core message to the relevance of the day. To solidify their point even more, they interspersed the static ads with visual clips from a Children’s Day performance (from children in their church) that perfectly ties the message together.

It ticks all of my boxes and I have zero notes.

2. Cowrywise - 8/10

Cowrywise is a wealth management app.

Cowrywise executed multiple campaigns for Children’s Day; one video, one carousel, and one static ad. Of all 3, the video and static ad were the best.

The video leaned on the success of Cowrywise’s last Children’s Day campaign, bringing the same children back again to get an update. They leaned on themes like innocence and joy, but still did a great job tying it all back to one of their offerings — Nest, a savings plan for children.

The static ad is great as well, targeting parents with messaging about saving for their children’s future with Nest.

3. Piggyvest - 8/10

Piggyvest is a wealth management app.

The ad here is simple, but incredibly efficient. Like Cowrywise, they target parents and nudge them to set up their children’s futures.

I appreciate that they didn’t go the cliche route by using piggy bank visuals (which would have been on brand regardless, considering the product name). But it does feel like the visuals could be a lot stronger and not be so literal in translation. However, this is a personal opinion and subject to taste.

4. The Hook - 7/10

The Hook is a marketing & advertising agency.

Since The Hook doesn’t directly target children, they decided to focus on the whimsy of the day. As a gag, they “replaced” their Creative Director with a 7-year old for a day.

While the ad doesn’t have any core underlying messaging, it’s a fun watch and really leans into the innocence and joy of the day. For a brand with no relevance to children, this was a great approach.

5. First Bank - 6/10

First Bank is a multinational traditional bank.

One of First Bank’s CSR pillars is education and empowerment, so they used their ad to reflect this. Last year, First Bank organised a Tech Skill-Up Bootcamp. So they used kid participants to promote this year’s event and to celebrate the day.

They lean into hope for the future with advocacy. The video is a little long, and it doesn’t do enough to capture the viewer’s attention. Which is a drawback, considering their CTA and main point are at the end of the video.

6. Koyn - 6/10

Koyn is a crypto trading platform.

The strength of Koyn’s ad is really in the copy, not the imagery. The copy drives home a straightforward message about the importance of securing a financial future for your kids.

However, the imagery doesn’t do anything to complement the copy. It shows a father who’s distracted (by trading on his phone) and not really in the moment with his child. This detracts from the message significantly.

7. DKK - 6/10

DKK is a marketing & advertising agency.

If DKK had only used the “Ctrl + Z” creative and the tagline in the last slide, this ad would have been far higher up in this list.

While the general idea looks great, some of the creatives in the campaign (like the “feedback machine”) feel like forced analogies.

8. Airtel - 4/10

Airtel is a telecommunications provider.

Airtel’s ad is simple and doesn’t try to be anything more than that. They focus on themes like the joy of childhood, and encourage parents to let children be free just this once.

But none of it really ties back to Airtel aside the red colour in the visuals. The phone itself feels randomly placed and doesn’t add anything to the message. Perhaps it might have if they’d tied it into messaging about capturing these joyful moments.

9. Vendyz - 3/10

Vendyz is an escrow payment platform for social commerce and real estate.

The core idea of Vendyz’s ad appears to be safeguard your children’s future. But the idea feels disconnected because Vendyz doesn’t really help you safeguard your children’s future, they help you safeguard transactions (nothing to do with children specifically).

There are also some details in its execution that shift the tone of the message or that have no relevance with the ad. For example, it’s unclear what “Little hands” has to do with the messaging, since the messaging has nothing to do with kids working with their hands.

The use of “every child feels protected” in particle shifts the message slightly. When people think about protecting children, they don’t think about financial protection; they think about physically protecting them from the dangers of the world. So, Vendyz’s use of “protected” without specifying that its the children’s future that’s protected, not the child itself, really changes the tone of the ad.

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10. Mavin Records - 2/10

Mavin Records is Africa’s leading entertainment company and record label.

When I first saw these visuals, I had no idea what they meant. It felt like I was missing some context to make the message reveal itself. A couple hours later, Mavin posted a video to contextualise the images a bit.

But despite the production value of the video, it’s unclear how it ties into the key messaging. There were many missed opportunities for better execution with this campaign.

A better execution would be bringing kids whose dreams are to work in music & entertainment (rather than those who want to be doctors and lawyers). Frankly, kids who want to be doctors already get validation for their dreams. It’s those who want to be creatives that often get their dreams invalidated, with society telling them they can’t make money from it or become very successful.

A powerful message got incredibly watered down with the execution in this campaign, and it’s disappointing.

11. OPay - 1/10

Opay is a fintech solution

The first crime in OPay’s ad is the AI voice. For such an emotional holiday, an monotonous AI voice draws zero emotions (and in fact kills any emotions one might have felt).

The ad itself feels like an investor update rather than a customer-facing piece of communication. They monotonously rush through bare numbers that hold no meaning to users.

For a company that claims to have made so much impact with children, they say nothing about the impact. They could have done some impact storytelling here by sharing visuals & stories about how OPay has changed the lives of these children.

It’s easily the worst Children’s Day ad I saw today.

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Easter can be a tricky holiday for brands, especially in a religious country like Nigeria. Most brands play it safe with a simple “Happy Easter” greeting to avoid offending Christians or getting dragged.

But a few brands managed to toe the line between creativity and appropriateness. I scoured the internet for the most noteworthy ones. Here are my thoughts (and ratings) for each.

1. Cafe One - 10/10

Cafe One is a coffee shop and co-working space created by Sterling Bank Nigeria.

Cafe One’s Easter comms is easily the best I’ve seen so far, and the social media reactions back me up on it.

The brilliance of the ad is that it hits the nail on the significance of Easter to Christians. This distinguishes them, especially since most brands focus on surface-level symbolism.

The cherry on top is that the copy and visuals align with both their product and the symbolic Easter visual (the cross). 10/10, no notes.

2. Tadora HQ - 9/10

Tadora HQ is a LinkedIn growth & personal branding agency.

Tadora’s ad comes as a LinkedIn carousel, true to form. Just like Cafe One, they focused on the significance of Easter over mere symbolism. But unlike Cafe One, they don’t use any symbolism at all (which is why they don’t get the full 10/10).

Still, they did a stellar job linking the Easter story to their core offering (personal branding) without diluting the message or offending Christians. Solid copy, clean execution.

3. Chess In Slums - 9/10

Chess In Slums is a non-profit organisation that uplifts children in underserved communities through the use of chess.

Chess in Slums does a truly excellent job of tying the Easter story to chess concepts—the existence of a simple pawn and the sacrifice of the pawn to become a royal.

The visuals really hammer in their point, and it’s an excellent example of visual storytelling.

4. Bigi - 8.5/10

Bigi is a soda brand with an array of flavours.

Their Good Friday ad leaned into the solemnity of the day. No product shots. Just a sober, reflective message.

There’s also a slight play on words in the copy that’s just the right amount of subtle, so it doesn’t dilute the message or take away from its significance. It’s a simple, to-the-point message with no frills.

As an extra cap to their feather, their tagline “For Every Moment” complements the copy and is a subtle product mention.

5. 02 Academy - 8/10

02 Academy is a brand communications and advertising school for creatives.

This ad’s strength is in the visuals: pencil shavings rearranged to form the image of Jesus.

It’s a powerful metaphor — discarded bits turned into something beautiful. The message ties back to how Jesus was rejected, then resurrected. The metaphor also resonates with 02 Academy’s target audience (creatives) who are also often rejected or underestimated.

6. Renmoney - 8/10

Renmoney is a digital bank that provides loans, savings, and banking services.

Most finance brands lean on the tired “He paid in full” trope for Easter campaigns, so it’s rare for me to find one that deserves a high rating. But Renmoney deserves this rating for managing to turn another overused marketing slang (the “achalugo” trend from Omoni Oboli’s “Love In Every Word”) into great messaging about the meaning of Easter.

Renmoney references the trend with the red hats and the “Odogwu” mention, but only to contrast it against the Easter message — the sacrifice made on the cross. It does a fine job of combining humour with a real & relevant message.

7. Colgate - 8/10

Colgate sells oral hygiene products.

The “Yanga” in Colgate’s Easter ad is especially significant because it’s the tagline of their most recent campaigns (Yanga with your smile). They do a great job of tying the tagline to the Easter message.

As a plus, the visuals are amazing. The font reminds one of the texture of toothpaste, and the smile represents perfect white teeth (presumably as a result of using Colgate). The tomb outline in the background is a nice touch as well.

8. Yield - 7.5/10

Yield is a fund management & investment solution by Credit Direct.

Yield leans into humour to promote their product. They position Judas Iscariot, the villain in the Easter story, as someone who made a poor investment; and then they use it as a teaching moment.

This message is especially timely in light of the recent CBEX scandal, which was revealed as a pyramid scheme and caused thousands of Nigerians to lose millions of naira.

9. Audacia - 6.5/10

Audacia is a real estate investment company.

Audacia’s message is creative and positions the tomb as a real estate property that has increased in value.

It almost works, but ends up feeling like a commodification of something sacred. While creative, the analogy falls a little flat, and it feels like there is a missing conclusion to piece it together.

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10. Fairmoney - 6/10

Fairmoney is a microfinance bank and instant loan solution.

Fairmoney’s ad is very simple, but its visual is a winner. While it doesn’t spread any message about the real meaning of Easter, they get some props for using their logo to represent the open tomb.

11. First Bank - 5/10

First Bank is a multinational bank and financial services company.

While First Bank’s copy attempts to reference the true meaning of Easter, the execution of their visuals could be better. The use of the nails was an excellent start, but the appearance of the dove ruined it, especially because there is no widely recognised symbolic significance of a dove in the resurrection story.

12. Golden Penny Spread - 4/10

Golden Penny spread is packaged butter, often eaten with bread.

Golden Penny’s ad is another example of a great visual idea with bad execution. The imagery of the lid and butter is supposed to represent the open entrance of the tomb (with the rolled stone).

But the design is poorly executed, and the symbolism is easy to miss. When this ad was first shared on the Marketing For Geeks group, it confused many members until someone explained what the imagery was supposed to represent. Good marketing should not have to be explained.

13. Imperial Crown - 1/10

Imperial Crown is a red grape non-alcoholic drink.

This ad was a complete miss. The red of the drink had so much potential (think symbolism of blood, sacrifice, etc). There was also some potential in their name itself (“Imperial Crown” to represent the crown of thorns on Jesus’ head).

Instead, we got a lackluster visual with vague copy. I’ve looked at this ad every which way, trying to see if there’s any hidden symbolism I’m missing. There isn’t.

Other Noteworthy Mentions

For the sake of brevity, I’ll simply share these and reserve my opinions. Happy Easter!

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ICYMI: In my last issue, I wrote about how a positioning shift led to Cenoa’s viral competitive strategy

In today’s issue, I outline insights from Cenoa’s growth story that you can implement right away.

Let's dive in!

Insights From Cenoa’s Story

#1. Reverse-engineer before replicating or duplicating.

One of the best ways to improve your marketing is by studying what has worked for others. When I worked as a copywriter, I spent hours on sites like Ads of the World, AdForum, and The Drum—just like Feranmi Ajetomobi, Cenoa’s former Country Manager.

But taking inspiration doesn’t mean copying. Duplicating is copying exactly, while replicating means tweaking it slightly to fit your context. Most people know that duplication is risky, but replication can be just as flawed.

Why? Because replication is still imitation. Even if you adjust a strategy, it might fail if you don’t account for the hidden factors that made it work—things like pre-existing brand trust, company size, or audience behavior. If you copy the surface-level tactics without the same foundation, it might not work out.

When Cenoa’s comparison ad went viral, another brand tried to replicate the approach. But they skipped the months of competitor research and direct differentiators that made Cenoa’s ad so compelling. Without that foundation, their ad fell flat.

That’s why reverse-engineering is the better approach. Instead of just copying, break down the mechanics behind a strategy—what made it successful, why it worked for that brand, and whether those same conditions exist for you.

In some cases, the conditions might not exist for you, but there might still be lessons that you can apply in other ways. Either way, with reverse-engineering, you’re not just imitating tactics. You adapt principles (not strategies) in a way that gives you a real chance at success.

TL;DR: Don’t just replicate what works for others—reverse-engineer it. Break down the mechanics behind their success, understand the hidden factors at play, and adapt the principles instead of copying the tactics.

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#2. Treat micro/niche influencers as a trust channel.

Some see influencers as a conversion channel; others argue they’re just for awareness. But Feranmi Ajetomobi also sees them as a trust channel; especially niche influencers.

Mass influencers, like celebrities and skitmakers, will often return high awareness numbers. But micro influencers turn attention into trust.

When Cenoa entered the Nigerian market, they leveraged micro influencers who had strong, engaged followings with relevant audiences. These influencers acted as trust brokers whom people listened to.

If you’re in a low-trust industry (like fintech), niche influencers can be more effective than big-budget celebrity endorsements.

TL;DR: Mass influencers get attention, but micro-influencers build trust—and when you’re entering low-trust industries like fintech, trust often matters more than reach.

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#3. Do extensive competitor research to find your differentiator.

The importance of competitor research can never be understated, especially if you’re in a saturated market.

You can’t figure out your key differentiator if you don’t have a deep understanding of your competitors, what customers love or hate about them, and where you win. You need to know what you’re up against.

Cenoa spent months studying competitors—using their products, tracking their rates month-on-month, and analyzing their positioning. When Cenoa compared itself to other dollar savings products in the market, they realised they couldn’t stand out. So they moved to an adjacent market where they could. And this shift changed everything.

If you’re not sure where to start, here’s my free competitor research template to help.

🔗Get competitor research template.

TL;DR: You can’t stand out if you don’t know what you’re up against. Deep competitor research helps you spot gaps, find your edge, and pivot if needed.

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#4. Virality requires conviction & persistence.

Cenoa’s growth story proves that virality can be engineered—but it takes consistent effort. It’s frustrating to create great content that doesn’t immediately take off, but that’s where conviction comes in.

If you don’t truly believe in your angle, you’ll give up too soon. And conviction isn’t just blind confidence. It comes from having proof to back your bets. For Cenoa, that proof came from the extensive research they’d done.

They didn’t go viral on the first try. They tested multiple versions of their comparison ad before one finally took off. Instead of relying on luck, they relied on a process of iteration, refining, and staying persistent.

TL;DR: Virality doesn’t have to be by luck alone; you can engineer it by holding a conviction, iterating on it, and being persistent.

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What I’m Reading

• When Competition Isn't What You Think — Great read about considering alternatives, rather than direct competitors alone.

• DoorDash's v1 was 8 PDF menus on a static HTML website — The problems (and strengths) with the traditional MVP model

• 20 Fundamental B2B marketing rules for higher revenue — Great read for anyone working in B2B marketing

Jobs

• Product Marketing Associate at Revwit — Remote, Nigeria

• Country Manager (Nigeria) at Africhange — Remote

• Senior Digital Marketing Manager (Part-Time) — Remote | $800 per month

• Social Media Associate at Tix — Lagos, Nigeria

• Social Media & Community Manager at Mainstack — Hybrid (after probation), Lagos

• Business Development and Sales Manager at Mainstack — Hybrid (after probation), Lagos

• Senior Marketing Manager — Remote

• Entry-Level Growth Associate — Remote, Lagos

• Social Media Content Strategist at T40 Technologies — Remote

• SEO Expert at Sologen Partners — Remote, Nigeria

Did you enjoy this issue? Give it a ❤️ and let me know in the comments section.

Even better, share this with someone. If they subscribe, you get referral rewards like free templates.

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Hi there.

Welcome to the 220 new subscribers who joined Marketing For Geeks since the last issue. Big thanks to everyone who shares MFG with their network.

ICYMI: In my last issue, I wrote about MTN’s PR disaster and how they could have responded instead. It is now my most widely-read post.

Today is for Funnel Vision, where I write a case study on a campaign, project, or product by speaking with the marketing professional behind them.

In this issue, I look into Cenoa’s growth story with Feranmi Ajetomobi, Cenoa’s former Country Manager for Nigeria.

What To Expect:

• Feranmi’s approach to hiring Cenoa’s Nigeria team

• How Cenoa penetrated the Nigerian market

• The reasoning behind Cenoa’s competitive strategy

• Cenoa’s acquisition channels and tactics

In the US and similar markets, comparative marketing isn’t anything new. But in Nigeria, strict advertising codes and cultural beliefs discourage brands from directly comparing themselves against competitors.

So it was a wonderful change of pace when a fintech app, Cenoa, made a tweet directly calling out a competitor’s rates and comparing against theirs. It inspired many hot takes about whether the post was ethical or even legal—I made a thread on this earlier.

Naturally, I wanted to hear from the horse’s mouth. And it was almost serendipitous that Cenoa’s Country Manager was a marketer I’ve respected since our paths first crossed in 2022.

I spoke with Feranmi Ajetomobi, Cenoa’s Country Manager in Nigeria (at the time of our interview), about penetrating the Nigerian market and navigating competition.

Let’s dive in!

Setting up in a new market

One of the first duties of a Country Manager, as Feranmi tells me, is team formation in the country they manage. Cenoa is headquartered in Turkey, so it has central product, engineering, and marketing teams. But when you’re entering a new market, it’s important for certain teams to be localised.

Given Feranmi’s marketing background, you'd think his first hire would be a marketer. It wasn't. It's clear throughout our conversation that Feranmi is both a strategist and executor, which might explain why he didn't need to hire marketers right away. He could do most of the groundwork himself, and he had Cenoa’s global marketing team to support him. I guess in a way, you could say Feranmi was Cenoa’s first marketing hire in Nigeria.

But that’s not the main reason why he didn’t hire a marketer first. Feranmi’s first hire was in the customer support team, and he explains his reasoning to me.

“No matter what, customer experience is the most important thing. If you don't have localised customer experience, you'll have a trust problem. If someone calls your support and hears a foreign voice, they would wonder if you’re a scammer.”

Feranmi believes that Customer Support is not a standalone team, but should instead be a part of the growth team. He learnt this when he worked at Cowrywise, where CS played a key role in conversion.

So when Feranmi wanted to hire someone to lead customer support at Cenoa, he looked out for people who shared his belief in CS as more than picking calls. In other words, customer experience and success, not customer support alone.

He first tried finding this person by making a job post on LinkedIn. But he quickly realised that the kind of person he wanted could only be found via referrals. So he asked for referrals within his circle. And he found exactly who he was looking for.

It's clear that Feranmi is proud of his first customer support hire. He has raved about her in posts before and he does the same on the call.

“We found someone; her name is Judith. She’s amazing. She has worked in CS for companies like QuickBus and Safeboda. But what was really different about her was that she saw the growth component of customer support. She didn’t just see it as ‘pick up calls and resolve customer problems.’ We didn’t play with the work of building an end-to-end system for CS.”

When I check Judith’s LinkedIn profile, I understand what Feranmi means. In her description of her work at various companies, I note key phrases that align with Feranmi’s view of customer success.

Once Feranmi had hired Judith, he could focus on taking the product to market.

Penetrating the Nigerian market

After Feranmi hired Judith, he began searching for partners that could improve Cenoa’s local infrastructure for Nigeria.

Feranmi tells me that Go-To-Market is a two-pronged approach. The prong most people focus on is simply getting the product to the customer. But, as Feranmi explains, Go-To-Market also involves finding partners that help you improve experience for these new customers.

When Cenoa first launched into Nigeria, it could take up to 2 hours for successful deposits and withdrawals. Payment infrastructure looks different in Turkey than it does in Nigeria, so Feranmi had to find a partner to help improve the speed of local transactions.

This is another key job of a Country Manager; to find technical partners to make operations more seamless.

Another job of a Country Manager is to explain the unique context of the new market to the global team. When Cenoa first launched in Nigeria, they were positioned as a dollar savings app, like Piggyvest or Cowrywise.

But Feranmi didn’t think that would work for a number of reasons.

The first was that the savings industry was too competitive for Cenoa’s offering. There were already other dollar savings options with better rates. And there weren’t many Nigerians earning enough to consider saving in dollars, so that positioning significantly reduced their market size.

But the second, and perhaps most important, reason was that savings were simply too high-trust. Nigeria has a trust deficit, and savings require more trust than other financial use cases.

“It is one thing to help people make transactions and receive money. It is another thing to ask them to leave their money with you for a long time. So it was a very tight place for us to be at that point in time.”

Feranmi had first-hand experience with Nigeria’s trust problem. He was part of Cowrywise’s early marketing team and had spent 3 years driving product marketing and storytelling for the fintech.

This meant he knew exactly how long it took Cowrywise to build the trust it has today. And he knew how long it would take Cenoa to build that trust, especially since it wasn’t a locally owned product.

“It took us 3 to 4 years to build that trust as Cowrywise. And now we’re coming as a new entrant in the same market. It would probably take a shorter time than that to build the trust for Cenoa. But we didn’t have the time.

We’re in a fast-paced industry with investors. You look at the numbers and the vision and know you don’t have the time to build the kind of trust you need for savings. If we had the time to spend years experimenting, we could definitely achieve it.”

So, one of the first recommendations that Feranmi made as a Country Manager was for Cenoa to try other use cases around cross-border payments. Management agreed, and thus, Cenoa’s positioning was changed.

Surprisingly, this positioning shift didn’t require heavy product changes. It helped that the team had identified a partner to improve the speed of local transactions, which was more critical now that Cenoa was a payments solution.

But the savings feature didn’t disappear. It simply became a value-add; and is one of Cenoa’s strongest differentiators now that it is in the payments market.

Other payments solutions simply let you send and receive money. But because Cenoa already had savings infrastructure set up, you could earn interest on your dollar balance. No other payments solution in Nigeria offered this benefit.

It needs to be 100% clear. This “simple” positioning shift changed everything for Cenoa. And they didn’t even need to make major product changes for it.

If they had stuck with their dollar savings app positioning, they would have struggled. Because their rates weren’t high enough to make a huge splash compared to other dollar savings apps. But as a global payments app, their savings feature became a major differentiator from competitors.

Cenoa’s comparative advertising

Everything that Feranmi has told me up till now already paints the picture of why comparative advertising was an excellent strategy for Cenoa. I don’t bother asking why he (and the team) decided to do it in the first place. Instead, I ask about the processes that led up to the viral ad we all saw.

The first thing Feranmi makes clear to me is that the comparative strategy was a joint effort between marketing and customer success. The initial competitor research was led by Cenoa’s Global Head of Strategy and a member of the Nigerian CS team. He uses this to illustrate his point about customer success being critical for growth.

“In Nigeria, there are a lot of big names in global payments. So we [the CS team member] tried some of these products and compared them. We looked at everything, from their onboarding to their KYC to their rates.”

This research took months to collate. But at the end of it, Cenoa’s competitive advantage was clear—their fees & rates. Feranmi then used this knowledge to build out a value prop matrix for Cenoa.

“We saw that we had an advantage with our infrastructure that lets us offer lower fees and better exchange rates. We looked at that cost statement and realised this could be our actual value prop statement. So we turned that differentiator into the tangible value in our value prop.”

When new entrants are cheaper than alternatives, it’s typically because they are subsidizing the cost somehow and intend to raise their prices after gaining sufficient trust and market share. Feranmi raises this to make the point that Cenoa’s differentiator isn’t simply that they are cheaper. It is that they have better infrastructure.

“I want to clarify that I don’t believe in subsidizing costs. I’ve never been a fan of it. It’s not a sustainable differentiator. When you want to position as low-cost, it has to be built on your infrastructure. The reason our rates are low is that we’ve spent money to build infrastructure that makes it cheaper for us. It’s not because we’re subsidizing the cost.”

Cenoa’s promise is that for every $1000 you receive, you pay less fees (and therefore get more balance) than with all other options. This promise is plastered across their communications, including their homepage, where they directly compare against various competitors.

The actual value prop statement was coined by Cenoa’s Head of Brand Marketing as a result of the competitor research that had been done. Feranmi then translated that into website copy. Because Cenoa was a challenger brand, it was very important to Feranmi that they took a bold approach to marketing.

It then made perfect sense to Feranmi to include some kind of comparison table or calculator on the website to show exactly how much you get when you use Cenoa vs when you use other platforms.

“I made a very shabby comparison table in Google Sheets. The CEO saw it and agreed that we should try it publicly. They first used it for the Turkey audience as a comparison against Payoneer. They saw results in that, so we did it for more Nigerian competitors like Grey, Cleva, Geegpay, and ChipperCash. And then it really worked.”

The team started seeing messages and posts from people saying they didn’t know they were losing that much with competitors.

And it was all due to the clarity that Cenoa had on its benefit. They weren’t just another dollar app with no differentiator. Feranmi reiterates that this wouldn’t have been possible if they’d stayed a savings app.

“We were offering cheaper rates than everyone in the same market. There were pain points and there was a clear strong advantage. In the past, the global marketing team tried a comparison against Piggyvest, but it didn’t work for 2 reasons. First, there is good love and trust for Piggyvest. But more importantly, we didn’t have a clear advantage over them at that moment.”

Of course, not everyone is lucky to have management that is open to switching its positioning. That’s why many marketers have to lean on storytelling or aggressive marketing as a differentiator. It’s no fault of theirs, Feranmi agrees. Perhaps another reason for Cenoa’s success is a management that listens to data and allows the team to experiment.

Feranmi and I finally get to talking about the ad that prompted this conversation. Many people who saw the ad, including me, assumed that it was Cenoa’s first comparative ad. That isn’t true.

In fact, Cenoa had created multiple posts, both organic and paid, comparing Cenoa to other options. This was simply the one that blew up. There are many possible theories on why this could be. Maybe this one had clearer messaging than others. Maybe $100 was too low for people to take notice. Maybe $12k was too high for people to relate to. Maybe it was just luck—right place, right time.

Feranmi has his own theory.

“At the time, people had a big pain point with Chipper. There was a consensus that Chipper Cash had been taking people’s money. So I think that made people relate with the post strongly.”

I ask Feranmi if he was worried about any ethical or legal backlash from Cenoa’s comparative ads. He isn’t.

“I saw a lot of people talk about ARCON. Regulatory bodies are one thing, for sure. But legal-wise, there isn’t any law being broken. We didn’t make any untrue statements, we did our research, and we presented the facts. I didn’t lose any sleep, to be honest.”

The only thing Feranmi might have worried about is perception, both internally and externally. But neither of these is an issue for him.

Internally, the global team is 100% aligned with Feranmi’s approach and they back it. For marketing to stand out, Feranmi says, you have to have a strong opinion and your team has to be aligned on it.

External perception is a different beast though. But I can tell Feranmi isn’t worried about that either. He speaks with the assured calm of someone who’s managed viral campaigns before. While he was at Cowrywise, they ran a fake email leak for a campaign that mixed reactions. Feranmi has learnt to weigh the positives against the negatives.

“Nigeria is an interesting country. We have this cultural belief that makes us think ads like these are trying to bring others down. But we’re just trying to show you what’s better. Once the truth is very bold, there will always be some sort of reaction. No matter how good it is, there’s going to be negative reactions. You just have to make sure the positive components outshine the negative, which is what happened to us.”

Comparison ads don’t have to be in good faith, but it is interesting that Cenoa’s is. Even while he speaks with me about the differentiators Cenoa uses to stand out from competitors, he mentions the things that some competitors—even Chipper Cash—have over Cenoa.

Unfortunately (or fortunately, for Cenoa), competitors don’t seem to be as aware of their differentiators as Cenoa is. Or they’re simply unwilling to lean into differentiators as Cenoa has, even if it means changing their positioning. Maybe if they did, they might have been able to respond to Cenoa’s comparative ads.

Only one competitor attempted to respond to Cenoa, and it wasn’t a competitor Cenoa even focused on. Another new entrant—far newer than Cenoa even—called Mular attempted to duplicate Cenoa’s strategy by responding with its own comparison.

I ask Feranmi about his thoughts on Mular turning the tables on Cenoa. His initial response is “I really don’t care; I suspected that somebody would try to clap back.”

But then he pauses and explains why he doesn’t care. He is not trying to be dismissive; he is simply confident in the research he’s done and infrastructure that Cenoa has built. Cenoa’s post took months (of research) to create. Mular’s took 5 days.

“Honestly, there’s no competitor that can come near us in terms of fees and rates in the Nigerian market as of today. I didn’t just wake up and make the ad. We started researching since August. We’d been doing this research for months and comparing fees month-on-month to find a stable rate for comparison.”

Feranmi also points out that Mular’s comparison isn’t comparable. Mular is a crypto payments app that doesn’t offer USD accounts, so it’s not a fair analogy to compare themselves with those that do.

I ask Feranmi about the actual numbers from the Chipper comparison ads. He’s proud to tell me about them.

To anyone else, these would be crazy numbers. But to Feranmi, they’re just the tip of the iceberg. There’s more work to be done.

Feranmi (and Cenoa) plans to continue leaning into their competitive advantage. But they don’t intend to keep doing the same comparative ads over and over again. Feranmi has been relatively calm during our conversation, but he becomes a little excitable when he says this. He cannot tell me all of the details because Cenoa hasn’t executed on them yet.

To whet my curiosity, he hints that it involves Cenoa putting its money where its mouth is by giving people back the money they lost with other platforms.

Cenoa’s recent success, especially in reducing CAC, has led to Feranmi’s boss voluntarily doubling his marketing budget. Which means that Feranmi has a bigger budget to experiment with.

Cenoa’s acquisition channels

So far, Cenoa has amassed about 400k users in Nigeria. We already know their recent comparative ads brought a bump in traffic, but the startup was doing fairly well even before that. Feranmi tells me about their chosen channels and the tactics they use to be successful in them.

Feranmi uses organic content marketing to choose the best content for paid channels. In fact, they tested the comparison messaging organically before deciding to put some money behind it for ads.

“If an organic content gets good traction, then we promote it with a little budget so it goes wider. So it has to deliver results first organically before we decide to spend. Of course, there are cases when you’re sure of something and want to go live with it right away. But most of the time, we test the organic impact first.”

Cenoa has also leveraged influencers, especially when they first launched in Nigeria. Many people expect influencers to drive quick conversions, but Feranmi tells me that’s only a secondary benefit at best.

For Feranmi, there are 2 main benefits of using influencers. The first is trust.

“In any new market, the first thing is trust; and that’s why influencers work. People use influencers wrongly when they expect instant conversions. The real impact of influencers at the beginning is trust.”

The 2nd benefit of using influencers, Feranmi explains, is reach. This is especially true for influencers with mass audiences, like skitmakers and celebrities.

“I’ve seen people talk on Twitter about ads not bringing conversion when they use big influencers like Layi Wasabi. But that’s what happens with generalist influencers. Their job is to amplify your message to a wide audience of people. So you use influencers like that to get attention. And then you bring in the niche influencers that can leverage that attention to actually get trust and conversions.”

Anyone who’s ever had to work with niche influencers knows how hard it is to find them in the first place. For this, Feranmi works with an agency, Creative Agora, that he has a longstanding relationship with.

But not everyone can hire an agency. In this case, Feranmi recommends doing the hard work yourself.

“For example, I can go to TikTok or YouTube and search for “How do I open a US dollar account?” And from that search, you’d see a ton of people answering these questions with videos. And you’ll see them with different follower counts or engagement numbers. Find the ones that work for your budget.

When you’ve never done the hard work yourself, you won’t really know what you want. And that means anyone or any tool can feed you a load of bull and you just run with it.

As we get on to the topic of niche influencers, Feranmi tells me about his work with niche communities. For example, Cenoa recently announced a partnership with People In Product, a tech company for—as the name implies—people who work in product.

Feranmi acknowledges that communities are small and might not bring you the same reach as other channels. But he argues that they can help you build ambassadors quicker and cheaper than other channels.

“So you reach out to a community and create an exclusive partnership with them. It shouldn’t be a one-off thing. You do events with them, speak with them, hold them tight, sponsor some of their events. And somehow you unintentionally become the official dollar account of those communities.”

Once again, Feranmi credits his CS Lead, Judith, for taking the lead on some of Cenoa’s strongest community partnerships. There is pride in his eyes when he says:

“For the first time, I’m seeing the kind of work I did at Cowrywise happen even better and at scale.”

Since Feranmi has told me how he hires rockstar CS people, I ask him what he looks out for in marketing hires. He tells me 4 things; boldness, persistence, documentation, and a focus on results.

Feranmi explains the reasoning for some of this criteria. If his marketing hire weren’t persistent, for example, they’d have given up when the first few comparison messages didn’t take off. Instead, they kept tweaking the messaging and trying new things until it finally hit.

“People always say you can’t engineer virality. You can. But for that to happen, you have to have a persistent system. Before that ad went viral, we’d tried similar things a number of times. He [marketing hire] could have dismissed it and said “I’m not doing this again” but he didn’t. And then this particular one went viral.”

And when Feranmi wanted to see the results of the campaign, they didn’t focus on the buzz and virality. They focused on how they affected the bottomline – website visits, sign-ups, transactions, acquisition cost.

When I told members of MFG’s WhatsApp community about the interview, they asked me to help relay some questions to Feranmi. One of the questions was “How does he approach these marketing angles? What’s the thinking process like?”

On the surface, it might seem like a vague question. But sometimes, bold marketing can seem so elusive. It’s hard to find new ideas that work. So I ask Feranmi the question.

“I just sleep actually”

His first response is half-joking, but there’s reason in it. Sometimes, it’s important to take a break and come back at things with a fresh mind. As the song goes, “Overthinking no fit solve problem.”

But Feranmi doesn’t end his response there. He pauses and tells me, in a more serious tone, that he simply looks at patterns. Like a true geek, he spends time studying things that have been done before. And then he reverse-engineers them.

Sometimes, his sources for inspiration are the works of other companies.

“I could go to Dominoes UK on social media and see the kind of things they tweet about. Sometimes, I go to Ads of The World and just watch a ton of ads. Some of these things won’t work in Nigeria. Some will. So I try to apply it to the Nigerian context.”

Sometimes, he looks at patterns in product data instead.

“I like using data to guide my marketing—not just me, the entire team. So if I see payments coming from a particular platform, I’m thinking ‘how can we build a partnership with that platform?’

One time, we found that some of our highest earners were coming from a particular platform. So we put those users in a segment and gave them a referral program. Now, I’m confident that everyone who comes through that referral won’t go below a certain transaction value.”

I ask Feranmi a final question (the question itself is inconsequential) and his last words strike me as the perfect way to end this story. They reflect Feranmi’s (and Cenoa’s) confidence in both their product and their marketing—and why they’re not really worried about competition.

“I have a few exciting rollouts coming soon. When that happens, I know someone will try to replicate it again. But then they’ll see why they can’t replicate it.”

That’s it! An inside look into Cenoa approaches competition in a saturated market. You can find Feranmi on LinkedIn.

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UPDATE: Feranmi has officially left Cenoa at the time of publishing this article, but remains an equity holder.

Want to do more than read MFG?

1. Join MFG’s WhatsApp community to partake in marketing discussions. The community now has 300 people with a mix of beginners, mid-level, and experts.

2. Come play at MFG’s 3rd physical hangout (community members only) on March 29. It’s nothing crazy; a few of us sit somewhere, drink (everyone pays for themself), play games, and rant. Location is Ibadan. Join the community to find out more details.

3. If you’re a founder, book a call to get one-time free product marketing advice for 15 minutes.

4. Contribute guest posts to MFG. Works best if you’re looking to build bylines for your portfolio.

What I’m Reading

• The definitive framework to find your next scalable user acquisition channel — Great post about finding the right acquisition channel(s) for your startup.

• The Ultimate SEO Guide for Early-Stage SaaS — Excellent guide for SEO beginners.

• 50 things we’ve learned about building successful products — 50 lessons from PostHog’s team

• How To Measure Marginal Willingness To Pay —Marginal Willingness To Pay measures how much a customer would spend to change one specific feature of your product.

• Why Is Duolingo So Crazy? — Great case study on Duolingo’s gamification and brand strategies.

Marketing Jobs

• B2B SaaS Content Writer at Scalerrs | Remote, Anywhere in the world

• Writer (HER Vertical) at Zikoko

• Content Writer at Zedcrest | Hybrid, Lagos

• Newsletter Editor at TechCabal

• Social Media Associate at TechCabal

• SEO Specialist at TechCabal

• Product Marketing Manager at Seamfix

• Growth Marketing Associate at The Afara Initiative | Remote, Nigeria

• Growth Marketing Lead at NotchHR | Hybrid, Lagos

• Content Writer at Groove | Remote, Anywhere in the world

Did you enjoy this issue? Give it a ❤️ and let me know in the comments section.

Even better, share this with someone. If they subscribe, you get referral rewards.

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Hi there.

Welcome to the 86 new subscribers who joined Marketing For Geeks since the last issue. Big thanks to everyone who shares MFG with their network.

ICYMI: In my last issue, I shared lessons from Treford’s partnership framework that you can implement right away.

In today’s issue, I write about MTN’s PR Mishap, why it flopped, and what they could have done instead.

Let's dive in!

On Tuesday (11th February), MTN Nigeria increased the price of one of its popular data plans by 200%. This increase wasn’t exactly unprecedented, since telecom operators have been petitioning the Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC) to increase tariffs by 100% (which the NCC negotiated down to 50%).

However, it was strange that the increase was over the agreed 50%, and that there was no prior announcement. Expectedly, Nigerians were angry, especially on Twitter. “MTN 15GB” was a trending topic on Twitter, and Nigerians demanded an explanation, apology, reversal, or all 3.

Within two days, MTN drafted a response and posted it across all social media platforms. But this response incensed, rather than placated, affected users.

Let’s be clear. This was a terrible release, as evidenced by the responses of users on social media.

I have previously written a rant on LinkedIn about why the release was a terrible one. Today, I want to do a deeper breakdown of what went wrong and what a better response might have been.

Before anything, we need to establish some context about the Nigerian situation.

1. Nigerians are price sensitive: Everyone is price-sensitive, but Nigerians more so than others. It makes matters worse that data has become a necessity for many young Nigerians, rather than a luxury.

2. Economic situations are tough: Nigerians are already struggling. In the last year, prices of most household items have increased by almost 200% and Nigerians have had to adjust continuously with no reprieve.

3. The Nigerian government is largely hated: Speak with any Nigerian for one hour and you will inevitably get your ear bent by rants about its corrupt and cruel government.

Now that we’ve established these facts, let’s speak a bit about crisis communication and what it’s supposed to achieve.

Crisis Communication

Crisis communication is how organisations manage information, protect their reputation, and maintain public trust during events that could damage their brand.

I love this definition because it already defines the 3 main goals of crisis communication:

1. Manage information: If you don’t tell your story, others will. And when others tell your story, you don’t control the narrative. There are a few generally accepted principles when managing information:

   1. Be the first to speak. The longer it takes you to respond, the less control you have over information. Ideally, you should prepare for a crisis before it even happens.

   2. Give only verified facts. Don’t speculate and don’t simply say that a thing is wrong. It is not enough to say “this is a lie.” You must combat the lie with the truth.

   3. Use multiple channels. Bad news spreads faster than good news. That’s why you have to work overtime to push your response as wide as possible.

2. Protect reputation: During a crisis, your reputation is at risk. So, crisis communication must try to safeguard your reputation and influence public perception correctly.

3. Maintain public trust: Trust is hard to build, but so easy to lose. If you can’t sufficiently reassure people, you won’t get that trust back. Even worse, users might switch to competitors or leave bad reviews.

In all, the most important metric to judge crisis management by is your influence on public perception. If you’re successful, public discussions about your brand should become neutral or even positive after you put out your release.

So, what are some ways to manage crisis when it happens?

Well, there are 2 theories that fit MTN’s situation well.

1. Situational Crisis Communication Theory (by Timothy Coombs)
   This theory proposes 4 response strategies.

   1. Deny: You can attack the accuser, deny responsibility, or blame a scapegoat.

   2. Diminish: You can explain the situation and justify your actions.

   3. Rebuild: You can apologise, compensate, and take corrective action.

   4. Bolster: You can remind the public of past good deeds and present new positive information. Coombs says this should never be a primary strategy; it should be used in addition to others.
      

   The strategy you choose is based on the type and severity of the crisis. There are 3 types of crisis clusters:

   1. Victim cluster: Where the organization is also a victim of the crisis. If you’re a victim, you use the Deny strategy.

   2. Accidental cluster: Where the organizational actions leading to the crisis were unintentional. If your crisis is accidental, you might Diminish, Rebuild, Bolster, or all 3 (depending on the context).

   3. Intentional cluster: Where the organization knowingly placed people at risk, took inappropriate actions or violated a law/regulation. If your crisis is intentional, you can only Rebuild and Bolster.
      

2. Attribution Theory (by Bernard Weiner)
   This theory says that in times of crisis, people will always assign blame to a party. If people believe that your organisation is responsible for the problem, then they will assign blame to you and expect accountability. There are 3 factors to consider here:

   1. Locus – Was the crisis caused by internal (company fault) or external (outside influence) factors?

   2. Stability – Is this a one-time event or a recurring issue?

   3. Controllability – Could the organization have prevented it?

   Your response to these 3 questions determines whether you need to assume blame (and how much of it you should assume) or shift it completely to the responsible party.

Now that we know all this, let’s talk about MTN’s situation specifically.

Where MTN went wrong

I’ll start by breaking MTN’s response down, line by line.

Now that we’ve broken down each line, let’s talk about the release as a whole.

Problem #1: Lack of Preparedness

On the surface level, MTN’s response seemed timely. The social media storm started on the 11th and MTN responded two days later on the 13th. But in my opinion, that is simply not timely enough. Here’s why.

One of the core tenets of crisis management is that it does not begin after the crisis happens. Ideally, you should foresee the crisis and prepare for it. MTN not only did not prepare for the crisis, but they actively caused it by not informing users about the increase beforehand.

Problem #2: Lack of Empathy

Some marketers have claimed that MTN’s response is empathetic. But they are mistaking sympathy for empathy. MTN only acknowledged that people were angry and showed sympathy for that anger.

But they did not show empathy; in fact, they undermined people’s feelings (and the seriousness of the situation) by leaning solely on humour.

Humour is great; there have been amazing crisis responses that use humour. But when humour is your sole crutch, you come across as tone-deaf.

Nothing can explain my point better than this quote from one of my favourite (and aptly named) PR books, “Public Relations for Dummies”:

“PR is an art of demonstration — showing rather than stating your message — and crisis management is no exception. When you just say that you care and are sorry, people are cynical. When you demonstrate compassion and caring in a dramatic and distinctive way, people not only believe your message but also pay attention to and remember it."

Problem #3: Lack of Explanation

This is where all the context I have provided becomes important.

Every Nigerian knows that the cost of all items has gone up due to inflation. Nigerians largely blame the government (and governmental organisations) for this because they’re the perfect (and most obvious scapegoat).

If we go back to the Situational Crisis Communication Theory, MTN could sit in either the Victim cluster (as they are a victim of inflation themselves) or the intentional cluster (as they increased prices far higher than the agreed 50% tariffs).

If we were to answer the questions posed by the Attribution Theory, then our answers would be:

• Was the crisis caused by internal or external factors? → External factors (Inflation)

• Is this a one-time event or a recurring issue? → One-time; it’s the first time in over a decade that telecom providers have made such a coordinated hike.

• Could the organization have prevented it? → Absolutely not.

You can probably tell where I’m going. If MTN fits into the victim cluster; and if the bulk of the blame does not lie at their feet, then shouldn’t they use the Deny strategy and place the blame on external factors? Well, not exactly. We’ll discuss that in a bit.

What should MTN have done instead?

Well, a lot of things.

For one, they could have said absolutely nothing. It is a sad truth that Nigerians are a beaten people who often complain for a few days only to adjust to the new state of things.

But I don’t believe the best response in this case was no response. I only believe that no response would have been better than the response they gave.

So, let’s talk about how they could have fixed the problems I highlighted.

Problem #1: Lack of Preparedness

MTN should have seen this coming. It should have been obvious that this would generate some uproar.

Decent crisis management would have been to anticipate this and get ahead of it by being transparent with customers.

Spectranet, one of MTN’s competitors, did an amazing job with this. Rather than suddenly increasing prices, Spectranet reached out to users by telling them that they would be phasing out their current price structure. They went a step further by advising users to lock into long-term plans so they can enjoy the old prices for a little while longer.

Spectranet’s response is great and it absolves them of all blame. It’s certainly not humorous, but it’s effective. Now, when Spectranet does increase its price, there’s a significantly lower chance of it becoming a crisis—because they informed customers in advance. And users are more likely to blame NCC than Spectranet.

Problem #2: Lack of Empathy

When I ranted about MTN’s release on LinkedIn, one person compared it to KFC’s iconic FCK campaign, which also uses humour to lighten tension.

The difference between KFC’s response and MTN’s is that KFC leans on humour moderately. Every other part of their response is apologetic, explanatory, and above all, empathetic.

On the other hand, MTN relies solely on humour. It’s the only lever they use, which is why they come across as tone-deaf. And where MTN assumes that people understand them, KFC takes the time to explain the situation and thanks people for bearing with them despite it.

If MTN wanted to show more empathy, they might recommend other bundles that users could take advantage of in place of the 16GB bundle. Or if they were feeling generous, they might do a limited-time price slash or bonus.

That’s how you show empathy. It’s not by telling people that you care (when your actions indicate otherwise); it’s by showing them.

Problem #3: Lack of Explanation

This was MTN’s biggest offence. Customers deserve a legitimate explanation for such a drastic increase.

In this, MTN had two options:

1. Blame the NCC: MTN could have followed in Spectranet’s footsteps and said “In line with NCC’s guidelines…” But there’s a problem with this approach. Even though the NCC looks like a good scapegoat (being a governmental organisation), pointing the fingers at them could backfire.
   If NCC feels unfairly blamed, they could simply say “Hold up, you were the one who asked us to increase tariffs. And we even protected Nigerians by negotiating a 50% increase instead of the 100% you wanted.” And then all the heat would go back to MTN again.

2. Blame inflation: MTN could blame the real enemy, which is conveniently an enemy that cannot speak up for itself. As we’ve established, Nigerians understand that times are tough. And it’s tough for businesses as it is for individuals. If MTN took this approach, it would need to do the hard work of humanising itself so that Nigerians truly believe that the economy is tough on the billion-dollar multinational.

A 3rd (and in my opinion, better) option would be for MTN to assume part of the blame (for not informing users beforehand), while shifting the rest of the blame to inflation (and by extension, the government that Nigerians are so angry with).

MTN’s Release Re-Written

A few people have asked me how I’d write the MTN release differently if I were in charge of their response.

First, here’s an excellent re-write Charles Isidi made on Twitter.

I expect some people to say “But this version is plain and doesn’t have the humour in MTN’s original release.” To placate those people (and to wrap up this long story), I have written a version that keeps MTN’s original pidgin and some of its tone.

TL;DR (Too Long, Didn’t Read): MTN’s “you dey vex. we know” release lacked empathy and leaned too much on humour as a crutch. Instead, they should have been explanatory and empathetic.

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Thanks to Temilade Praise for giving invaluable critique on early drafts of this post.

Personal Update

Two weeks ago, I left my job as Head of Marketing at SocialKit. I loved working on SocialKit, but it felt like I’d hit a personal plateau. So, I quit to find myself again (cliche as that might sound).

One of the things I intend to test during this phase is consulting & fractional work. I’ve done this in the past, but never focused on it primarily.

To that end, I’m starting with free 15-minute consulting calls for founders. You tell me about your product and I give you free product marketing advice within 15 minutes.

Get free marketing advice

If you like what I have to say, then I can execute on ideas fractionally or we can set up recurring paid consultations. If you don’t, we end the call with no commitments.

What I’m Reading

• Duolingo’s Brand Handbook — Duolingo does an amazing job at marketing. Their handbook shows you why.

• Beyond the Billboard — When To Choose Distribution over Marketing. Really insightful read into when it’s more important to be seen than to be perceived, written by MTN’s former CMO.

• My product went viral on social media but all I got were these shitty users — Why virality often brings the worst users and when big user spikes are good.

• Customers don't care about your AI feature — Something to think about before you lean into the “AI-powered” messaging

Jobs

• Head of Customer Engagement and Retention at Omnibus

• Social Media & Content Intern at Hazie } Remote

• Product Marketer at Alerzo

• Social Media Associate at WeTalkSound | Remote, Lagos

• Content Creation & Distribution Specialist | Hybrid, Lagos

• Social Media Manager at Strattmont | Remote, Nigeria

• Marketing Growth Strategist at ContentJet | Remote, Anywhere in the world

• Demand Generation Manager at Toggl | Remote, Anywhere in the world

• Growth Marketer at Sitepoint | Remote, Anywhere in the world

• Head of Marketing at Safetywing | Remote, Anywhere in the world

• Product Marketing Manager at Baymard | Remote, Anywhere in the world

• Social Media Manager at Chore | Remote, Everywhere except US

• Content Marketing Specialist at Earnipay | Hybrid, Lagos

• Social Media Intern at Bumpa

• Content Marketing Associate at Bumpa

• Performance Marketing Associate at Bumpa

Did you enjoy this issue? Give it a ❤️ and let me know in the comments section or leave a testimonial.

Even better, share this with someone. If they subscribe, you get referral rewards.

Share

Hi there.

Welcome to the 23 new subscribers who joined Marketing For Geeks since the last issue. Big thanks to everyone who shares MFG with their network. P.S. When you refer friends, you get access to my top templates (including my email audit & marketing plan template).

Refer a friend

ICYMI: In my last issue, I spoke with Dotun Adefioye about Treford’s partnership framework that got them to 20k students.

In today’s issue, I outline insights from Treford’s case study that you can implement right away.

Let's dive in!

Insights From Treford’s Story

#1. Revenue isn’t the only metric to judge partnership success by.

Not all partnerships will drive immediate sales, and that’s perfectly fine. In reality, partnerships can serve different purposes—some bring direct users, others provide credibility, and some open doors to new opportunities.

Treford has 4 partner types, each bringing unique value to Treford’s ecosystem and bringing them a step closer to achieving their goals.

For example, Treford’s learning partners don’t bring direct revenue, but they increase student satisfaction. Higher student satisfaction then increases the likelihood of organic word-of-mouth referrals.

Another example. Not all community partners bring high-volume leads for Treford right away. But they increase brand awareness among Treford’s ICP, making future conversions easier.

So, before you start doing partnership outreach, map out the types of partners that could add value to your business. Think beyond just “who can sell for me” and consider who can help build trust, expand reach, and enhance your product offering.

TL;DR: Not all partnerships drive immediate sales, and that’s okay. Some partners will help build trust, expand reach, or enhance your product.

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#2. The best partnerships are a win for all involved.

One mistake many businesses make is pitching partnerships with a “here’s what we need” approach instead of a “here’s what’s in it for you” approach.

A partnership isn’t a favour someone does for you; it’s a mutually beneficial collaboration. If one side is getting all the value while the other barely gets any, then the partnership won’t get anywhere.

The best partnerships are the ones where multiple stakeholders receive benefits on both sides. If you’re reaching out to a potential partner, don’t just lead with your ask. Make sure to talk about the benefits they’re likely to receive.

Before pitching a partnership, always ask yourself: “if I were them, why would I say yes?” If you can’t think of an answer, then you shouldn’t even consider broaching the partnership.

TL;DR: Partnerships should be mutually beneficial. Before pitching, ask yourself, “If I were them, why would I say yes?” If there’s no clear value for them, rethink your approach.

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#3. Run probation periods for partnerships if you can.

You wouldn’t put your entire budget behind a marketing channel you haven’t tested yet. Partnerships are similar. Not every partnership will work out as expected, so you don’t want to invest too much in it when it’s untested.

This is the foundation of Treford’s partnership philosophy. Rather than signing big, long-term deals with every partner, they start with small collaborations to see how things play out.

With community partners, they give a small discount and only increase it when they see returns from the community. Trials like this prevent them from getting locked into ineffective partnerships.

If you’re thinking of broaching a partnership, consider starting with a small engagement first. Decide on the success metrics that matter for the partnership and only extend the relationship if you see the expected traction.

TL;DR: Test partnerships before committing long term. Start small, track results, and scale only if it proves valuable.

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#4. Use self-attribution to track partnership impact.

We’ve established that not all partnerships have direct revenue impact. But that doesn’t mean you can’t track success; it just means it’s a little harder. People may discover your product through a partner, but sign up weeks later without using a tracking link.

For direct conversions, Treford tracks sign-ups by giving exclusive codes to partners. For indirect conversions, they rely on self-attribution. In their forms, they ask “How did you hear about us?”

Self-attribution lets you know which partners are driving traction indirectly. Without it, you might underestimate the impact of partnerships. And if you don’t track results properly, you might cut off a valuable partnership simply because conversions didn’t happen directly.

TL;DR: Not all partnership impact is direct, so track both direct and indirect conversions. Use exclusive codes and self-attribution to measure true impact.

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#5. Partner programs require relationship management

One major lesson from Treford’s story is the importance of relationship management. Partnerships aren’t a “set and forget” revenue stream.

In fact, this was one of the reasons Treford’s early affiliate programs failed; because they didn’t maintain communications with partners.

You can’t onboard partners and leave them to figure things out. If you don’t nurture them, they become less invested. To stay top-of-mind, you can copy Treford’s approach by:

• Checking in regularly

• Providing them with updates

• Sharing promotional material they can use

• Increasing incentives when they perform well

These tactics keep partners motivated and ensure promotions stay fresh and relevant.

TL;DR: Partnerships need active relationship management to succeed. Regular check-ins, updates, and incentives keep partners engaged and invested.

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What I’m Reading

The Van Westendorp Method for Optimal Product Pricing — Four simple survey questions to help you define the best pricing for your product.

Tally’s Bootstrapped Journey to 500,000 Users and $160K MRR — I used Tally for the first time in 2023, and I’ve loved them since then. Loved reading their growth story.

Why ultra-successful products disappear daily — How "time windows" automatically create viral word of mouth.

When Should You Invest in Paid Marketing? — Great article with a decision tree to tell you if it’s the right time to start doing paid marketing.

Jobs

• Social Media Marketing Operations Specialist at OPay

• Product Marketing Associate at Piggyvest Business

• Freelance Writer (B2B marketing) at Influ2 | Remote, Worldwide

• Communication Officer at Tunga | Remote, Nigeria or Uganda

• Social Media Manager at Kuda | Hybrid, Lagos

• Product Marketing Instructor at AltSchool | Remote, Nigeria

• Regional Marketing Specialist (North East) | North East, Nigeria

• Regional Marketing Specialist (North Central) | North Central, Nigeria

Did you enjoy this issue? Give it a ❤️ and let me know in the comments section.

Even better, share this with someone and you can get access to free templates.

Share

P.S. If you made it this far, it means you (probably) enjoyed reading this. If so, could you leave me a testimonial?

Leave Testimonial

Hi there.

Welcome to the 287 new subscribers who joined Marketing For Geeks since the last issue. Big thanks to everyone who shares MFG with their network. As a reminder, this is what you can expect each week:

• ✅Week 1: A Funnel Vision issue where I share the growth story of a successful African product or project.

• Week 2: Actionable insights from the previous week’s growth story

• Week 3: 1 interesting thing & 3 marketing insights.

• Week 4: 5 standout marketing pieces & hot takes from the internet

ICYMI: In my last issue, I shared some amazing brand manifestos for your swipe file.

Today is for Funnel Vision, where I dive into a specific campaign, project, or product by speaking with the marketing professional behind them.

In this issue, I look into Treford’s partnership framework with Dotun Adefioye, Treford’s Partnerships Manager.

What To Expect:

• Types of partners at Treford

• Pull vs push in partnerships

• Partnership green & red flags

• Treford’s affiliate program

• Partnership during the No-Code Tech Summit

Three years ago, in 2022, I began my product marketing career by taking Treford’s product marketing bootcamp. A year later, I furthered my career by taking their product strategy bootcamp.

I first heard about Treford through a marketing community they had partnered with. Partnerships like that have been the bedrock of Treford’s success.

So, when I decided to do a case study on Treford, I knew I had to focus on their partnership strategy. I spoke with Dotun Adefioye, Partnerships Manager at Treford.

In our ~2-hour long conversation, we discussed what makes a partnership worth it and what red flags Treford looks out for.

Let’s dive in.

Types of Partnerships At Treford

I cannot dive into this article without outlining the types of partnerships that Treford engages in. It’s the foundation of their partnership framework.

1. Hiring Partners:
   Treford considers itself as a resource company. Because of this, they need hiring partners for talent placement. People who take Treford courses likely want to practice the skills they learnt, so they need jobs.

   “What we do at Treford is to fill skill gaps for non-tech verticals. Once you’ve done that, you want a better life and a better-paying job that suits the skill you’ve learnt.”

   For this, Treford has 2 major hiring partners: Propel & Hirefoster. These hiring partners help provide job opportunities for Treford graduates where possible. In some cases, Treford even earns cashback for successful job referrals. A win-win-win.
   

2. Community Partners:
   Community partners are likely the most popular types of partners Treford has. If you belong to any no-code tech community in Nigeria, you’ve likely heard Treford mentioned.
   

   I ask Dotun to name some of Treford’s community partners and the list goes on. Marketing For Geeks is on the list. Dotun tells me that his goal with community partnerships is to create value for the community members, by giving discounted (or even free) access to their courses.
   

3. Learning Partners:
   Learning partners help Treford deliver more value to its students. These partners are products students might use in their chosen learning paths.

   

   For the learning partners, they are introducing their product to the next generation of talents and establishing themselves as a standard tool for that niche.
   For Treford, they are teaching their students how to use valuable tools that will aid them in the real world.
   For the students, they’re getting free access to a tool they would have had to pay for otherwise.
   

   Once again, win-win-win. This is a trend in Treford’s partnership framework. Their most successful partnerships are those that are valuable to all 3 stakeholders: Treford, the students, and the partner.
   

4. Brands:
   Finally, I ask Dotun about brand partnerships, which is the most vague on the list. There are 2 types of brand partners at Treford.
   

   The first are brands looking to use Treford as a CSR initiative. These partners reach out to Treford to sponsor courses for a number of people.

   

   I ask Dotun how Treford chooses who to give these free courses to. It depends, he says. Sometimes, the partners have already selected beneficiaries of this scholarship. In some cases, they leave it to Treford; and Treford gives slots out to their audience.

   “Sometimes, we use it to reward community partners. So, we can say ‘a brand has paid for 10 people to join a particular session. Do you have people from your community who can take advantage of these free slots?’ So, those brand partners come from a place of goodwill.”

   The second type of brand partners are companies looking to upskill a large chunk of their workforce; in other words, B2B deals.

I ask Dotun which of the partnership types is most impactful for Treford. It depends, he says once again.

“It’s not straightforward, because each of these partnerships has impact in their own way. For example, our learning partners are a value-add for us that boosts our external perception.

If we were solely to judge by direct revenue growth, brand partnerships will be the most impactful. But if we were to judge by reach and awareness, community partners will take the cake. Because those are the people who help amplify our message.”

How Treford Approaches Partnership Discussions

Partnership is in itself a marketing form. This means, just like with other marketing channels, there is a pull and a push.

A push happens when you actively look for your audience and push messaging on them. A pull happens when you allow your audience find you by creating content they’ll look for or by positioning in places where they’d find you.

I ask Dotun about how Treford finds potential partners—do they push or do they pull? It’s a bit of both, as Dotun tells me.

“We have a partnership framework for people we’re trying to get in bed with. This includes hiring departments for startups and scaleups, government institutes, corporate bodies, and large-scale communities. So, we reach out to these people. But a lot of organisations also reach out to us.”

Some partners reach out to Treford because their mission or audience aligns with Treford’s. The initial message gives Dotun an initial hint as to whether the partnership is worth pursuing in the first place. If it’s worth entertaining, then Dotun sets up a first call with the potential partner. However, he says, this call isn’t a guarantee that the partnership will hold.

During the call, Dotun asks certain questions to ensure Treford and the potential partner are on the same page. The most important thing to check for, as Dotun tells me, is value. It’s the core of their discussions. Dotun needs to ensure, not just that Treford can provide value to the partner, but that the partner can provide value to Treford.

“We check for value. We don’t want people who just want to leverage the Treford name or who want access to our database of learners. So we ask “what can you offer us?” and “what can we offer you?”

One of the more unconventional approaches that Treford takes is to not sign official contracts or make announcements right away. In fact, Dotun says, there was a partner Treford had for 2 years before ever making an announcement or signing a contract.

“We typically have a probationary period before an official contract is signed. It varies from partner to partner. That period is for us to see how things turn out so we don’t waste each other’s time with the announcement.”

When both parties are satisfied with the viability and success of the partnership, Dotun hands off the partnership to the content team to prepare an official announcement.

“Our content team links up with theirs because the announcement has to be synchronised. The partners may share marketing materials with us and we may share ours with them. My part here is to connect both parties and act as a bridge to ensure they’re clear on everything they need. I sync with the partner to see if they have any dependencies or want us to make any corrections.”

Partnership Green & Red Flags

Dotun mentions that there are certain flags that Treford looks out for during the partnership discussions or probationary period. I ask him to tell me about them.

The biggest red flag, Dotun says, is when a partner only wants to gain value from Treford without having any to offer in return. If a partner only focuses on how Treford can help them without mentioning what they can offer (without being prompted), then it’s likely not a good partnership deal for Treford.

A second red flag is when a partner’s solution isn’t very clear. Dotun tells me a story about a potential partner whose product he could not understand even after 2 calls.

“If I don’t understand your solution or offering, how can I pitch it to stakeholders? For this partner, after 2 calls, I still did not have a grasp on what their product was about. So the conversation died off and we didn’t pick it up.”

A 3rd red flag is when a partner is too hasty to close a deal. That doesn’t give him enough time to do due diligence on the partner, and it can be a sign that the partner has something to hide.

Dotun’s due diligence lets him know if there is enough value for the partnership to be worth it. And the value doesn’t even have to be balanced, as Dotun tells me. As he puts it,

“What we’re getting from you doesn’t have to be equivalent to what we’re giving you. But we have to make it make sense in some way. And if you’re too hasty during this phase, it means you only want to use us.”

But enough about red flags. Let’s talk about the signals that let Dotun know a partnership will likely be great. Treford’s 2 top goals are growth and opportunities for its ecosystem. So, partnership green flags are centered on both goals.

“In terms of growth, will we be able to scale our user base with you? Will we be able to get revenue impact from what we’re dishing out? If we get in bed with you, will our messaging be amplified and by how much?”

For opportunities, Dotun looks out for offers that can create more value for its students and alumni. This is especially true for hiring and learning partners.

“To get opportunities for our ecosystem, we have hiring partners and even workspaces that our students & alumni can take advantage of. Same goes for learning and event partners who can give us free or discounted access to tools and tickets. If those are in place, that’s a green flag for us.”

Managing Partnerships

It is not enough to launch a partnership. Dotun is also in charge of managing relationships with partners and deciding when to invest more in certain partnerships.

Partnerships cost money, so Dotun must infer how much to give and whether it’s a worthy investment.

For example, Treford offers certain discounts to community partners, but some communities get higher discounts than others. Dotun says this is one of the things the probation period advises them on.

“We have a certain percentage discount that we are open to sharing across board with any partners. New partners never get more than that amount. But, depending on the kind of traction we get from the partner, we can increase the amount later on.”

The determining factor in whether a community gets an extended discount is the impact of the partnership on Treford’s numbers. If a partner has provided enough value, then Dotun reaches out to the finance team to see how much higher Treford can go.

“I start the conversation, but I can’t make the decision on my own. Once I’ve deemed that a partner has been beneficial and deserves more, I have a conversation with the community in question. After that, I reach out to finance to see what the financial implications are for us.”

In some cases, the outcome of the conversation isn’t even an increased discount. Treford’s finance team has capped discounts at a certain percentage, so Dotun is not always able to offer a higher discount.

In such instances, rather than a discount, Treford may add a cashback policy for the community partner. In other cases, they give them a one-time full scholarship to bestow on community members of their choosing.

Dotun views this as a reward to acknowledge the success of the partnership and the traction it has brought for Treford.

Not all partnerships are successful, though, so I ask Dotun what happens when a partner doesn’t bring the expected numbers. When this happens, Dotun explains, he revisits the conversations with said partner. In some cases, he may change the offer for the partner to find something that better aligns.

“If a partner isn’t bringing the expected value, it might mean what we’re offering them doesn’t really align with their audience. So we sometimes try to find a new offer that will benefit them more. For example, the live sessions might be too expensive for their audience, so we push self-paced courses instead.”

If, after all odds, a partnership proves completely unsuccessful, Treford may cut it off. In fact, after a review this year, Dotun let go of about 8 partners that hadn’t provided any traction and were unresponsive to his outreach.

Tracking Partnership Success

Of course, I can’t write about Treford’s partnership setup without touching on its impact on Treford’s numbers.

To understand Treford’s numbers, you must first understand its verticals. Treford has 2 of them.

The first is its live learning vertical, which includes bootcamps and masterclasses. The bootcamps are intensive 6-week programs that include class assignments, weekend (online) classes, exams, and case studies. These are Treford’s most expensive offering, starting from N200,000. This also means that it is Treford’s cash cow.

Treford’s live verticals are tracked manually and are more of a service than a product.

“The process for our live sessions is manual. We use forms to track the progress. Once you show interest by filling a form, our team approves the application and moves you to the sales department. You finalise payment with the sales department and get registered for the live sessions.”

Because the process is so manual, Dotun tracks success through partner codes and self-attribution. Each partner is given a distinct coupon code, which their members can submit while filling the application form. This lets the sales team apply discounts before payments.

Apart from codes, the forms also include a “How did you hear about Treford?” question, which lets Dotun know which channel a student came through, even if they didn’t use a coupon code.

The 2nd vertical, which Treford launched officially in October last year, is the self-paced vertical. For this, Treford has built a catalogue of courses on various topics, with some courses free and others paid.

Treford’s self-paced vertical is a product, rather than a service. This means that tracking is done through actual analytics tools. However, this tracking is handled by the product team, even though Dotun often creates reports on the numbers.

When Dotun needs to see the impact of partnerships on self-paced courses, he reaches out to the product team to provide the data he needs. When he needs to see the impact on live sessions, he reaches out to the sales team to see how many leads became paying students.

Treford has trained over 20,000 no-code professionals, with most of its revenue coming through live sessions. In 2024, about 44% of attendees at Treford’s live sessions came directly through partnerships. The success of Treford’s partnership framework is not up for debate.

Treford’s Affiliate Program

Early this year, Dotun contacted me (and other partners) to set up one-on-one calls. When I got on the call, he informed me that Treford was launching an automated affiliate program.

But this isn’t the first time Treford has launched an affiliate program. In fact, over the years, Treford has tested different variants of the program 3 times. Each time, they learnt something new that they improved on in the next version.

As Partnerships Manager, Dotun is in charge of managing the affiliate program. At the time of our initial interview, he told me that his goal was to create a stable structure and automate the program. It appears he has now done so.

The biggest problem with Treford’s previous affiliate program was that it was managed manually, in a similar model to Treford’s community partnerships. Dotun would manually assign codes to potential affiliates, referred students would enter the code when applying, and Dotun would check the code against his database. It was a tenuous process.

Apart from the manual effort of assigning and tracking codes, another stressor for Dotun was maintaining relationships with affiliates.

“The whole system wasn’t automated enough and that was the problem. We had affiliates who’d show interest, but they’d fall off along the line because they didn’t get any reminders. In fact, some people forget that they’re members of the program and they refer people without giving their affiliate code.”

Dotun’s last line rings through, especially for me. As a Treford alumnus, I’ve been a member of their affiliate program in the past. But I’ve never remembered to share my code when I recommend Treford to friends and acquaintances. This time around, Dotun wants to stay top-of-mind for affiliates.

All the earlier versions of Treford’s affiliate program were specifically created for alumni. Former participants in Treford’s programs often refer it to others. So, the previous affiliate programs were created to incentivise alumni to keep doing so.

“A lot of leads for our live sessions come from our alumni acting as ambassadors. People who have gone through our programs share it with others, whether we pay them or not. So we wanted to implement a program where they got a percentage commission back for doing this.”

Now, Treford’s latest iteration is expanding outside its alumni network. Dotun is looking to connect with niche influencers whose audience largely contains Treford’s ICP. I ask Dotun what criteria he intends to judge influencers by, and he says numbers are only a 2nd priority.

“Of course, numbers are important. But because of our niche, we’re more concerned with the topics you speak on and the audience you have. I plan to look for people who are recognised as voices in certain niches—people who would recommend something and their audience trusts them enough to check it out. So I won’t look for people with audiences of 100k people where only about 600 are actually active. I’ll look for people who have 2k followers, but those 2k followers actually trust them and fit our audience.”

No-Code Tech Summit

Treford’s longest-term community partner is the Non-Tech In Tech community, a Slack community of professionals working in no-code verticals in tech startups. In 2022, Treford partnered with Non-Tech In Tech (NTIT) to create a first-of-its-kind summit for no-code professionals in Nigeria. The 2-day event includes a full-day seminar as well as an awards ceremony.

The summit was a hit and has since become an annual hallmark event, holding almost every year since then. I ask Dotun what Treford’s goal is with the event, and he tells me it’s a long-term game.

“The tech industry is very big. And over 60% of the tech industry is made up of no-code tech professionals. But somehow all the flowers of the industry go to the developers. So, we’re trying to get non-technical people their accolades. That’s the idea of the summit; to create a gathering of individuals in these niches and give them recognition.”

But that is not to say that Treford is completely selfless in organising the event. A nice side benefit for them is that they can “preach the gospel of Treford,” as Dotun puts it. During the event, Treford sets up a booth and gives discounted access to attendees. After the event, Treford often records higher website visits. But as Partnerships Manager, that isn’t Dotun’s high point. For him, it’s the new partnerships that appear after the summit.

Events of this size often require a village to organise. So it’s certainly great luck (or strategy) that the summit has joint hosts. Since the summit is jointly hosted, its partnership team is a marriage of sorts, made up of members of both Treford’s and NTIT’s partnership teams.

This joint partnership team is split into 3. There’s a team in charge of identifying potential partners, another in charge of handling conversations and managing relationships with partners, and the last in charge of closing deals and ensuring the partners receive all the terms of their agreement.

Dotun belongs to the sub-team that handles conversations with partners. Because of this, he doesn’t have as much insight into how the team finds event partners. However, he tells me that the No-Code Tech Summit has about a 60% retention rate for sponsors. This means they often have repeat sponsors because they’ve maintained good relationships with them.

Dotun tells me that the biggest issue when finding new partners is finding the details of key individuals to have conversations with. It’s one thing to have a list of potential partners, he says. It’s another to know who to talk to in those organisations. But once they get past that obstacle, the rest of the process feels like Dotun’s day-to-day at Treford.

The Culture at Treford

Because Treford’s live sessions hold during the weekends, a lot of their employees have to give up weekends to manage sessions. Program managers often use their personal phone lines to manage communications with attendees and partners. It’s the kind of environment that one would expect to see described as toxic or overwhelming.

So, while doing preliminary research for this article, it was a shock to me that most of Treford’s employees had been there for years. Treford has a small team that, by all indicators, is closely knit and strangely motivated.

Dotun has spent almost 2 years at Treford, a short term compared to colleagues who have been with Treford for 3-4 years. I already suspect the reason for Treford’s employee retention rate, but I ask Dotun regardless. He confirms my suspicions.

I’ll let Dotun tell it in his own words.

“I’d say it starts from the business model. The company is very people-centered. We put the people first before the business. Of course, the business is a business. Growth is important. Revenue is important. But at the core of it, it’s the people. Treford wants to impact people; including its own employees. Making money is just a side benefit.

There’s this startup mentality you expect, where startups have this immense pressure to deliver in tight deadlines. But at Treford, you’re able to grow into your role and actually learn. We’re supposed to be a resource partner, so even employees are learning while on the job. We’re getting the kind of experience that people pay to get. That learning culture shows in everything that we do.”

Throughout the conversation, it is immensely clear to me that Dotun (and the rest of the Treford team) truly believe in what they’re doing. It’s rare to see a team so aligned in its mission and it’s likely the reason for their success so far.

That alignment extends beyond the team, and it’s embedded in how Treford builds partnerships. Treford’s partnerships are an extension of their core philosophy — people first, numbers second.

And that’s it. A look into how Treford has built the careers of over 20,000 professionals by leveraging strategic partnerships, proving that when partnerships are rooted in shared values, their impact goes far beyond the bottom line.

You can see more of Dotun on LinkedIn.

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Read about the key lessons from Treford’s story.

Coming Up

In the next Funnel Vision issue, I’ll dive into Cenoa’s controversial competitor marketing strategies. I’m looking forward to writing this; I had an enlightening conversation with Feranmi Ajetomobi, Cenoa’s Country Manager, last weekend.

Subscribe so you don’t miss the case study in a few weeks.

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What I’m Reading

How to do content marketing that doesn’t suck in 2025 — 13 solid content marketing ideas. Enjoyed reading this.

Why Most Users Reject Your App Notification (And How to Fix It) — How to get users to opt in to receive app notifications.

P.S. If you made it this far, it means you (probably) enjoyed reading this. If so, could you leave me a testimonial?

Leave Testimonial

We’re right at the end of the year, phew.

Last year, in a moment of boredom, I made a quiz based on previous MFG issues. I got positive responses, so I’ve decided to do it again this year.

The quiz is solely based on previous issues, but the topics are related to (product) marketing principles, models, and topics. It’s a fun way to test your brain, but it’s by no means an indicator of your marketing prowess.

I’d love to hear about your score (and your general thoughts on the quiz) so please feel free to share and tag me (@ladefalobi on all social platforms).

Have fun with it!

Take The Quiz

End of Year Recap

Like everyone else, I am playing 2024 back in my head and thinking through my wins and losses. Last year, I started a tradition of writing a personal Year In Review article; I intend to do the same this year.

While I haven’t yet written my personal Year-In-Review, it’s a good time as any to create a mini version for Marketing For Geeks specifically.

Funnel Vision

In March, I launched the Funnel Vision section of the newsletter, where I interview marketing professionals at successful African startups and write case studies on them.

I wrote some of my best work as a result of this.

I had intended to publish 1 case study every month, but was only able to publish 3 before the year ran out.

The case studies have turned out to be the most difficult type of content to produce for Marketing For Geeks, because I spend up to 48 cumulative hours creating them.

It’s a lengthy process — deciding people/companies that would be a good fit, reaching out to them, following up, booking the interview, doing pre-interview research to make sure I ask great questions, holding the ~2-hour-long interview, transcribing the conversation, doing post-interview research, requesting/editing/creating visuals, and then writing the actual article.

Since I have a full-time job (and am determined to have a personal life), I only have so many spare hours in a week. So, I do most of the work overnight, which is utterly unsustainable.

But the case studies have also become the most read, shared, and engaged-with content for MFG. This means I won’t be discontinuing them anytime soon.

Instead, in 2025, I’ll figure out how to reduce the amount of time/effort it takes to create Funnel Vision articles, without reneging on its quality. Alternatively, I will simply reduce the frequency to a more realistic cadence.

Consistency & Getting Serious

One of the biggest struggles I’ve faced since starting Marketing For Geeks has been consistency. Every few weeks, I make a re-commitment to be more consistent with MFG and post frequently. Yet I fail each time.

At the beginning of the year, my goal was to publish 2 issues every month. But there were multiple months during which I didn’t publish even 1 issue. It’s a constant struggle and I have tried many solutions.

My most recent solution is to unbundle the newsletter sections into 4 distinct parts that can be spread over 4 weeks each month. My goal was to create an even more repeatable framework, so I wouldn’t have to do much thinking from scratch before each issue.

I arrived at this structure, which I shared with subscribers.

• Week 1: 1 interesting thing & 3 marketing insights.

• Week 2: 5 standout marketing pieces & hot takes from the internet

• Week 3: A Funnel Vision issue where I share the growth story of a successful African product or project.

• Week 4: Actionable insights from the previous week’s growth story that you can use in your marketing.

It might seem counterintuitive to attempt a weekly cadence when I failed at a fortnightly cadence. But here’s how I see it: if I fail at a “2ce per month” cadence, it might mean over a month with no content. But if I fail at a “4ce per month” cadence, it might only mean a couple weeks with no content.

The biggest issue I envision is with the Funnel Vision issues. As established, they take an immense amount of time, effort, and coordination to create. But Funnel Vision isn’t going anywhere, so I’ll power through regardless, even if it means reducing the frequency of the Funnel Vision issues only.

I also wanted to get more serious about MFG in 2024. So much so that I finally bought a custom domain (marketingforgeeks.com), paid for a few tools, had a new logo made, and produced merch. These are MFG goals I completely achieved. I am very proud of these. Yay me.

~2k Subscribers

At the beginning of 2024, I set a goal to hit 5000 subscribers. Which was a little ambitious since I only had 671 subscribers at the time. But maybe if I’d stuck to some of the plans I set for MFG, I might have hit the goal.

While 1,903 isn’t the number I hoped for, it’s certainly one I’m proud of. Despite doing a less-than-optimal job of promoting the newsletter and staying consistent, I was able to:

• Publish 10 issues which were read over 15k times

• Reach a minimum of 1.5k views on each issue

• Reach a minimum of 2k views on Funnel Vision case studies

• Get 1,232 new subscribers, almost double the previous number of subscribers

• Get my domain rating up to 8 from 0, having lost my previous rating by switching from Substack to a custom domain.

• Get a total of ~3.5k search impressions with a 5.9% average CTR

• Grew MFG’s WhatsApp community to 200+ members.

Some of these are merely vanity metrics, but I will allow myself to be vain today.

Thank you so much for reading and supporting Marketing For Geeks. I really do mean that.

Happy New Year’s Eve (or Happy New Year, depending on when you’re reading this).

See you in 2025.

Cheers!

Lade.

Hi there.

Welcome to the 30 new subscribers who joined Marketing For Geeks since the last issue. Big thanks to everyone who shares MFG with their network. As a reminder, this is what you can expect from MFG:

• Week 1: 1 interesting thing & 3 marketing insights.

• Week 2: 5 standout marketing pieces from the internet → You are here.

• Week 3: A Funnel Vision issue where I share the growth story of a successful African product or project.

• Week 4: Actionable insights from the previous week’s growth story that you can use in your marketing.

ICYMI: In my last issue, I wrote about how to use the Kano model in product marketing, why brand manifestos are great, and why you should capture demand.

P.S. I’m trying to get to know MFG’s readers more. Could you answer a few questions in this short form if you haven’t yet? And if you’d like to join MFG’s WhatsApp community, please fill this form.

🔑5 Marketing Pieces

Since I wrote about brand manifestos in my last issue, I’ll share some great examples today.

#1. Twist’s “Why Async” Manifesto

Twist is a work messaging tool—an alternative to Slack. So it makes sense for them to back asynchronous work in their manifesto.

#2. Atlassian’s Workplace Woes Manifesto

Atlassian didn’t call this a manifesto, but that’s what it is. One of the best manifestos I’ve read. They took the results of a survey and used it to position meetings as the enemy.

#3. 37signals’ 1999 Manifesto

In my last issue, I shared a screen from 37signal’s manifesto. But before that manifesto, they had an old one. Back in 1999 when 37signals was just a website development agency. Their core values didn’t change, but their product did.

#4. Nike Running’s Manifesto

#5. Apple’s Manifesto

What I’m Reading

The art of naming your startup/product — 8 metrics to optimize when naming a startup/product and 8 naming strategies to use.

How June Grows: Winning By Doing The Opposite — Really good case study of June.so’s growth.

The 10 biggest mistakes I made bootstrapping to $1M ARR — Honest story about how Melissa Kwan built eWebinar without an abundance of resources or friends in high places.

Social Quitting — A 2-year old article about the enshittification of social media that’s still true today (looking at you, Twitter). Makes great points about how social media locks you in with switching costs; reminds me of MFG #11.

Do You Have an Acquisition Problem or a Sales Problem? — Self-diagnosis tool, Sales Deck Template and 5 Examples inside.

Did you enjoy this issue? Give it a ❤️ and let me know in the comments section or leave a testimonial.

Even better, share this with someone. If they subscribe, you get referral rewards.

Share

Hi there.

Welcome to the 336 new subscribers who joined Marketing For Geeks since the last issue. Big thanks to everyone who shares MFG with their network.

Quick update: I plan to publish this newsletter more often, so I am thinking of tweaking the structure. Here’s what I’d like to do:

• Week 1: 1 interesting thing & 3 marketing insights.

• Week 2: 5 standout marketing pieces & hot takes from the internet

• Week 3: A Funnel Vision issue where I share the growth story of a successful African product or project.

• Week 4: Actionable insights from the previous week’s growth story that you can use in your marketing.

ICYMI: In my last issue, I talked about offer types, MLPs vs MVPs, why paid social is for demand generation, and bouncing back from terrible reviews.

For this issue, I was supposed to share a case study on Selar’s growth, but that won’t be going out due to factors beyond my control.

In today’s issue, I write about how to use the Kano model in product marketing, why brand manifestos are great, and why you should capture demand.

Let's dive in!

🔑1 Interesting Thing

In the 1980s, a Japanese professor named Dr. Noriaki Kano created the Kano model. At the time, companies thought that customer satisfaction was linear; that improving any feature would lead to improved customer satisfaction.

Dr. Kano proved that better features don't always lead to better customer satisfaction. He noticed that improving some features had no impact on satisfaction, while some unexpected features that users hadn’t asked for had a bigger impact.

His research led to the Kano model, which product teams use today to prioritise features. But the Kano model isn’t just for product managers. It’s also valuable for crafting feature and product messaging.

The Kano model breaks features into 5 categories:

1. Basic Needs (aka Must-Haves): These are the minimum expectations a customer has from your product. For example, I expect to be able to make calls with my phone.
   If these needs aren’t met, users will be dissatisfied. However, improving them won’t necessarily make users happier.

2. Performance Needs: These features have a direct impact on customer satisfaction. The better they perform, the more satisfied the customer will be. And the worse they perform, the more dissatisfied customers would be.
   For example, the more storage my phone has, the more satisfied I will be. The less I have, the less satisfied I am.

3. Excitement Needs (aka Delighters): These are unexpected features that delight customers. The user might not even know they need them, so their absence has no impact on customer satisfaction. But if you have them, your customer satisfaction will significantly increase.
   For example, FaceID on a phone is a nice-to-have feature. If it’s included, I’m thrilled; if not, it’s no big deal.
   I wrote about the importance of delighting users in MFG #07.

4. Indifferent Features: These are features that neither decrease nor increase satisfaction. Customers simply don’t care about them. For example, I don’t care what default wallpaper comes with my phone.

5. Reverse Features: These are features that actively annoy users. Customers are happier when these features are absent. For example, users might be annoyed by stringent verification processes.

What does this mean for your product marketing?

1. Basic Features:
   These features should never be used as selling points, because competitors have them and customers expect them. Focus on using these basic needs to reassure users at the bottom of the funnel. At that stage, they want to confirm that your product covers all the essential bases. Your tone here should be reassuring.
   For example, saying a fintech app is secure is nothing new — it’s a minimum expectation for a financial app. But on the payments page, you can simply reassure users that the transaction is secure.
   Use in: BOFU content (e.g. feature lists, product descriptions, FAQs, tutorial videos)

2. Performance Features:
   The more you have of these, the happier customers are. Make a big deal out of announcing them. These are the features customers will use to compare your product to competitors. Highlight them boldly in your messaging, showcasing superior performance and functionality.
   For example, when buying a phone, customers focus on performance features like storage space and battery life—not the color or default wallpaper. In your marketing, emphasize how your product stands out in these critical areas.
   Use in: MOFU content (e.g. comparison pages, case studies, demos, testimonials).

3. Excitement Features:
   These are the secret weapons in your arsenal. Use them in your awareness campaigns to pack an extra punch. You may also use them as your value proposition depending on their impact on users and their rarity. They’d be especially loved by innovators and early adaptors.
   Use in: TOFU content (e.g. ads, social media, brand experience)

4. Reverse Features:
   If you have these, skip them entirely. However, if many competitors have these and you don’t, you should harp on them.
   For example, bank loans typically require exhaustive documentation and collateral. But most modern loan apps don’t, so they can lean on this heavily in marketing — “unlike others, we don’t require you to go through those annoying verification processes.”

I’ll skip indifferent features, because you should avoid emphasizing them at all.

Features evolve. What excites customers today can become a basic need tomorrow. For instance, touch screens were once a delight, but they’re now a standard expectation. AI is an excitement feature now, but in a few years, it might become a basic need. That’s why you should review your messaging often to make sure you’re in tune with trend shifts.

TL;DR (Too Long, Didn’t Read): Use the Kano model for product marketing. Reassure that you have the basic features, compete with performance features, and attract with excitement features.

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💭3 Insights

#1. Demand gen needs to go along with demand capture.

Only a tiny fraction of your target audience is ready to buy at any given time. The majority of your audience isn’t quite there yet. But that doesn’t mean that you should only focus on in-market buyers.

Your out-of-market audience aren’t a lost cause. They just haven’t gotten to the trigger events that will get them to buy. But when their trigger moment arrives, you’ll want to be top of mind.

These customers will probably see your marketing, but they won’t be ready to take big actions, like paying for a plan or signing up immediately. That’s why you need to capture demand with a smaller low-effort action. You can then nurture them to get them closer to the trigger moment (or to just stay top-of-mind).

Here are some of the best ways to capture demand:

• Freemium: Freemiums are arguably the gold standard for demand capture. A free tier allows you to engage users who are interested but not ready to commit. Over time, you can nurture them toward their trigger moment.
  For example, I used Canva for years before hitting my upgrade trigger moment — wanting higher-quality images for my newsletter. Canva primed me for that upgrade by offering just enough functionality to hook me and strategically hinting at the gated features I'd only be able to access with the paid tier.

• Free Trial: For some out-of-market buyers, all they need is a chance to try your product. Free trials remove the risk for customers and lets them experience the value firsthand. It’s a simple but effective way to demonstrate how your product solves their problem, especially for buyers who are close to being in-market.

• Subscribers: Even if someone isn’t ready to buy, they might be willing to subscribe to a newsletter, if it offers value tied to their interests. You can tailor your newsletter to their pain points, interests, or aspirations while subtly linking back to your product.
  For example, a project management tool might offer a newsletter full of productivity tips. This keeps their audience engaged until they’re ready to commit to a solution.

• Events: Niche events—whether you organise them, sponsor them, or merely attend—are a great way to find your target audience. Registered attendees already have an interest in the event topic or industry. This makes them prime candidates for nurturing through newsletters or similar content.

• Lead Magnets: Lead magnets are among the most popular demand capture tactics. By offering a free resource that your audience LOVES, you can capture their information while providing real value.

  The best lead magnets are those your audience would otherwise pay for—something valuable enough that others charge for it.

Social media technically also counts as demand capture, but it’s limited because it’s rented media, not owned media. Your audience is rented from the social platform; Instagram could suspend your account and you lose the audience you’ve built.

But with freemiums, free trials, and subscribers, your audience stays with you. You have their information and you can move them if you wanted (e.g. from one newsletter platform to another newsletter platform).

TL;DR: Only a small fraction of your audience is ready to buy. Capture demand early with freemiums, trials, or newsletters to stay top-of-mind when they’re finally ready.

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#2. Make research very easy to respond to.

I enjoy answering surveys and participating in product research interviews. But I’m in the minority.

For most people, responding to research is stressful. It can take some time and there’s really nothing in it for them (unless you’re offering a reward).

That’s why you need to reduce the friction in your research as much as possible.

• Tell people what to expect. Say exactly what the research is about and how long it would take. Make sure the form or meeting title give a hint to the topic of the research.

• Avoid jargon or complex phrasing. Respondents shouldn’t have to reread a question to understand it.

• Use research tools that are convenient for users. Users shouldn’t have to download a new app just so they can help you with research. If you’re doing calls, setup your Calendly to let participants choose their preferred meeting platform.

• Allow for anonymous participation. Research is not a lead generation activity. If you happen to find new customers, that’s just a side attraction. If you’re collecting personal information (like email addresses or phone numbers), make those fields optional.

• Stick to essential questions only. Long surveys often lead to drop-offs.

• Don’t make respondents write unless it’s absolutely necessary. Stick to multiple-choice questions or quick rating scales. Even when you ask questions in communities, you can reduce friction by providing choices.

  

• Use progress indicators to show how much research is left. Most survey tools have this anyway, but check just in case.

• If possible, use logic branching to avoid asking irrelevant questions. For example, if someone says that they’re unemployed, you can skip questions about company name or job title.

TL;DR: Make research easy for participants. Use clear language, minimize effort with multiple-choice questions, and skip irrelevant questions with logic branching.

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#3. Your brand manifesto can be a differentiator.

I first learnt about brand manifestos 5 years ago, when I was obsessed with advertising and did a deep dive into vintage advertising concepts. Back then, advertising relied heavily on lengthy copy. Brands would take out full-page newspaper ads filled with text—and it worked. So brand manifestos were great ways for companies to declare their unique story and beliefs.

Today, the consensus seems to be that modern consumers don’t read. Whether that’s true or not, there’s still a segment of your audience who will read what you write, if it’s compelling enough. These are often your most passionate adopters, the ones who will go hard for you.

Brand manifestos are your chance to tell your audience why they should care about your product. The goal is for your target audience to read it and say “woah, that’s what I believe too” or “yes. that’s exactly how I feel.” You want them to see themselves in what you’ve written and align with you based off it.

Because brand manifestos aren’t direct conversion drivers, most companies put them off till they have more time to focus on brand-building tactics. Which is a fair approach

But you should lay the initial groundwork for your brand as soon as you can. That way, you’re already carrying early adopters along. Brand manifestos can also be a place to draw messaging from, helping you restate your proposition and differentiate yourself.

The perfect example of a modern company doing manifestos well is 37signals, the parent company behind Basecamp, Hey, and Once. Each of their products has a dedicated manifesto page. The parent company itself itself has dedicated its entire website to stating its manifesto.

37signals turn their values into reasons you should care about them. They take strong standpoints and try to attract people who also believe (or are likely to believe) in their points. Their manifesto says things that'll attract adaptors:

• They have no investors or board of directors, so they won’t become sellouts.

• They’re for the underdogs (small and mid-sized businesses and startups), not large corporations.

• They’re anti big-tech so they' avoid predatory data practices.

Before reading Basecamp’s manifesto, I hadn’t thought about how tools like ClickUp and Asana deprioritize small businesses. After reading the manifesto, I believed it wholeheartedly. Similarly, I thought spam was just an unavoidable part of email. But after Hey’s manifesto, the problem became crystal clear—and Hey became the obvious solution.

That’s what amazing manifestos do. They make the believers feel seen and instantly align with your brand. They nudge the unaware to think deeper and slowly align with you.

TL;DR: A strong brand manifesto might not bring direct conversions, but it aligns early adopters, inspires messaging, and differentiates your brand in a crowded market.

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I'm speaking at LinkedIn Local Oyo this Saturday (November 14). If you happen to come, please say hi and ask for a Marketing For Geeks sticker🩷.

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What I’m Reading

How to get the most out of mentorships — In this article, I shared tips to get the most out of mentorships, whether you’re the mentor or mentee.

Flo's Rise: How This Women's Health App Grew to Unicorn Status — A very comprehensive case study into Flo’s growth, written by Binjo Adeniran.

How to Improve Retention: The Ultimate Guide for Product Managers and Leaders — Long read, but great dive into how to improve retention.

5 tips to plan my career like I plan my product — I do most of these and it seems to be working. 100% recommend.

How to prioritize marketing activities & avoid random acts of marketing — Good guide on marketing prioritization.

Did you enjoy this issue? Give it a ❤️ and let me know in the comments section or leave a testimonial.

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Hi there.

Welcome to the 210 new subscribers who joined Marketing For Geeks since the last issue. Big thanks to everyone who shares MFG with their network. P.S. When you refer friends, you get access to my top templates (including my email audit & marketing plan template).

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Every month, I share 1 interesting thing, 3 actionable marketing insights that have helped me do better product marketing, and 5 pieces of marketing that caught my eye.

ICYMI: In my last issue, I spoke with Courage Afemije of Heyfood about how they grew from a small campus solution to 100k users in 5 cities. It’s an amazing story.

In today’s issue, I write about when to use different offer types, choosing MLPs over MVPs, why paid social is for demand generation, and how to come back from terrible reviews.

Let's dive in!

🔑1 Interesting Thing

Last weekend, I went shopping for groceries and ended up buying multiple clothes from a boutique in the mall instead. I never do that; I’m a cheapskate—I largely purchase thrift clothes from open markets. There was only one factor behind my impulse decision. Let’s break that down.

#1: Flier Copy

I was handed a flier almost immediately I walked into the mall. Since I’m a bit of a geek (as implied), I immediately began ranting about the flier to my partner. Here’s the summary of my initial rant.

I was ready to dismiss the flier until I noticed there was content on the other side. That content was enough to convince me to buy on impulse. In my opinion, there was no need for the initial flier side I saw; the back content was all they needed. Here’s why👇🏽

The key takeaway from this initial contact?

• Don’t make vague offers to customers. “Sale” and “Free Gift” don’t grab your customer’s attention; and they don’t provide enough information to convince people to buy.

• Don’t overwhelm new customers with unnecessary information. The first page of the flier was wasted because it didn’t give me the information I needed at that specific point.

• In general, match your message to your audience and their specific context. ODG Outlets is a largely unpopular brand expanding into Ibadan for the first time. But the headline would only be relevant to people who knew them previously

#2: BOGOF vs Discounts vs Free Gifts

After doing some impulse buying at the store, I came to a realisation. I would never have stepped into the store if they had offered a discount or a free gift. That led me on another geekout session where I talked through the different offer types and when they work best.

Before that though, I should say that one of the most powerful things ODG Outlets did was anchoring their offer. If they had simply said Buy One Get One Free—without setting an expectation in my mind for what the cost would be—I probably wouldn’t have stepped into the store. I’ll speak more about anchoring techniques in a future post.

Now to the offer types. Let’s focus on 3:

• Buy One Get One Free (aka BOGOF):
  This is the type of offer you set up when you intend to clear your stock. BOGOF offers will attract wide audiences, including people who might not typically buy your product. It’s easy for them to rationalise the expense as “too good to pass up.”
  
  BOGOF works best for low-cost items and products where more quantity doesn’t seem unnecessary. For example, a BOGOF deal on couch sets or dining tables will not be attractive to retail users, because two of those may seem excessive. In fact, the deal could even repel customers because of the higher (effort and monetary) cost of managing storage and logistics. But Buy One Get One Free deals on clothes are likely to be more effective because there’s no extra cost to users.
  

• Discounts:
  In my opinion, discounts are most effective for customers who already know your product. You don’t need to do as much work anchoring the price for them—they already know the standard price they’re comparing the discount against.
  
  Discounts can be hard to anchor, especially when you use percentage discounts (e.g. 20% off) rather than price discounts (e.g. N1000 off). With percentages, customers have to do quick maths to calculate what the discounted price would be—mental effort which can be a friction point for users. That’s also why it’s often better to use price slashes over percentage discounts.
  
  A great example of that is Chowdeck’s 1k Refuel slash. Everyone knew Refuel’s usual price. But Chowdeck didn’t position it as a 50% discount—they used a specific price to reduce any mental friction for users.
  

• Free Gift:
  This works best when the gift complements the purchased item. For example, if a person buys a camera, you might throw in a free SD card. If they looking to buy software, you might throw in a free trial. If they buy a laptop, you might gift them some fun laptop stickers.
  
  If your gift is not related to the item you’re selling, it’s a lot harder to impress customers. You’d need to offer something substantial (like a chance to win big-ticket items in a raffle draw) to really convince them. Simply handing out branded pens and mugs will not be enough—they may delight people who already intended to buy, but won’t attract browsing customers at the top of the funnel.

Key Takeaways

• Buy One Get One Free offers attract new & browsing users; discounts & free gifts attract existing & in-market users.

• Always anchor your offers: In the past I’d seen stores (in the same mall as ODG Outlets), with signs saying “80% discounts,” yet I was never tempted to even browse. This was because they never anchored the offer to a price. Plus, discounts already have a bad rep; customers know that some companies inflate their prices to make discounts look better.

• Reduce any mental friction in your offer: Don’t create an offer that creates more work for customers. The simpler and clearer your offers are, the more likely people are to engage with them without hesitation.

TL;DR (Too Long, Didn’t Read): Buy One Get One Free offers will attract new & browsing users, while discounts & gifts will attract existing in-market users. Anchor your offer and reduce friction to get users to buy.

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💭3 Insights

#1. Sometimes, you don’t need an MVP.

I originally published this insight as a post on LinkedIn.

You’ve probably heard about Mimimum Viable Products (MVPs). They are basic versions of products that you use to test your business case and validate your idea. Airbnb’s founders started by renting out air mattress spaces in their own living room. Uber’s MVP was an SMS solution. Yelp started as an email service for people to request recommendations from friends.

The common trait with Airbnb, Uber, and Yelp is that they were innovative products bringing new ideas. So, validation was critical for them. But that isn’t the case with all startups.

If you’re building a product that isn’t a new idea, an MVP might not be the way to go. Why validate a market that already exists? If it’s not a brand-new concept, others have likely done the validation for you.

Instead, you should consider building a Minimum Lovable Product (MLP). This is the simplest version of your product that users will actually love. With an MLP, you build a product that you don’t have to convince users to use. The goal here is to build something users are excited to use, not something they settle for in the meantime.

It’s still not the 10x version of the product, but it’s also not a stripped-down version they have to tolerate. This is even more important if you’re going into a saturated market (e.g. if you’re building another payments fintech). Plus, many times, companies don’t make money on MVPs right away. But MLPs are products people are willing to pay for right off the bat.

This isn’t to say one is better than the other; it’s to say they both work in different contexts.

I’ve spent the last few months building a changelog tool. When we started, we wanted to build an MVP first. Two months in, we switched to an MLP because we realised we weren’t building anything significantly different from others, and our barebones MVP wouldn’t serve a purpose.

Now, I’m working on a new product, but we’re sticking with an MVP this time. Because this product has something significantly different from competitors.

So if you’re doing something that’s really new, do an MVP. If it’s not new, maybe consider an MLP.

TL;DR: If your product doesn’t introduce a brand-new concept that’s different from competitors, you may be better off building a Minimum Lovable Product over an MVP.

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#2. Paid social is for demand generation.

Insight originally shared on LinkedIn by Tayo Sadique, Performance Marketing Leader. This insight (Insight #2) is written in his voice, with slight edits from me.

When it comes to paid marketing, social and search are some of the top channels. Paid search tends to convert more than paid social, leading some marketers to discount the power of paid social ads.

But paid social and paid search are fundamentally different. Paid search is intent-based, paid social isn’t. This means that the target audience in paid search is ready to buy, while those in paid social likely aren’t.

Only 3% of your audience will be in the market to buy now. This 3% will search on Google or ask friends for recommendation. Then they’ll take action when they find a solution that meets their needs. Paid search will help you reach these 3%.

But what about the other 97%? The ones who are your ICP, but for some reason aren’t ready to buy yet? Those people won’t automatically come to you when they’re ready (or they won’t get ready on their own)—not unless you’ve done some work generating demand.

To stand a chance of reaching this audience that will buy someday, you need to implement a demand generation strategy. That’s where paid social comes in. Here’s why you should use paid social as a demand generation channel:

1. If you nail targeting and creatives, then your ads will build brand, affinity, and trust with people who are in your ICP audience.

2. While paid social converts less in the short-term, it primes a segment that isn’t ready to buy to come to you when they’re ready.

3. Marketers are in a rat race and every company is fighting for its share on the market. Rather than focusing on the 3% in-market audience alone, paid social lets you reach a wider market (the 97%) and scale your campaigns.

4. There are members of your audience who may not think of buying your software if they’re not nudged to action. Paid social helps you convert that segment.

5. Paid social supports all your other marketing strategies.

It might be tempting, but marketers shouldn’t focus on short-term conversions alone. Prime your audience with paid social and capture them with paid search.

TL;DR: Paid social is a demand generation channel. It builds awareness and trust with your audience, preparing them to buy later, unlike paid search, which only targets the 3% already ready to buy.

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#3. You can come back from terrible reviews.

Insight by Ifeoluwani Oseni. Ife originally shared this in response to a question on the Marketing For Geeks WhatsApp community.

The question was “Let's say you have a product with bad ratings on Google/IOS playstore, what are some of the tactics one could use to reverse the trend?” The rest of this insight (Insight #3) is written in his voice with slight edits from me.

Speaking based on what I’ve experimented with previously and has worked to a fair degree, here’s how you can turn bad reviews around:

1. Start with the Product: Categorize the negative reviews and find the recurring issues. Maybe it's a UX problem, maybe it’s customer service, or maybe your product isn’t delivering on its promise. Identify the core issue, fix it, or you’ll just keep getting the same complaints.

2. Leverage Customer Service: Timing is everything. If CS successfully helps a customer, that's the perfect moment to ask for a review. They're more likely to leave a positive one right after a good experience. Counter the bad reviews with amazing reviews, especially if they’re about the issue that caused negative reviews in the past.

3. Automate Review Requests: If a user hits certain engagement milestones (like using your product consistently), nudge them with an email asking for a review. The more value they’re getting, the more likely they are to leave positive feedback.

4. Experiment with In-App Prompts: Don’t spam. Trigger review requests at key moments for highly engaged users. Too many nudges can backfire, turning a minor annoyance into a bad review.

5. Get the Whole Team Involved: Make reviews everyone’s business. Encourage your entire company to leave reviews and ask their networks to do the same. It’s a simple but effective way to build momentum.

Bad ratings can be turned around, but not by gaming the system—you have to actually address the underlying issues and create an experience worth reviewing positively.

TL;DR: To turn bad reviews around, fix recurring product issues first. Then, ask satisfied customers for reviews, automate prompts at key moments, and get the whole team involved to boost positive ratings organically.

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⚡5 Pieces of Marketing

#1. This Messaging Insight from Alex James👍🏽

#2. This Post from Oke Umurhohwo👍🏽

#3. This Pop-Up From TL;DV👍🏽

#4. This Use of Gamification by Vella Finance👍🏽

Not sure how converting it is, but it was sure fun to play. Even if it doesn’t convert, it’s certainly memorable.

#5. This Live Card Editor By Vella Finance👍🏽

When you put in your name, they slap it on a card that you can customise within the website. Giving you more reasons to click “Create Card”

What I’m Reading

Every SaaS Retention technique is on this list — Really good list of 79+ retention tactics for SaaS products.

You need a better content strategy — A how-to guide to creating content that stands out.

Chowdeck’s #1000 Refuel Meal Campaign — A short case study by TEMSI.

"Secret" discount page hack — How to increase conversion rates and customer happiness with a secret discount.

The Ultimate Content Marketing Programs Guide for SaaS — Great comprehensive guide on SaaS content marketing.

These Were Nigeria's 100 Brightest Teenagers in 2009. Where Are They Now? — Excellent data storytelling in this.

Did you enjoy this issue? Give it a ❤️ and let me know in the comments section.

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Hi there.

Welcome to the 142 new subscribers who joined Marketing For Geeks since the last issue. Big thanks to everyone who shares MFG with their network.

Every month, I share 1 interesting thing, 3 actionable marketing insights that have helped me become a better product marketer, and 5 pieces of marketing that caught my eye.

ICYMI: In my last issue, I wrote about why your value prop probably isn't different from competitors (and how to fix that), creating an objection-smasher page, and the 10-step checklist for content marketers in a new role.

Today, we have a Funnel Vision issue, where I do a deep dive into a specific campaign, project, or product by speaking with the marketing professional behind them.

In this issue, I look into HeyFood’s growth story with Courage Afemije, Head of Growth at HeyFood.

What To Expect:

• How HeyFood got to its first users within the student community

• Expanding outside UI’s borders

• Conquering the more remote areas in Ibadan

• How HeyFood approaches expansion

• HeyFood’s strategy now that there’s more competition

• Strategies & tactics that HeyFood gets right

• Mistakes made by the HeyFood team

From University of Ibadan To 5 Cities

When HeyFood was founded in 2021, Jumia Food was the only food delivery app in Ibadan and they were doing a woeful job. Jumia Food only had Chicken Republic & KFC and only delivered within a narrow radius. If people wanted to order from local favourites like Amala Sky, they had to use unreliable errand services that weren’t worth the cost.

A group of friends at the University of Ibadan came together and built a solution – HeyFood. HeyFood rapidly penetrated Ibadan and has now expanded to 5 cities.

So, I spoke with the man who has been with HeyFood since its inception. Courage Afemije is the Head of Growth at HeyFood and he’s managed the product’s growth from its early stage within the UI community to the YC-backed company battling competitors today. 

Let’s get into it, starting with how HeyFood reached its first big milestone.

First 1k Users, The UI Story

HeyFood was started by UI students, so it’s only natural that the student community first drove its growth. Since Courage was friends with HeyFood’s founder, he had a decisive role from the start. 

A large reason for HeyFood’s success was that they were solving a real problem for people. Just like Facebook—another product with early roots in the student community—they were solving problems that they themselves had faced. In fact, Courage became more involved after using the product himself and feeling a burning urge for more people to know about it.

In those first days, they did things that don’t scale—a principle that likely got reinforced after they got into Y Combinator. HeyFood’s initial “riders” were students who’d help pick and deliver orders for customers. The team used these riders to collect feedback about people’s experiences with the product.

Their first vendors were hall cafeterias and student vendors. Those vendors became a marketing channel for them. The team put stickers promoting HeyFood at each store, promising perks like free delivery on the first order. That’s a practice that HeyFood still swears by today.

“A lot of students got to know about HeyFood through that approach. We helped them [vendors] create designs, which they sent to their customers on WhatsApp, telling them they could get free delivery if they ordered through HeyFood next time.”

HeyFood also did some community marketing, getting student influencers and WhatsApp TVs to share posts about HeyFood on their WhatsApp status. They did that consistently and got the UI community to adopt HeyFood widely.

Student communities often have great influence over the city they’re centred in; UI was no different. Before long, word about HeyFood began spreading outside UI.

“One thing I’ve noticed is that the student community in Ibadan shapes the culture in major areas like Bodija and Akobo. That’s because there are people living in those areas that probably graduated from UI, are still students of UI, or know someone in UI. So, if you’re leveraging a student community, it’s easy to reach people like fresh graduates who are entering the working class. We were able to tap into that market early.”

By the time HeyFood reached its first 1k users, they’d gotten enough traction to get into YCombinator, which meant they now had more money to invest in expansion and marketing.

Expansion Outside UI

There was a short period when Courage left HeyFood, but he stayed connected with the team and was in the loop on their activities; so he is able to fill me in. After HeyFood received YC money, they began leveraging paid ads and referrals. 

Working-class people didn’t care as much about the N200-N500 referral reward. However, the referral campaign was more effective within the student community because the rewards mattered more to them. So much so that they began gaming the referrals.

The team had made some mistakes with the program, allowing people to claim referral bonuses without the referred user taking an activation action. This means students were creating duplicate accounts or referring people outside Ibadan just so they could claim the reward.

“You look at referrals from the angle of acquisition cost and lifetime value. You expect to recover the rewards cost and break even when the user comes back to make more orders. But these users would order once and probably go look for another number to register with to get another bonus.”

HeyFood had to pause referrals for a month and go back to the drawing board. Courage sees a positive consequence of the failed referral though. Because so many people were ordering, HeyFood gained more virality and you could see a HeyFood bike in every corner of the UI-Bodija axis. This led to more organic sign-ups from people who’d seen a bike on the road.

Courage believes this is when HeyFood started achieving product-market fit, with people installing the app organically. 

Conquering Ibadan

At this point, HeyFood had gotten traction outside UI, but only in the areas surrounding the university—Agbowo, Bodija, Akobo, Samonda, etc. The question then became how they could fully penetrate Ibadan and reach the less popular areas.

The team decided to try the same tactic they’d used in conquering UI—leveraging vendors as an acquisition channel. 

“People in Bodija, UI, Akobo already knew HeyFood. But those in Challenge and Apete didn’t. We tried to recreate what we did in the first areas we dominated. We went to most of the stores in the area, onboarded them, and got them to agree to put some branding in their store.”

Whenever HeyFood onboarded vendors, they put branding at the store – stickers, tabletop signs, and roll-up banners. The more popular a store was, the more branding they put in it. That way, when people walked in, they got to know about HeyFood. Courage believes that this was HeyFood’s highest-converting channel.

The restaurants were happy because HeyFood was solving a distribution and delivery problem for them, and because the only alternative (Jumia Food) had prioritised large chains over local favourites. Customers were happy because they didn’t have to go to stores in person or source delivery riders themselves. It was a win-win-win.

HeyFood’s hunch was right and before long, they’d conquered all of Ibadan. It was time to think about what city they could conquer next.

Expansion To New Cities

The first thing that Courage tells me about expansion is that marketing is the least of your worries. Operations is the most important factor in expansion success, he says.

“If you’re thinking of expansion in terms of marketing campaigns or growth experiments, you’re wasting your time. The first thing to think about is how to get riders that would deliver the orders. Once customers cannot get their orders, you’re done. That experience has the most influence on whether a user comes back to use the product again or not. And it’s mostly influenced by operational factors than by any other thing.”

In marketplaces, there is often the question of which side comes first – the vendor or the buyers. In HeyFood’s case, it’s neither. The riders are the most important marketplace players.

When HeyFood wants to expand into a new city, the Operations team first has to onboard riders and train them to use the app. While this happens, the Sales team identifies popular restaurants in the city and tries to onboard them. That way, the Operations team can prioritise riders close to those restaurants or mobilise riders towards those areas.

The first city on HeyFood’s radar was Abuja. This was in November 2022, months before Chowdeck stepped into the city. A year later, HeyFood expanded into Abeokuta.

Abeokuta bore a lot of similarities to Ibadan. Both typically overlooked by startups in favour of more urban cities like Abuja and Lagos. Both with no major competition for HeyFood. Both with a fairly large student community.

However, unlike in Ibadan, HeyFood did not choose Abeokuta’s student community as its starting point. In Ibadan, the university is close to the city’s major commercial and residential district (Bodija), so many of the popular restaurants are within the area. But in Abeokuta, the university is more isolated from major areas, like Oke Ilewo.

“We try to approach growth like this – if we did this in this city, is it possible for us to replicate that in this new city? Abeokuta had a student community, but it was not one we could leverage in the same way. FUNAAB is far from the places where the most popular restaurants are.”

So instead, HeyFood relied on their trusty vendor-as-acquisition-channel strategy. They identified hot spots in the city, onboarded them, and then leveraged them.

“If a store does a lot of numbers on-site, they are most likely going to do a lot of orders in the app. That’s our theory and that has been proven. For example, when Item7Go first came to Ibadan, a lot of people were talking about them and they did a lot of orders on-site. So we knew we needed to get them on the platform. That’s the same thing we do in other cities. We focus on bringing the top stores in the city onto the platform. In Abeokuta, that was Halaga and that was the first vendor we chased to get onboard.”

HeyFood used this playbook to penetrate Abeokuta & Abuja, and it is the same strategy they used to expand into 2 more cities — Benin & Port Harcourt.

While HeyFood was expanding to other cities, competitors were eyeing their home city, Ibadan.

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Facing Competition

When HeyFood first launched, they had no real competition to contend with. They were the only option and they’d captured a substantial market share in cities like Ibadan and Abeokuta. By 2022, Glovo had come into Ibadan as a competitor but made little impact against HeyFood. The competitive landscape really changed when Chowdeck announced its entry into Ibadan in 2023.

But, as Courage tells me, the competition has little to do with marketing and everything to do with operations. Like Courage said earlier in our conversation, riders are the bedrock of the food delivery business. So, riders were the first thing that competitors went after.

“Riders are very important in the growth process. When they leave, you feel it, because users get bad experiences and that leads to them churning.  So, the game is crazier now because riders, just like customers, now have options. When a competitor comes in and tells riders they can earn up to 600k per month, there’s a problem. Users start getting their orders late because riders have been taken by competition.”

When competitors start to take away the bedrock of your product, there will naturally be some temptation to compete on price by increasing the amount you pay riders. Courage agrees that this has been a tempting strategy, but it is not without its cons. He takes the time to explain why.

“Most of the payment that customers make on the platform is subsidized. Riders actually get paid more than what customers pay. As competition increases, you could try to match the price you pay riders, but you’d end up spending more than you’re supposed to. And then your burn rate becomes way higher.”

Courage is a little wistful as he says this, and I understand why. When HeyFood started, restaurants (and many riders) had little experience with food delivery platforms and the team had to do a lot of training to get the market to where it is now. HeyFood developed the market themselves, only for competitors to swoop in and have it easier than they did.

But Courage is not discouraged. In fact, I get the sense that the team has a few things in the works to protect and expand their market share. Courage says it has been a challenge to have to deal with strong competitors, but it’s a challenge HeyFood needed to face.

I ask Courage if he thinks that HeyFood’s growth has been limited by its initial focus on Ibadan. Most of Nigeria’s most successful startups had origins in Lagos or moved to Lagos to gain more success. It’s the commercial capital of the country and has undeniable influence. And Courage agrees with me. In fact, he believes it has been a factor in the success of some of HeyFood’s competitors. When you consider that HeyFood entered Ibadan, Abuja, and Abeokuta months before competitors like Chowdeck did, you’d see his point.

“If you own the largest market share in Lagos, you most likely own 50-60% of the Nigerian market. Every other city shares the other 50%. And that’s an advantage for any business coming from Lagos. You’ll see businesses that are only in Lagos doing way more numbers than businesses that are in 5 cities exempting Lagos. 

Besides the number of orders you do, PR also comes from Lagos. The influencers that could sell your brand are in Lagos. You get exposed to a larger audience. So, it makes it easy to enter other cities. When we [HeyFood] wanted to expand to PortHarcourt, we had to work our ass off to get awareness there. But if it’s a brand coming from Lagos [e.g. Chowdeck], there’s a high chance that people in PortHarcourt already know you. All you’ll need to tell them is ‘oh we’re now in your city.’ So that’s the disadvantage we’re at.”

Of course, I ask Courage if HeyFood has plans to expand to Lagos any time soon. While he doesn’t give a direct answer, it is clear that it is a question of when it would happen rather than if it would happen.

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What HeyFood Gets Right

Courage is right that startups in Lagos are likely to gain more brand equity, but brand awareness is one of the many things that HeyFood knows how to do well.

If you’re a long-time subscriber, you might remember Courage from a Twitter space last year where we discussed HeyFood’s virality & growth loops. You can access the transcript of that conversation here.

How HeyFood Engineers Virality

HeyFood creates viral content fairly often, from their social content to their push notifications. 

When I ask how HeyFood manages to do this, Courage’s response shows that it’s an intentional effort. For starters, he doesn’t believe in 1-month or 2-month content calendars because they limit you to generic content for content’s sake. He prefers to create content that’s relevant to current situations and trends.

“There are trends we can leverage. There’s a lot of creativity that will come. There will be things that we draw inspiration from along the line. We might see something and want to replicate it fast. And creating a 2-month calendar will not be effective for that. Because in a week, the content might be outdated or no longer align with what we want to achieve.”

Courage truly believes that content should always be extraordinary, and he has pushed this philosophy to his team. Whenever the team creates content, he pushes for an interesting factor to make it extraordinary.

To help, he asks them to share with 5 people and get their feedback. This also helps test if certain creative content is too obscure or controversial.

“I am always very particular about content. I tell my team to show the content to 5 people and get their feedback before they decide if it’s good enough. For all our content that did really well, we showed it to people before it went out. I want to know people’s genuine reactions when they read the content. And the content has to be simple. It doesn’t make sense when you have to explain content for people to get its meaning. If out of 5 people, 3 people don’t get the meaning, then that is a problem and the content doesn’t work.”

With so much viral content, you’d think social media would be a great conversion channel for HeyFood. But that isn’t the case. I ask Courage what role he thinks virality plays for growth.

“Virality basically helps you build that top-of-mind awareness for your brand. People who might not have known you before could get to know you through your content. But the fact that they know you doesn’t mean they’d automatically go and download your product. It's just one of those touchpoints that you reach users at.”

How HeyFood Manages Rewards & Discounts

I’ve used HeyFood myself since 2021, and my usage increased after they launched their rewards program in 2023. When I first spoke with Courage last year, I asked about the rewards program. I ask Courage about it again, but this time I want to know more about its inspiration.

Like with many growth discussions at HeyFood, the rewards system was the outcome of a casual chat between Courage and his close friend and roommate from 100level. Only, this friend happens to be HeyFood’s founder, Taiwo Akinropo.

At the time, HeyFood ran promo campaigns almost daily. HeyFood’s discount strategy was built to increase user stickiness (i.e. keep users coming back to order). But it was becoming too costly to retain users and they needed to be more strategic. So, Courage was thinking of alternative retention strategies that would cost less.

The inspiration came from Starbucks’ infamous loyalty program. Courage believes in stealing like an artist. He and Taiwo reverse-engineered Starbuck’s loyalty program to figure out what parts they could replicate and what parts couldn’t apply to their use case. He says it’s important to know your capacity as a brand so you don’t set yourself up for failure.

“If Coca Cola implements something and you say you want to steal it, you need to remember that they have the budget to push it. If you’re working with a lean budget and trying to implement the exact same strategy, you’re probably setting yourself up for failure. A lot of times, you have to study how exactly they implemented it and then adapt it to your own circumstance.”

Once they’d studied Starbucks’ reward program, they could create theirs.

“A lot of this initial calculations were between me and Taiwo [HeyFood’s founder]. We sat down and did the maths of how much we were spending before, how much we’re looking to spend now, and the impact that would have on retention. We needed to decide how much we were willing to spend on retention, so we set a cap for how much we could spend per user. We knew we didn’t want to spend above N20 for every N1000 spent so we started from there to figure out a number that made sense. ”

Courage wasn’t joking about the calculations. He spends about 5 minutes explaining the numbers they considered, the worth of a HeyFood star, the dynamism of the rewards, and the different iterations they made before settling on the version they launched. It was enough maths to give me a headache. But Courage says it was worth it. The rewards program significantly reduced the cost they spent on retention and increased the number of orders they got.

To further optimise the program and reduce costs, Courage added an expiry caveat to the rewards, so that users would order more often to accumulate rewards.

“We made claiming the reward a deliberate action. You don’t get your reward automatically; you have to come back into the app to claim it. We also have an expiry feature so you’d use your stars as fast as possible and keep coming back.”

Interestingly, HeyFood’s rewards program doesn’t do much for their power users. Often power users even forget to use promo codes when ordering, Courage says. But other user types value the rewards, so the feature is most impactful for them.

Courage also wanted to encourage people to take other activities within the app, like rating a vendor and sharing a review. So he tied those actions to rewards as well. He says these actions are useful, not just for virality, but for operational success.

“We wanted to increase the number of ratings that users made. Ratings lets us know which riders are performing well or how users perceive specific vendors in the app. Vendors can check their dashboard, see the ratings, and improve their service. We also share these reviews with our success teams so they can help vendors work to improve their service based on user feedback.”

2023 Recap Campaign

Since Spotify launched their first end-of-the-year Wrapped campaign in 2016, many startups have begun creating personalised annual data summaries for users. Apple Music has Replay, Cowrywise has Roundups, Piggyvest has Report Cards, and HeyFood has Recaps.

2023 wasn’t the first year HeyFood would publish a recap feature to mark the year ending, but it was the first year I took notice of it – largely because the team had made some improvements in presentation and visuals.

“The most notable thing was probably the presentation and visuals. We tried to create a deeper emotional connection, and music was a good way to do that. So we took the top Nigerian songs of 2023 and allowed users select their favourites to play in the background while they go through the recap. We also improved the design and added more personalisation and relatable slangs.”

One of the goals of the campaign was to improve brand awareness. So, Courage engineered virality into it by promising rewards to lucky users who shared their recap on social media. 

When I ask Courage about the impact of the feature on orders, he explains to me that it’s difficult to give an accurate number because its release coincides with HeyFood’s top revenue month – December. In other words, there was a spike of growth when the recap was released, but some of it could be attributed to the typical seasonal spike.

Courage’s Biggest Mistake

With so many successful experiments, I am curious to know about the ones that didn’t do so well. I ask Courage about his most regrettable mistake, and he tells me about a failed attempt to leverage low-cost out-of-home advertising.  When Courage tells me the story, his regret is palpable. I empathise with him; it was a brilliant idea ruined in execution. 

Before Courage came back to HeyFood, there was an old strategy that involved putting up billboard ads around Ibadan. But Courage figured that he could save costs and get the same results by placing stickers on public transportation across the city. A brilliant idea.

Courage put in the work and met with the transport chairmans to negotiate. He paid a small sum and they agreed to aid with distribution of the stickers on buses and cabs in their network. Another brilliant idea.

So how did it become “an absolute disaster,” as Courage put it? Well, Courage gave the designs to a printer who printed all the stickers in one go. This was the first mistake. This mistake made it hard to rectify the second mistake:

“By the time the printer brought the work, we realised he printed with a paper sticker. And he’d printed every single thing so we had to work with it that way. We tried to get a refund, but his recuse was that we didn’t specify that he shouldn’t use paper.”

The disadvantage of paper stickers is that they slowly dissolve when it rains. And just their luck, rain fell the same day they put up their stickers. The stickers were supposed to last for months and be seen by hundreds of thousands of people. But the entire work washed down the drain only a few hours after they were put up. 

Like Courage says, it was a great idea with poor execution.

Courage’s Biggest Win

I cannot ask about Courage’s biggest mistake without asking about his biggest personal wins. Courage takes an experiential approach to everything he does, so he says his biggest win is creating an integrated mix where his little experiments add up to the growth he wants.

“I like to experiment with things that don’t scale. These things don’t scale, but they add to the overall growth we’re trying to achieve. One channel could be contributing 10%; another 5%. And it all comes together beautifully to the number we’re aiming for.”

Courage is also proud of all the learning he has done at HeyFood, especially while expanding to new cities. The most challenging expansion was to Abuja, because unlike Ibadan and Abeokuta, the country’s capital was more competitive and running costs were higher. For example, billboards in Abuja cost 3-6 times what they cost in Ibadan. So, Courage had to find low-cost growth opportunities. And he did. HeyFood now boasts 20% week-on-week growth in Abuja because of community marketing tactics that Courage implemented.

“It’s expensive to operate in Abuja. Billboards are more expensive, transportation is more expensive. So we had to look into non-expensive things to achieve our numbers. We started looking for communities to target. And communities can be anything, like student communities or NYSC members. And now, we’re doing at least 20% weekly growth in Abuja, largely due to communities we leveraged.”

Collaboration culture at HeyFood

Because Courage oversees so many growth experiments that require input from multiple teams, I had to ask about how HeyFood encourages collaboration. He reveals that HeyFood’s student origin has had a positive impact on the team culture. Because many members of the founding team (and current team) were friends before working at HeyFood, the team is able to speak and relate freely. Oga-led marketing isn’t a thing at HeyFood.

“Among friends, you’re free to talk about different things without being scared. In this case, it feels like you’re talking to someone who’s been your friend for years, so there’s freedom to say ‘we’re not doing this right, we should do this.’  Even when it comes to discussing finance and salary, everyone is very open.”

Collaboration is extremely important, as Courage tells me. The most important department to collaborate with at HeyFood is the Operations team. As we’ve established, Operations is the bedrock of the food delivery business.

“Operations has to be in the loop on everything. If you want to run a campaign to increase number of orders, Operations must be aware or you set yourself up for failure. Because Operations needs to create the system that ensures the campaign’s success. For example, if we’re giving discounts at a particular store, they need to direct a lot of riders to that store or recruit more riders to match up with the order volume.”

When it comes to collaborating with the tech team, it helps that HeyFood’s founder (and Courage’s close friend) is the head of tech. Since Courage and Taiwo brainstorm together on a lot of experiments, it’s easy to translate rough ideas into technical requirements. 

The more the interview went along, the more obvious the camaraderie between Courage and Taiwo seems to me. HeyFood’s student origins don’t just make a nice story; it’s the driver behind the open culture that encourages Courage and his team to test growth tactics and move quickly.

That’s it! A look into how HeyFood grew from a small campus delivery service to a YC-backed startup with 100k users and 5 cities.

You can see more of Courage on LinkedIn. Courage (and HeyFood) have even more stories to share and are open to speaking engagements. 100% recommend.

📣Tweet about this.

What project, product, or campaign should I focus on next? Feel free to recommend a project you love by leaving a comment.

What I’m Reading

TEMSI Social Media Template — Free social media reporting templates for your next performance update.

Why every app needs a power user strategy — How to nurture your top users and use them to propel growth.

3 mistakes when setting up B2B referrals—and how to avoid them — Super insightful article on how to manage referrals when you’re B2B.

The honest guide to hitting 200K LinkedIn followers 📈 — Amazing guide to creating better LinkedIn content. Applies to company and personal accounts.

Your Pricing Problem is a Positioning Problem — Product-Market Fit is old news. Position-Market Fit is in. Feels like a great segue from the last MFG issue about positioning.

Did you enjoy this issue? Give it a ❤️ and let me know in the comments section.

Even better, share this with someone.

Share

Today, I want to dive deeper into how to define your value proposition; and why most websites have it wrong.

There are 2 approaches to value prop messaging:

Approach #1: Why You Should Use A Product Like Ours

This is the approach most companies take. It simply states why people use tools within that category. Let’s take Calendly as a case study. Calendly’s hero section offers the exact same value props you can find in any other meeting scheduling tool. Because it tells you why you should use a meeting scheduling tool; not why you should use Calendly specifically.

The problem with this approach is that it doesn’t differentiate you from competitors. It leaves you promising customers the exact same thing that others are promising them.

This doesn’t mean it’s not an important value prop approach to document or that you should never use it. But it should not be your main value prop unless you’re selling an innovative product with no known competitors (which is very rare and not the case for most products). It is most useful for TOFU marketing (e.g. SEO).

So, how do you define this type of value prop?

1. Conduct audience research: Audience research can never be over-done. Dive deep into understanding who your target audience is. Conduct discovery interviews (here’s a sample) to better understand them. Make sure to document all the research you do.
   

2. Define their JTBD: Users “hire” your product to do a “job” for them; the Job-To-Be-Done (JTBD) framework helps you define what that job is. The way a job gets done might change, but the job itself doesn’t. For example, a person might want to get from their home to work; that’s a job. They could achieve that in different ways; taking public transport, booking an Uber, hitching a ride, driving their own car, or even walking. Your promise is to help them achieve that “job” more effectively or efficiently.
   

3. Map their pains & gains: Now that you understand your audience, list the problems (aka pains) they face while trying to achieve their JTBD and the motivation & positive outcomes (aka gains) they expect from achieving it.
   For example, for the “get from home to work” JTBD, the pains might be road traffic, cost of fuel, and discomfort during transit. The gains might be getting to work on time, minimising commuting costs, and enjoying a stress-free commute.
   You can use tools like the Value Proposition Canvas pictured above (specifically the customer profile section) to map out their needs and pains.
   

4. Map your solution: Once you’ve mapped your customer profile, outline how your product or service creates gains and relieves pains. Again, the Value Proposition Canvas can help here, specifically the value map section.
   

5. Combine them into benefits: Take the problems and the solutions that you’ve mapped and combine them into benefits for the customer. Make sure to twist the knife on their problem and be specific about how you solve it.

Approach #2: Why You Should Use Our Product Specifically

This is the approach that Less Annoying CRM used. Here, you make a promise that is unique to you. It says what you offer that competitors do not. Let’s go back to the Calendly examples. Here are some Calendly alternatives that DO show why you should choose them specifically.

If you’re in a red ocean market where people are aware that competitors exist, this is the perfect option. Use this value prop type in your hero section and on comparison pages. It’s perfect for BOFU marketing.

To define this kind of value prop, you need to have followed the steps in approach #1. Once those are completed, you can move on to these steps:

1. Conduct a ton of competitor research: Dive deep into your competitors, the solutions they offer, and what customers think about them. You can use my competitor research template [🔒SUBSCRIBE TO GET IT FOR FREE] to help.

2. Explain how your solutions differ from competitor solutions: What do you do differently than they do? Think on every single level you can. What’s their team size like? Do they take a different approach than you do? Where’s their HQ? What’s the UX like? List as many differences as you possibly can, whether you consider them relevant or not.

3. Connect the differentiation to your TA’s problem: How is that differentiation of benefit to your TA? You can turn even the most subtle differentiators into value props. Here are some examples:

   1. Global competitors? Turn your local focus and understanding of nuance into strengths.

   2. Competitors with VC backing? Say that unlike competitors, you can prioritise users over investors.

   3. Larger competitors? Say that while you don’t have their resources, you’re more agile and able to make changes without bureaucracy.

Sample Value Proposition Levers

If you’re still not sure what makes your product different from competitors, here are a few unique positioning levers you can use:

• We’re #1: Highlight your market leadership.

• We Have The Best Quality: Emphasize your high standards and craftsmanship. Best used when you’re higher priced.

• We’re Only For A Few People: Position your product as an exclusive club that only the best can get into.

• We Came First: Emphasize your pioneering status. Use your years of experience as a strength.

• We Fixed This Competitor Screwup: Position competitors as an enemy you’ve come to save the customer from. Focus on the problems users face with them.

• We Care More About You: Focus on customer-centric values and personalised service.

• We Are Cheaper: Stress affordability. Emphasize the cost savings.

• We Focus on One Thing Alone: Differentiate with a niche focus and highlight expertise within that niche.

• We’re the 2nd Best, and That’s Okay: Show humility and reliability.

TL;DR (Too Long, Didn’t Read): You can’t stand out from competitors with generic value props like “Save time on xxx." Competitors can make that same promise. Focus on a promise that only you can make.

📣Tweet this.

Sample Value Prop Marketing

These are examples of products with clear differentiation in their messaging.

#1. Bang & Olufsen’s Ads👍🏽

Bang & Olufsen position themselves as being exclusive. Their value prop is their exclusivity; making you feel like you’re part of an elite few when you own one.

#2. Avis Rental’s “We Try Harder” Campaign👍🏽

Avis Rentals had always trailed behind the market leader in car rentals. Rather than pretending to be the No. 1 car rental company, they leaned on their #2 position as their value prop, birthing the iconic “We Try Harder” campaign.

#3. Basecamp’s Small Business Manifesto👍🏽

Basecamp does an excellent job emphasizing their commitment to small businesses. That’s why they use their personalised services and small size as a value proposition.

#4. Southwest Airlines’ Transfarency Promise👍🏽

At a time when other airlines used sneaky pricing (with people complaining about hidden fees), Southwest Airlines positioned itself as the airline that was fully transparent about its pricing with no hidden fees.

#5. Hey’s Website Hero Section👍🏽

Hey was built by the same people who built Basecamp, so their strong value prop is no surprise. They position themselves as the hero coming to save you from shitty competitors.

Did you enjoy this? Give it a ❤️ and let me know in the comments section.

Even better, share this with someone.

Share

Hi there.

Welcome to the 130 new subscribers who joined Marketing For Geeks since the last issue. Big thanks to everyone who shares MFG with their network. P.S. When you refer friends, you get access to my top templates (including my email audit & marketing plan template).

Refer a friend

Every month, I share 1 interesting thing, 3 actionable marketing insights that have helped me do better product marketing, and 5 pieces of marketing that caught my eye.

ICYMI: In my last issue, I spoke with Olamide Adurota of Risevest about how Rise manages experiments to move users along the funnel.

In today’s issue, I write about why your value prop probably isn't different from competitors (and how to fix that), creating an objection-smasher page, and the 10-step checklist for content marketers in a new role.

Let's dive in!

🔑1 Interesting Thing

A couple of weeks ago, I made a video geeking out about Less Annoying CRM’s website; it’s hands down the best use of a value prop I’ve seen on a website yet. [P.S. Subscribe to Marketing For Geek’s YouTube channel]

Today, I want to dive deeper into how to define your value proposition; and why most websites have it wrong.

There are 2 approaches to value prop messaging:

Approach #1: Why You Should Use A Product Like Ours

This is the approach most companies take. It simply states why people use tools within that category. Let’s take Calendly as a case study. Calendly’s hero section offers the exact same value props you can find in any other meeting scheduling tool. Because it tells you why you should use a meeting scheduling tool; not why you should use Calendly specifically.

The problem with this approach is that it doesn’t differentiate you from competitors. It leaves you promising customers the exact same thing that others are promising them.

This doesn’t mean it’s not an important value prop approach to document or that you should never use it. But it should not be your main value prop unless you’re selling an innovative product with no known competitors (which is very rare and not the case for most products). It is most useful for TOFU marketing (e.g. SEO).

So, how do you define this type of value prop?

1. Conduct audience research: Audience research can never be over-done. Dive deep into understanding who your target audience is. Conduct discovery interviews (here’s a sample) to better understand them. Make sure to document all the research you do.
   

2. Define their JTBD: Users “hire” your product to do a “job” for them; the Job-To-Be-Done (JTBD) framework helps you define what that job is. The way a job gets done might change, but the job itself doesn’t. For example, a person might want to get from their home to work; that’s a job. They could achieve that in different ways; taking public transport, booking an Uber, hitching a ride, driving their own car, or even walking. Your promise is to help them achieve that “job” more effectively or efficiently.
   

3. Map their pains & gains: Now that you understand your audience, list the problems (aka pains) they face while trying to achieve their JTBD and the motivation & positive outcomes (aka gains) they expect from achieving it.
   For example, for the “get from home to work” JTBD, the pains might be road traffic, cost of fuel, and discomfort during transit. The gains might be getting to work on time, minimising commuting costs, and enjoying a stress-free commute.
   You can use tools like the Value Proposition Canvas pictured above (specifically the customer profile section) to map out their needs and pains.
   

4. Map your solution: Once you’ve mapped your customer profile, outline how your product or service creates gains and relieves pains. Again, the Value Proposition Canvas can help here, specifically the value map section.
   

5. Combine them into benefits: Take the problems and the solutions that you’ve mapped and combine them into benefits for the customer. Make sure to twist the knife on their problem and be specific about how you solve it.

Approach #2: Why You Should Use Our Product Specifically

This is the approach that Less Annoying CRM used. Here, you make a promise that is unique to you. It says what you offer that competitors do not. Let’s go back to the Calendly examples. Here are some Calendly alternatives that DO show why you should choose them specifically.

If you’re in a red ocean market where people are aware that competitors exist, this is the perfect option. Use this value prop type in your hero section and on comparison pages. It’s perfect for BOFU marketing.

To define this kind of value prop, you need to have followed the steps in approach #1. Once those are completed, you can move on to these steps:

1. Conduct a ton of competitor research: Dive deep into your competitors, the solutions they offer, and what customers think about them. You can use my competitor research template [🔒SUBSCRIBE TO GAIN ACCESS] to help.

2. Explain how your solutions differ from competitor solutions: What do you do differently than they do? Think on every single level you can. What’s their team size like? Do they take a different approach than you do? Where’s their HQ? What’s the UX like? List as many differences as you possibly can, whether you consider them relevant or not.

3. Connect the differentiation to your TA’s problem: How is that differentiation of benefit to your TA? You can turn even the most subtle differentiators into value props. Here are some examples:

   1. Global competitors? Turn your local focus and understanding of nuance into strengths.

   2. Competitors with VC backing? Say that unlike competitors, you can prioritise users over investors.

   3. Larger competitors? Say that while you don’t have their resources, you’re more agile and able to make changes without bureaucracy.

Sample Value Proposition Levers

If you’re still not sure what makes your product different from competitors, here are a few unique positioning levers you can use:

• We’re #1: Highlight your market leadership.

• We Have The Best Quality: Emphasize your high standards and craftsmanship. Best used when you’re higher priced.

• We’re Only For A Few People: Position your product as an exclusive club that only the best can get into.

• We Came First: Emphasize your pioneering status. Use your years of experience as a strength.

• We Fixed This Competitor Screwup: Position competitors as an enemy you’ve come to save the customer from. Focus on the problems users face with them.

• We Care More About You: Focus on customer-centric values and personalised service.

• We Are Cheaper: Stress affordability. Emphasize the cost savings.

• We Focus on One Thing Alone: Differentiate with a niche focus and highlight expertise within that niche.

• We’re the 2nd Best, and That’s Okay: Show humility and reliability.

TL;DR (Too Long, Didn’t Read): You can’t stand out from competitors with generic value props like “Save time on xxx." Competitors can make that same promise. Focus on a promise that only you can make.

📣Tweet this.

💭3 Insights

#1. Use review sites for user & competitor research.

When you’re trying to understand more about competitors (and why users should choose you over them), review sites are the best place to start.

Go to the app store pages of competitors or check out review sites like G2 & Capterra. Read as many reviews as you can, from the 5-star reviews to the 1-star reviews. You can find out what people love the most about your competitors, as well as what things frustrates them the most about them.

P.S. This can help you find your differentiation as well. Look at what your competitors are getting wrong and then promise users that you’d get them right.

If the top complaint from users is their customer service, then emphasize your commitment to customers and leverage that as a value prop (e.g. “We respond 3 times faster than competitors” “Speak to a real human and not a bot” “The only xxx that actually cares about customers”)

TL;DR: Use review sites like G2 and Capterra for competitor research. Read all reviews to identify what users love and hate. Use these insights to highlight your strength over competitors.

📣Tweet this.

#2. Create an objection smasher page.

Insight by Dave Gerhardt, CEO at ExitFive. This insight (Insight #2) is written in his voice.

Here’s one of my favourite B2B SaaS marketing plays you can steal. It’s called “The Objection Smasher.”

Create a public-facing landing page and list out the brutally honest 5-10 reasons customers don’t buy your product and why they churn.

Every buyer is working through 2-3 vendors and hundreds of features. But they all know they are being sold to. Of course, everything you say about your product is going to be glowing. That’s what everyone else is doing.

You can shift the conversation and earn trust and credibility by sharing the top reasons people don’t buy. You’d have a better chance by sharing your POV on the reasons why people don’t buy. That way, you control the message, rather than having them wonder and maybe never even talk to you.

If you handle the objections upfront before you even get to a sales call, your sales team doesn’t have to play defence right from the first call.

Sit down with your sales, customer success, and product leaders. Take insights from each team and handle those objections in advance. This could easily start with a blog post.

TL;DR: Create an "Objection Smasher" page. List the top reasons customers don’t buy and address them honestly. This builds trust and handles objections upfront, making sales calls smoother and more effective.

📣Tweet this.

#3. Don’t jump right into creating when you start a new job.

Insight by Jeremiah Ajayi, Content Marketing Manager at RemotePass. This insight (Insight #3) is written in his voice.

When I started as Content Marketing Manager at RemotePass, I didn't jump straight into content creation.

Instead, I spent my first month focusing on building a strong foundation. Here’s my 10-step guide to what you should do in your 1st month as a content marketing manager:

1. Deep Dive: I familiarised myself with the company, our product, and value proposition.

2. Building Bridges: I connected with other teams, especially Growth, Sales, and Customer Success, to understand their perspectives.

3. Learning From The Past: I reviewed past demos and customer calls to gain insights into customer needs and pain points.

4. Content Audit: I conducted a content audit to assess existing content and identify areas for improvement.

5. Sharpening The Focus: I collaborated with the Sales team to develop a more refined Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) based on my customer understanding.

6. Speaking The Same Language: I established a style guide to ensure clear and consistent communication across all marketing materials.

7. Planning For Success: I created a content operations document outlining content cadence and publishing schedules.

8. Knowing The Competition: I conducted competitor research to identify any gaps in our content strategy.

9. Data-Driven Approach: Based on the content audit and competitor research, I developed a data-driven content strategy to address the gaps I identified.

10. Setting The Course: I created a roadmap of milestones for the rest of the quarter and aligned them with the executive team.

Doing these set me up for a successful second month where I've already been able to achieve tangible results.

NOTE FROM LADE:
This framework can easily apply to any other role. Just replace the word “content” with your niche. E.g. if you’re a growth marketer, go an audit of the current growth efforts, create a growth ops document, and develop a growth strategy.

TL;DR: Don’t go into creation mode immediately at a new job. Spend the first month laying a strong foundation with this 10-step checklist (by @jeremiahajayi_):

📣Tweet this.

⚡5 Pieces of Marketing

Since I spent most of this issue discussing value props, the 5 pieces of marketing will focus on products with clear differentiation in their messaging.

#1. Bang & Olufsen’s Ads👍🏽

Bang & Olufsen position themselves as being exclusive. Their value prop is their exclusivity; making you feel like you’re part of an elite few when you own one.

#2. Avis Rental’s “We Try Harder” Campaign👍🏽

Avis Rentals had always trailed behind the market leader in car rentals. Rather than pretending to be the No. 1 car rental company, they leaned on their #2 position as their value prop, birthing the iconic “We Try Harder” campaign.

#3. Basecamp’s Small Business Manifesto👍🏽

Basecamp does an excellent job emphasizing their commitment to small businesses. That’s why they use their personalised services and small size as a value proposition.

#4. Southwest Airlines’ Transfarency Promise👍🏽

At a time when other airlines used sneaky pricing (with people complaining about hidden fees), Southwest Airlines positioned itself as the airline that was fully transparent about its pricing with no hidden fees.

#5. Hey’s Website Hero Section👍🏽

Hey was built by the same people who built Basecamp, so their strong value prop is no surprise. They position themselves as the hero coming to save you from shitty competitors.

What I’m Reading

8 Top Marketing Newsletters in Nigeria — I made a list of some of my favourite marketing newsletters authored by Nigerians.

Demand generation for long sales cycle — Anyone who works in B2B can attest to the long sales articles; this article tells you how to do demand generation right.

The MKT1 Guide to positioning — How to differentiate your product, without getting stuck in the weeds.

How Calendly overhauled their product-led sales motion — Calendly’s CMO shares a first-hand account of how Calendly fixed their lead routing problem.

Pricing & Packaging for SaaS 🏷️ — A great guide to SaaS pricing strategies & models + examples.

Did you enjoy this issue? Give it a ❤️ and let me know in the comments section.

Even better, share this with someone and you can get access to more free templates from me.

Share

For example, you can find case studies and growth stories anywhere, but only a marketing newsletter written by a Nigerian would provide the growth stories of Nigerian companies specifically. Case in point👇🏽

That’s why I’m making this post; to share some of my favourite marketing newsletters (covering topics like content marketing and product marketing) with Nigerian authors. This list is ranked in no particular order.

1. Yellow Chili Campaigns

Author: Torinmo Salau

If you love marketing case studies, you’ll love Yellow Chili Campaigns. Torinmo Salau, a PR & Communications Specialist, curates the newsletter as a library of marketing campaigns.

Every other Wednesday, she shares a short campaign example from around the world to give marketers and founders inspiration for their own work. She ends each newsletter with action points that you can easily apply to your business or product.

You should subscribe to Yellow Chili Campaigns if you love creative marketing campaigns and need more content for your swipe file.

2. Marketing For Geeks

Author: Lade Falobi

Marketing For Geeks is a product & content marketing newsletter read by 1k+ marketers. It’s written by SaaS product marketer, Lade Falobi (that’s me!), who calls it the “second-best marketing newsletter you’ll ever read".

Every other week, I share 1 interesting thing (often a deep dive into a marketing theory, principle, or case study), 3 actionable insights, and 5 marketing pieces for your swipe file. I also alternate with case studies into the growth stories of Africa’s most successful companies, like Piggyvest:

Marketing For Geeks also has an exclusive Whatsapp community for marketers of all types and experience levels.

You should subscribe to Marketing For Geeks if you love actionable insights you can implement right away and breakdowns of marketing theories or case studies.

3. The Early Stage Marketer

Author: Onyinye Nwankwo

As the name implies, The Early Stage Marketer is perfect for marketers who are just beginning their career or who are working at early-stage companies. However, the newsletter is a great read for any marketer, regardless of your career stage.

In the newsletter, Onyinye shares her experiences as the first marketing hire in multiple startups. Her personal storytelling style is part of what makes The Early Stage Marketer so endearing. She is vulnerable about relatable mistakes, lessons, and practical insights that she has learnt in her career.

The Early Stage Marketer also has a community for marketers with 0-3 years of experience, making it a great resource for those just starting in their marketing journey.

You shoud subscribe to The Early Stage Marketer if you’re an entry-level marketer or if you work at a budding startup where you are the only marketing hire.

4. THRIVE for Product Marketers

Author: Peace Attah

THRIVE is a product marketing newsletter written by Peace Attah, a leading product marketer with over 4 years experience in the field. The newsletter covers a wide range of product marketing, with tips for beginners transitioning into the field.

THRIVE for Product Marketers includes tips & best practices that will help you in your product marketing newsletter, and real-life examples of good and bad product marketing.

Peace sends her newsletters every two weeks and each issue is educational and actionable.

You should subscribe if you’re a product marketer or if you’re trying to transition into product marketing.

5. The Marketing Roundup

Author: Olohireme Ajai-Ikhile

The Marketing Roundup is a weekly content marketing newsletter. Reme, who leads content at a SaaS publication, shares two insightful lessons about content marketing and one helpful resource in every issue.

She writes about great content marketing strategies, updates in relevant technologies (e.g. Google’s API leak), and actionable tips & strategies.

You should subscribe to The Marketing Roundup if you work in content marketing or leverage content as part of your overall marketing plan.

6. Marketing In Action

Authors: James Praise and Oluwakayode Akinbode

James & Kayode have done marketing for startups in the EMEA & US regions for years, and they use their learnings to create insights for Marketing In Action.

Marketing In Action is a weekly growth marketing newsletter with practical guides and templates in each issue. They cover topics like marketing channels and growth marketing processes for founders and marketers.

You should subscribe to Marketing In Action if you are a marketer or first-time founder looking to grow your startup.

7. Just Content Marketing

Author: Akachukwu Obilor

Just Content Marketing is a content marketing newsletter that brings a fresh perspective to various content marketing topics. Akachukwu’s goal is to help marketers “engage and convert customers with content.”

The newsletter doesn’t have a regular posting schedule, but whenever it goes out, it’s packed with actionable content marketing insights.

You should subscribe to Just Content Marketing if you’re a content marketer looking to improve your content strategy or to execute better.

8. In The Marketing Room

Author: Gift “Gigii” Chidinma

In the Marketing Room is part of Gigii’s Room, a three-part multi-faceted newsletter covering content marketing, entrepreneurship, and better living tips.

You can subscribe to all 3 or just In The Marketing Room, where Gigii shares content marketing insights, tips, lessons, and examples.

You should subscribe to In The Marketing Room if you’re a content marketer or hands-on founder.

Conclusion

There you have it—my top picks for marketing newsletters written by Nigerians. Each of these newsletters offers something unique and valuable, making them worthy additions to your inbox.

Don’t just take my word for it—subscribe to these newsletters (or read their previous issues) and see for yourself. And if you know of any other great marketing newsletters from Nigeria that I missed out, feel free to let me know. Happy reading!

Hi there.

Welcome to the 99 new subscribers who joined Marketing For Geeks since the last issue. Big thanks to everyone who shares MFG with their network.

Every month, I share 1 interesting thing, 3 actionable marketing insights that have helped me become a better product marketer, and 5 pieces of marketing that caught my eye.

Subscribe now

P.S. I’m trying to get to know MFG’s readers more. Could you answer a few questions in this short form if you haven’t yet? Also, if you’d like to join MFG’s WhatsApp community, please fill this form.

ICYMI: In my last issue, I wrote about how to use the 7 principles of persuasion to improve conversion, the 3 types of B2B personas you need to create, and how to use compounding strategies to create MoM growth.

Today, we have a Funnel Vision issue, where I do a deep dive into a specific campaign, project, or product by speaking with the marketing professional behind them.

In this issue, I look into Risevest’s growth marketing strategy with Olamide Adurota, Growth Lead at Rise.

Let's dive in!

How Risevest Manages Full-Funnel Growth Experiments

At the Builder’s Summit last weekend, a speaker asked how many people at the event used Risevest; and hands shot up across the room. In a country whose currency value is constantly crashing, Risevest allows Nigerians to protect against inflation with dollar-denominated investments.

Today, Risevest has over 600,000 users and has paid over $42M out to them. A big part of Risevest’s success is its growth experiments, which are managed by Olamide Adurota, their Growth Lead. I’ve been looking to feature Olamide in Marketing For Geeks since last year, and this was the perfect opportunity.

So, what does Risevest’s growth funnel look like and how do they manage success and failure?

Marketing vs Growth

Marketing can be a dizzying field and it can be tough to decide what buckets certain titles fit under. For Olamide, who has a dual reporting line to the Head of Marketing and Risevest’s CEO, the difference is clear. Marketing is broad and typically relies on efforts within the marketing team alone. But for growth, you have to work with whatever team is needed to achieve your specific goals at the time. Sometimes, that’s the marketing team; sometimes it’s the product team; sometimes it’s the engineering team or the sales team.

This means that Olamide has to work across multiple teams, depending on what solution he’s looking to implement or what problem he’s trying to solve. When he runs TOFU campaigns and needs ad content, he collaborates with the marketing team. When he needs a direct integration for a tool, he works with the engineering team. When he runs an in-app experiment, he and the product manager rub minds. 

Working with so many teams can be difficult, but it’s easier for Olamide because he’s multi-dimensional.

“When you're multidimensional–when you have knowledge of different areas like marketing, product, sales–you can interact seamlessly with different teams. I can also interact with the data team because I also have some foundational knowledge of data. I understand how I want the data infrastructure of the product to be, the tools we need to implement, how we need to pass the data from one to the other, and how data needs to be collected on the app. It’s the same for other teams. That knowledge makes it easier to interact.”

This doesn’t mean the road has been sunny all through. When he first started at Risevest, he had to immerse himself in their technical processes and principles. The Head of Engineering gave him insights into their existing data infrastructure, which he then used to set up the tools he needed and shaped how he made requests going forward.

Olamide doesn’t always directly work with developers. He and the product manager typically collaborate and the product manager then translates his requests to the developers. But sometimes, he joins engineering standups when they need extra context or have specific questions about his requests.

Experimentation at Risevest

Experiments are a big part of Risevest’s culture, and Olamide’s day-to-day involves making and testing hypotheses. Olamide keeps track of his many experiments in a Google Sheet.

One of the experiments Olamide is most proud of is the one he ran for Risevest’s referral program. He made one tweak to the referral landing page, and it resulted in a 10.5% increase in referral conversions, exceeding his initial goal of a 5% increase. The tweak? Customising the referral page with the first name of the referrer.

It’s not all roses though. Some experiments are amazing successes; but others turn out to be failures despite your best wishes.

For example, Olamide discovered a positive relationship between the adoption of Risevest’s auto-invest feature and an increase in Assets Under Management (AUM). So, he launched an experiment to test if an increase in adoption of the feature would lead to an increase in AUM. He created engagement messages to validate his hypothesis and it fell short of his goal. Now, he’s testing the hypothesis again, but with a different solution.

That’s just one of the many times that Olamide has had to pivot quickly from failure. It's the least enjoyable part about his job; that he has to be comfortable with failing.

Video Source: Risevest YouTube

Olamide also takes some comfort in collaborating with the marketing team during their weekly calls. During those calls, he's open about what failed or didn't fail: and the whole team brainstorms on what to do next.

These experiments have yielded great results for the company. By tweaking different ad variants, Olamide and his growth associate were able to reduce Risevest’s Cost Per Acquisition by 73% and achieve a10-20% MoM user growth.

Tracking Success

Data is one of the most important pillars of growth, so it’s only natural that Olamide has clear processes for tracking success with data.

For acquisition, he tracks sign-ups, installs, and Cost Per Acquisition (CPA). Risevest runs acquisition campaigns across multiple channels (Google, Twitter, Meta), so it’s very important that Olamide knows which channels or campaigns are scalable or that draw in the best users.

For activation, he tracks the activation rate and Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC). It’s important to track CPA separately from CAC, so you know just how much you spend to acquire active users. Risevest had already established their activation metric before Olamide joined in, but he agrees with them about what an active user is. As he explains, activation should be based on the action that gives users value and indicates product usage. For Risevest, that is when users fund their wallets for the first time.

It’s one thing to get a user to fund their wallet; it’s another for them to use it consistently and adopt it. That’s why Olamide monitors product adoption and usage. Certain key actions within a product help signify adoption. In Risevest’s case, those key actions include using the auto-invest feature and creating or funding an investment plan. Tracking these actions means that Olamide can better understand user behaviour and nudge users to get the most value from the product.

You can read more about product adoption in MFG #09:

But perhaps, some of the most important metrics are the revenue metrics. The most important of these is Assets Under Management (AUM) because Risevest is an investment company. He also monitors the Average Revenue Per User (ARPU) and the LTV to CAC ratio.

Lifetime Value (LTV) is a tough nut to crack, and there are many different ways of calculating it. Olamide graciously walked me through the formula Risevest uses, which calculates a projected lifetime value as a function of your churn rate and average revenue per user. Here’s the formula:

Finally, Olamide reviews the churn rate. At Risevest, there are two definitions of churn. The first is when a user hasn’t funded their wallet in 60 days. The second is when users withdraw all the money from the platform. This is because as an investment platform, active users are defined by those with Assets Under Management.

He and his team recently ran an RFM (Recency, Frequency, Monetary) analysis to rank customers and predict new user behaviour based on existing user behaviour. 

“We wanted to identify our best users and our worst users. For recency, we looked at users who had funded their wallets in the past 30 days. For frequency, we looked at users who had funded consistently for at least 6 months. For monetary value, we looked at users who had funded a certain minimum amount each month for those 6 months and had a minimum amount in AUM.

The combination of these conditions gives us a list of users we can consider our best users. The next step for us is to look at their data to understand more about them, like what channels they came from. The RMF analysis basically informed the rest of our strategy and experiments. For example, this gives us an idea of what acquisition channels to possibly prioritise that could yield more users like them.”

With so many metrics to track, I had to ask Olamide how exactly he keeps track of them. His major tool is Amplitude, which he uses for product analytics. Amplitude also has a Customer Data Platform (CDP) that lets him connect his data sources together. For example, he passes attribution data from AppsFlyer (a Mobile Measurement Partner) to Amplitude’s CDP, and then to Customer.io (a customer engagement tool). 

He was able to build this data infrastructure with the help of the data team and engineering team. To communicate his needs, he used an event tracking sheet following this template👇🏽

Event Tracking Sheet - Mixpanel

53.9KB ∙ XLSX file

Download

Download

In the sheet, he works backwards from the key metrics he needs to the key events and properties that inform them.

“I already know the different actions that users can take, the important actions I want to look at, and how I want to break down my data. For example, I know I want to view sign-ups by what channel they came from or by their age group. So I make sure to include the user source as a property in my tracking plan”

Having a data team has really helped Olamide do better and quicker work because he can just ask the data team to run queries and return a list of users that fit his criteria.

“It’s a net positive. Without data, you’re sitting in the dark. When I’m trying to make a decision and I need a benchmark, I need historical data to help prepare my mind. Same thing for experiments. If my tools don’t have the answer, I can just go to the data team.”

Funnel Management & User Engagement

Olamide is also responsible for making sure users move along the funnel.

There are two main ways Olamide approaches experiments for this; from a marketing angle or from a product angle. 

Marketing solutions include things like user engagement and communication nudging them to take the next key action. Olamide has created segments in customer.io depending on what stage users are in their journey.

Risevest has different journeys created in customer.io and they use omnichannel engagement. Not all users view emails; not all have push notifications on. So, Olamide pushes messaging across multiple channels. As the saying goes, “There is more than one entrance to the market.”

“We always try different channels because your users aren’t just on one channel. There are users who don’t check their emails, and so you can only reach them via push notification. There are those who don’t even read or allow push notification, so you can reach them via SMS. And all that just increases your chances of success.”

For the second approach—the product approach—Olamide collaborates with the product team. Marketing messages aren’t always the solution to drop-off funnels; in some cases, the drop-off is caused by a product problem.

“Your users could be dropping off because your product is quite complicated and they don’t know what to do next. There are different ways to find out what’s really causing your users to drop off. You can use external tools like Hotjar to view recordings of new users vs returning users. Returning users likely already know what to do on the app; they just do what they need to do and they get out. But for new users, you might notice them browsing around because it’s a new interface and they don’t yet know what to do next.”

Olamide believes onboarding is an important aspect of optimising the funnel, because new users often need guidance on what to do next.

Risevest also uses customer engagement to reactivate churned users. Apart from engaging them with marketing communications, the telesales team reaches out to churned users to understand what went wrong.

What Makes Fintech Marketing & Growth Different?

Olamide has worked across multiple industries, but Risevest is the first fintech product he’s grown. Naturally, I had to ask him if he thought fintech marketing was different from other industries he’d worked in.

There are 2 main differences for Olamide. The first is in the broadness of the market. With verticals like SaaS or Edutech, you have to sell to a specific niche and you can use inbound models like SEO & PLG to draw them out slowly. In fintech though, you have a more mainstream audience and a very large market. This means, Olamide says, that awareness is very important.

“It means you need to make a lot of noise and you need traditional marketing to increase awareness because you’re trying to sell to a broad market.

You need awareness, because that helps with acquisition. It’s easier to acquire users when they’ve already seen or heard about your product.”

Speaking of fintech marketing…

Treford is hosting a full-stack fintech masterclass that covers everything from product management to data tracking and design. You can pay for all 7 classes or choose the one that best suits you.

I’ve taken Treford’s product marketing and product strategy bootcamps in the past; they were excellent.

The good people at Treford have granted a 10% discount to MFG subscribers. There’s limited slots left, and registrations close by June 10.

Get 10% Off

Okay, back to it.

The second thing about fintech, according to Olamide, is that trust is an extremely important currency. Nigerians are distrustful people; especially when it comes to money. 

“There will be concerns about whether you can be trusted or not. You need to be upfront with regulations, endorsements, and certifications. You especially need to communicate with users often. It’s normal for people to be sensitive about their money and where they put it. At Risevest, when there’s a new CBN policy that makes users worried about their money, we send communications explaining the new policy and why it doesn’t affect their normal”

The strategy works. The company has received some public acclaim for being a trusted financial partner, and they’ve grown to become the top dollar investment app in Nigeria.

That’s it! A look into how Risevest handles growth experiments from the scientist who leads them.

📣Tweet about this.

You can see more of Olamide on Twitter or LinkedIn.

Join Olamide on Risevest.

What project, product, or campaign should I focus on next? Feel free to recommend a project you love by leaving a comment.

What I’m Reading

Using content to influence switching costs — I wrote about switching costs in MFG #11. This lovely issue from Akachukwu tackled the same topic, but focusing on how to use content marketing to influence switching costs. It’s a great read.

Stop optimizing for a CAC:LTV ratio of 1:3 — Why the 1:3 CAC to LTV ratio might not be the best benchmark for your business.

Why you (probably) shouldn't create a new category — A lesson in differentiation and positioning for competitive advantage.

Why data-driven product decisions are hard (sometimes impossible) — A dive into the difference between being data-driven vs data-informed vs data-ignorant, and why that matters.

Did you enjoy this issue? Give it a ❤️ and let me know in the comments section.

Even better, share this with someone.

Share

Hi there.

Welcome to the 103 new subscribers who joined Marketing For Geeks since the last issue. Big thanks to everyone who shares MFG with their network.

Every month, I share 1 interesting thing, 3 actionable marketing insights that have helped me do better product marketing, and 5 pieces of marketing that caught my eye.

ICYMI: In my last issue, I launched Funnel Vision and spoke with Daniel Orubo of Piggyvest about how he built Piggyvest’s content engine.

Funnel Vision will come once monthly, so you can expect the next one to drop in 2 weeks. P.S. I interviewed for the next Funnel Vision weeks ago, and it’s about growth experiments at Risevest😉. So, subscribe (if you haven’t) so you don’t miss it.

Subscribe now

In today’s issue, I discuss the 7 Principles of Persuasion, B2B persona types, compounding strategies, and more.

It’s a long one. Let's dive in!

🔑1 Interesting Thing

Today I’d like to discuss one of my top frameworks; Cialdini’s 7 Principles of Persuasion. Robert Cialdini created the principles 30 years ago, and they’re as relevant today as they were then. Because while times might change, people remain the same.

Let’s cut the long story and dive into the principles:

1. Reciprocity
   “Do as you would be done by.” “Treat others as you would like to be treated.” “Give something to get something”
   We’ve all heard different variations of the principle of reciprocity. It’s a universal truth. Give people something and they feel obligated to give you something in return.
   

2. Scarcity
   This is another common principle. When something seems scarce—whether it's a limited-time offer or exclusive access—it suddenly becomes more desirable. This principle taps into our FOMO and makes us value something even more because we know others can't easily have it.
   

3. Authority:
   We tend to listen to people who have authority. Whether it's job titles, certifications, degrees, or a company's reputation, these signs of authority can help reassure customers. There are two ways to leverage authority.

   1. Focus on your authority: Has your product been in existence for decades? Does your team consist of subject matter experts? Whatever authority you have, highlight it as clearly as possible.

   2. Leverage other people’s authority: Another approach is to get endorsements from the people or companies whose authority your audience respects. Just ensure the authority is relevant to the audience and product in question.
      

4. Commitment & Consistency:
   People don't want to be seen as unreliable so they try to stay consistent with their actions. This makes it hard for them to make big commitments sometimes. To use this principle, ask your audience to commit to small actions first. These low-stake commitments build up loyalty and add up to a bigger investment in your product.
   

5. Liking:
   Humans are more interested in people, things, or topics that they like. So, you need to make yourself, your brand, or your product likeable. Use personable content, language, or people that they can relate to. It’s why concepts like founder marketing, employee advocacy, and brand voice exist.
   

6. Social Proof:
   There’s hardly any marketer who hasn’t heard about the principle of social proof. People listen to other people’s opinions and they buy into what others are doing. So, with social proof, you show prospects that other people like or use your product.
   

7. Unity:
   This is the 7th principle, added by Cialdini in 2016. If your target customers feel included in what you do, they are more likely to participate. People like to belong to something (or to feel like they do). This is why brands leverage shared identities in marketing, like race, sex, and nationality. E.g. “Made in Nigeria For Nigerians” “Women-Centered” “Black-owned organization” etc.
   
   For Unity to work, you need to deeply understand who your ideal customer is, and who it isn’t. Otherwise, you risk excluding or offending your customers to appease non-customers. To help with this, you can create negative personas.
   

How To Use The Principles

This barely scratches the surface, so in future issues, I will write more deeply about each principle of persuasion.

TL;DR (Too Long, Didn’t Read): If you want to improve your conversion rate, try using Cialdini’s 7 principles of persuasion. P.S. You probably already know at least 2 of them.

📣Tweet this.

A Little Game

I use every single one of Cialdini’s principles in Marketing For Geeks. If you can mention 3 out of 7 of them, I’ll share 1 out of these 3 resources with you (you pick which):

1. My marketing plan template

2. My marketing channels checklist

3. My experimentation tracking template

If you can guess all 7? I’ll send all 3 resources your way.

How do you play?

Just make a post on LinkedIn or Twitter mentioning the principles you’ve caught me using in Marketing For Geeks and how I used them. Then tag me and Marketing For Geeks.

My LinkedIn | MFG’s LinkedIn | My Twitter | MFG’s Twitter

P.S. The prizes are only valid till I publish the next issue of MFG. Once I publish the next issue, you will only be able to access the free resources by referring new subscribers to Marketing For Geeks.

This is not a paid ad. This is a recommendation from me because I think this handbook is a must-read.

Binjo Adeniran spent months speaking to marketing & product leaders (from Peace Itimi to David Adeleke) at Nigeria’s top fintech companies and compiled it into a handbook. It’s an amazing read whether you work in fintech or not. Contains everything from community building, storytelling, performance marketing, sales, and user trust.

Get 20% off the book when you use the code LADEGROWTH.

Get 20% off

💭3 Insights

#1. Decision-makers aren’t the only B2B persona you need to consider.

When it comes to B2B products, decision-makers are very important personas, but they aren’t the only ones you need to consider. In most B2B cases, the people with decision-making power are not the ones experiencing the problem your product solves. They won’t be the ones using the product or setting it up.

That’s why when you create personas, you should include personas for the decision-makers, the champions, and the implementers.

The decision-maker is the person with the power to say yes or no to a new product. These are the senior executives who have the final say on what the company uses, e.g. the CMOs, CFOs, CEOs, Heads of Department, etc. They care about ROI— Is the investment into your product worth it?

On the other hand, the champion is the person who feels the problem deeply. They face the problem every day and will be excited by the idea of your product coming in to solve their problem. But they often don’t have any buying power; they need the approval of the decision-maker.

The implementer typically has absolutely no stake in the product. They don’t feel the problem and they don’t care about it. An example is an engineer who has to help set up Google Tag Manager or Customer.io for the marketing team. All the implementer cares about is how easy it is to set up and how much time it would take.

So what do you do?

You need to empower the champion with the resources they need to advocate your product. Give them the pricing pages, sales decks, and comparison pages that they need to convince the decision-makers to say yes. You can further incentivize champions by offering them rewards, for example, for bringing their company on board.

For the implementer, make sure you have clear documentation that makes their work (implementing the product) easy. Don’t bother selling to them.

TL;DR: When creating your B2B personas, include champions who’ll advocate your product because they feel the point; decision-makers who’ll pay for your product; and implementers who’ll integrate your product.

📣Tweet this.

#2. MoM growth is easier when you set up compounding growth strategies.

It can feel really great when you have huge spikes in growth, but if you can’t sustain that spike (or at least retain a portion of it), it might be difficult to achieve steady month-on-month growth. That’s where compounding strategies and growth loops come in.

This doesn’t mean abandoning one-off campaigns; it means setting up loops and funnels that help you ensure that campaigns lead to more sustainable growth. That way, your charts don’t go back to red after a sudden spike.

Here are some examples of compounding growth strategies to help you achieve MoM growth:

• Setting up retargeting campaigns after traffic spikes.

• Creating referral programs to increase your viral coefficient.

• Setting up loyalty programs to incentivize repeated actions.

• Creating evergreen content to bring consistent traffic.

TL;DR: By implementing compounding growth strategies like retargeting, referrals, loyalty programs, and evergreen content, you can ensure sustained growth even after initial spikes in traffic or engagement.

📣Tweet this.

#3. When competitors fail, it’s time to swoop in.

I’ve spoken a lot about the importance of monitoring competitors so you know how/when to steal customers from them. I even shared my competitor research template (which I updated recently by the way).

So you can probably already tell I’m big on competitor research and using insights from that research in marketing.

When Disha, a mini-website builder for creators, paused operations this year, I expected competitors like Fidia, Mainstack, and Selar to swoop in and steal confused customers. That didn’t happen, which is what prompted me to share this insight. I’m a Disha user myself and was surprised that Googling “Disha paused” “Disha shut down” “Disha alternatives” “what to do as Disha shuts down” didn’t bring any results from competitors.

Last year, when Google Optimize shut down, users didn’t have to go far to find alternatives. That’s because competitors swooped in with great communication targeting Google Optimize users (+ Google itself recommended 3 of those competitors as alternatives).

There’s no better time to steal customers from a competitor than when they fail, make a mistake, or are in the news negatively. Searches for their brand keywords will increase (from people trying to get more info about what’s happening) and users are more primed for alternatives (because of dissatisfaction).

That’s when you target relevant competitor keywords, create transition/migration plans, and ramp up your messaging, just like Optimizely, VWO, and ABTesty did when Google Optimize shut down.

TL;DR: When competitors fail, seize your opportunity. Be ready to swoop in with targeted messaging, transition plans, and comparison pages to capture dissatisfied customers searching for alternatives.

📣Tweet this.

⚡5 Pieces of Marketing

In the spirit of today’s interesting thing, I’m showing how different products leverage some principles of persuasion in their websites.

#1. Notion’s Home Page👍🏽

#2. Refactoring UI’s Landing Page👍🏽

#3. Harry’s Newsletter’s Pop-Up👍🏽

#4. Close’s Demo Booking Page👍🏽

#5. Basecamp’s Underdog Page👍🏽

#6. [BONUS] This Book’s Amazon Page👍🏽

This page uses all 7 Principles of Persuasion, just like MFG does. But I’ve left it blank. If you’re down for another little game, try spotting all 7.

What I’m Reading

The 30-60-90 Day PMM Cookbook — A guide on what product marketing is and what your first 90 days should be focused on as a newly hired product marketer. P.S. Marketing For Geeks is featured there as a top product marketing resource😊

From 0 to 10 million users in four years — How copy.ai got 40k users in 3 months and scaled to 10m in 4 years.

How / What vs. Do / Is 🤸‍♀️ — Forget the confusing title. This is an amazing article on the thinking that leads to the 2 types of people in teams (strategists vs doers).

How to Build an Interesting Portfolio that Gets You the Job — As someone who spent a lot of time reviewing portfolios in the last month, this addresses the top mistakes people make in their portfolios.

4 Types of Positioning for SaaS Products — Exactly as it says. 4 approaches to positioning for your SaaS product.

Did you enjoy this issue? Give it a ❤️ and let me know in the comments section.

Even better, share this with someone.

Share

Hi there.

Welcome to the 56 new subscribers who joined Marketing For Geeks since the last issue. Big thanks to everyone who shares MFG with their network.

Every month, I share 1 interesting thing, 3 actionable marketing insights that have helped me become a better product marketer, and 5 pieces of marketing that caught my eye.

P.S. I’m trying to get to know MFG’s readers more. Could you answer a few questions in this short form if you haven’t yet?

Also, if you’d like to join MFG’s WhatsApp community, please fill this form.

Subscribe now

ICYMI: In my last issue, I wrote about when NOT to use comparison pages, how to avoid causing decision paralysis, and how to use the P4 Quadrant in planning product/feature launches.

In today’s issue, I’m doing something a little interesting.

I’m starting a new series, called Funnel Vision, where I do a deep dive with a top marketing or product professional about specific campaigns, projects, or products they’ve worked on. You’ll get a behind-the-scenes look into what it took to launch some of the most successful campaigns and products in Africa.

In this first issue, I’m deep diving into Piggyvest’s content machine, which is led by Daniel Orubo.

Let's dive in!

How Piggyvest Built A Stellar Content Machine

Daniel Orubo has almost a decade of experience in content creation and strategy. Piggyvest is Africa’s largest consumer fintech. What do you get when you cross the two?

Easy. You get Piggyvest, the cool kid on the block, a fintech product that has gained some of the highest earned media of African startups in the last year; with a cult fan base that has gone as far as creating fan art from its content.

In this first issue of Funnel Vision, I deep dive into how Piggyvest earned virality & brand love from its content, with words directly from the horse’s (Daniel’s) mouth. Specifically, Daniel and I spoke about 2 of Piggyvest’s most successful content projects; The Grown Ups comic series, and the Piggyvest Savings Report.

So what went on behind the scenes to result in the amazing content Daniel and his team produced? Like with most stories, we’ll start from the beginning.

The Beginning

I rewrote this section many times because I couldn’t decide what this story's beginning was. At first, I thought it was about the origin of the projects – how Daniel came up with the ideas. But in reality, the beginning of Piggyvest’s content success starts with a strategy document that Daniel shared with the management team right when he was about to get hired in 2021. 

In the doc, Daniel explained why a content department was absolutely necessary for Piggyvest. That document laid the groundwork for all of Piggyvest’s content marketing success; from hiring superstar content creators to getting the freedom to run experiments like Grown Ups.

“I was building this department from scratch. I knew I was going to get in and start asking for things and I knew I'd need to start hiring. So I needed to be able to validate the [proposed] hires by tying them back to the promises I'd made. And the promise for me was to get more users, more brand visibility, more positive social capital, more readers, and more conversions. I think it's very important, as a content leader, to lay that kind of groundwork.”

As it turns out, content was an absolute necessity for Piggyvest, driving both traffic and conversions. But we’ll get to that.

Daniel also made a big bet on himself, by promising to get 50k visitors on Piggyvest’s blog within 3 months of getting hired.

The bet paid off. The blog passed 50k website visitors within just 1 month. That strengthened the foundation for the content team because it proved that content could deliver results. This wasn’t just talk– this was talk and do.

Setting Up For Success

The strategy document was just the building plan; next, Daniel had to begin laying blocks, starting with hiring a superstar team to help drive the results he envisioned.

And he managed to do just that.

“I think I have the best team on the planet. I know people say that all the time, but I genuinely think I do. I work with some of the smartest people I've ever met, and we all align. I'm really proud to have a team that I can trust wholeheartedly to execute because that’s the dream”

His hiring secret? He doesn’t look at CVs.

Daniel says he instead looks out for taste because you can’t teach taste. He asks questions about what kind of content applicants consume—you have to consume high-quality content obsessively to create high-quality content yourself.

Another strategy that helped him in those early days was hiring people who could do multiple things; people who had multiple talents and interests. His work as a content leader was then to give pointed feedback to help them tie their creative outputs to real business goals. 

“In the beginning, there’d be ideas that were very funny but just didn’t serve the company or fit into the conversation. So, I’d say ‘I think this is a great idea. I think this would work in any other context. But for what we’re trying to do, I don’t think it works’.

When you’re coming from the media space, where the main goal is getting people to consume, it can be easy to forget [when it comes to content marketing] that the goal is to get people to know your business and patronise it. You can get carried away by a great viral idea. Then you get 100,000 people to engage with the content, but not a single person converts because it doesn’t tie back to your business.

So, it’s just constantly reminding them that the real star of this show isn’t your great ideas; it’s Piggyvest and its users. And the more I did that, the more the ideas they brought forth were more pointed. And now, they just understand.”

Culture of Trust

It was the combination of Daniel’s initial success and the brilliance of the content marketing team that allowed Piggyvest’s leadership to grant the team so much leeway to experiment in ways that many other African startups wouldn’t. 

The proof was in the pudding, and what a tasty pudding Daniel had put on fire. It also helped that Piggyvest had a culture of trust in its employees; a culture that empowered and emboldened the team.

“The thing I love about Piggyvest is that they believe in themselves. Like, if they hired you, it’s because they trust that you know what you’re doing.

I remember the first meeting we had [about Grown Ups] was at Odun’s house, and we were throwing character ideas and she was giving feedback like ‘yeah, I like this, I like that’. It was just a lot of support.

And when you work at a place like that, it makes you more creative. It gives you courage to throw even your craziest ideas around.”

Piggyvest Savings Report & Data Storytelling

Research reports as content forms are hardly a new thing. Yet, social media lit up when Piggyvest released its 2023 Savings Report.

What was so special about this report? Why was it getting so much buzz? 

The Idea

According to Daniel, the report wasn’t intended to be used externally, at least not at the beginning. Daniel simply wanted to do some user research to satisfy his curiosity about how Nigerians (Piggyvest users) were navigating the economic situation in the country. 

But once he started working on the report, he knew it HAD to go out. Daniel believed that data was very important for making people feel seen and represented. And he was right. People did feel seen & represented.

The most impressive thing about the savings report was that it was built completely in-house. Daniel mentioned that he initially reached out to a research firm, but the amount they quoted was more than the entire marketing budget for the year. 

The Execution

One of the toughest parts of building research reports in-house is collecting the data and getting a representative sample size. Companies typically try to increase the number of respondents by adding an incentive, but the Piggyvest team decided against doing that because they had just launched anti-fraud communication and didn’t want to confuse users.

Sending out surveys without an incentive only made the work harder, so the team had to be intentional about building out the survey questions. There were so many questions to ask, but too many questions would turn off the user and cause drop-offs. So, instead, Daniel created some dynamism in the survey questions.

“One thing I got out of working at Zikoko and interviewing 500+ people is that I know how to ask questions. I know the kind of questions to ask to make people share, so that informed the questions we asked. And I was very picky about the questions not being too much so people didn’t get bored halfway. So we tried to make the questions as engaging as possible and we also did a lot of logic linking. So if you say no to a certain question, there are some questions you won’t see. We also gave people a lot of options and allowed them to type in an answer if they wanted. That was where the data cleaning got really hard, of course.”

Because this was a research project, the content and data teams had to collaborate. The data team helped select a randomised sample size and made sure the data collection & analysis followed the right processes. But the content team did the work of analysing the data and telling stories with it.

Deciding which stories were worth telling took a lot of meetings. The team had to decide what data stories were compelling enough.

“It was one of the most stressful things. It was me, Bolu (content marketing associate), and Kelvin (editor at the time). We’d sit on a call for hours day by day, breaking down the data and deciding what was interesting enough to be a part of the report. So there were some things we gleaned that didn’t make it to the final report. Even stats that we thought were very interesting. It was a process of getting data, deciding what was relevant, what was important, and what made for a compelling story when tied together. And that took us blocking out time and basically losing our minds on the call. But it was very worth it.”

The Output

Hours of work went into creating the report that we all saw. Multiple teams were involved. Daniel said he turned a little insane during that period because he wanted things to come out perfect. When he felt like he was being too nitpicky, his boss, Piggyvest’s CMO, reminded him that this was his project to own. That emboldened him to stick to his guns to get exactly the output he wanted. The report itself went through many design iterations because of this.

“I wanted it to be an experience people would remember; something I and my team would be proud of. The first design didn’t work for me at all and we went through about 5 design iterations.”

And now to the part that made the report even more special – the live page. The more the team worked on the report, the more they worried about whether people would read it. That was when Daniel had the idea to take some of the interesting insights and distill it into an interactive web page.

“We were scared that people wouldn’t want to read the full thing, and because of that, they would lose out on all the insights. That’s how we had the idea to make two versions of it. We wanted clarity; we didn’t want to create something that was just for finance bros. I wanted everybody to be able to engage with this and come away with something. That was the driving force for me.”

Of course, no one would spend so many resources on a project without tracking results and testing that everything worked.

“It’s like ‘okay, you’ve created something, but are we tracking the right things? Are we tracking conversions? Are we tracking how people are navigating the pages?’

We were also doing a lot of testing. I got all the people around me involved. I’d just send it to them like ‘test it on your phone, is the flow nice?’ I’d send to someone with an iPhone, someone using an Android, someone using a Big Mac PC, someone using a smaller laptop. I needed everybody to test it, to make sure that the experience was solid for every single person.”

It was all worth it. In the end, over 120,000 people visited the report page, with over 20,000 people downloading the PDF report.

Grown Ups

The popular Supa Strikas comic series was one of the first indicators of a comic culture in Nigeria for many of us. Supa Strikas is now largely obsolete, and for many people, so is the comic culture in Nigeria. But Daniel noticed a rising trend in readership of Webtoons in Nigeria and theorised that the comic-reading culture in Nigeria was still alive, especially among younger Nigerians.

And so Grown Ups was born. For the uninitiated, Grown Ups is a comic series launched by Piggyvest in 2023. It follows the financial mistakes & successes of a friend group of 4 young Nigerians. The comic series has now been read by over 500,000 people.

Grown Ups was a project that required a lot of creative energy with inputs from multiple people. In fact, on average, Grown Up issues have 5 people working on them.

Daniel says the team held a weekly brainstorming session to develop story ideas. These sessions involved a lot of back-and-forth, with many ideas being cut. But Daniel doesn’t have veto power in these sessions; it’s a democracy and the majority takes the win.

“I’m not the kind of leader who needs to be right all the time. Sometimes I say ‘I don’t agree with this’ but I’ll put it up to a vote. I ask ‘Do you guys think it works?’ If everybody else says yes, I’m like ‘Go for it, I guess I’m the one in the wrong here.”

If you’ve managed creative people before, you probably know how easy it is to go down a rabbit hole of ideas and then struggle to find your way back up. Daniel solved for this during the brainstorms by having a designated script editor/supervisor, whose job it was to keep the story together and flowing.

“We had someone who typically writes for the blog, but for Grown Ups, she was the script editor. Her job is to say ‘Does this thing match what we said in season one? Is this timeline correct?’’ Sometimes, we throw ideas around and suddenly we’ve moved to a different planet. So Tobe [script editor] is always there to ground us and make sure we’re not flying off the handle in terms of continuity. That’s one of the things we did to make sure we were consistent, because ideas are always flowing and it’s very easy to get sidetracked.”

The Grown Ups characters resonated with many people and part of the reason is that the characters were well-defined. Daniel says this is something the team did intentionally.

“We didn’t want to force certain outcomes. We just wanted to define our characters really clearly, then throw them in different situations. Then we allow them to navigate it in a way that feels true to the characters. So we never had set agendas for how these characters behave and that’s what makes it fun. We’re just like ‘okay, if this character who is so obsessed with money gets put in this kind of situation, what would happen? And we just go from there”

Content Repurposing & Distribution

Both Grown Ups and the Savings Report were such viral projects that I had to ask Daniel about his approach to distribution, especially since Piggyvest largely leads with organic rather than paid marketing. Daniel says one thing that the team does (apart from optimising for search) is to make their content inherently shareable and then nudge people to share every chance they get. Daniel specifically referenced an insight from a previous MFG issue, about how people don’t always remember to share good content. So sometimes, the team adds in an incentive to share.

“One of the things that we did for Grown Ups that really helped was offering people the chance to win merch if they share. That shot up the number of shares we were getting and increased the number of people that visited.

And for the Savings Report, we made it inherently shareable. For stats that we thought were interesting, we allowed people share directly. And on the day of release, Piggyvest was trending because of that little share button. We try to constantly give prompts to share.”

Another strategy that helped the team, especially for Grown Ups, was the community they built around projects. Daniel says that community is important in any work that you do, because those are the people who would advocate for you. He recommends actively nurturing and rewarding community members (like Piggyvest did with its Grown Ups event).

“There’s a community of people that subscribe to the Grown Ups newsletter and they get it before everyone else. They’d always respond to emails saying how they loved issues and how they were sharing it. And so, we decided to create [an event]; something that brings these people together so they can talk to us, the creators, and we can listen to them. That event was such an eye-opener, hearing people talk about the project.

There was a fan who said she forced 2 of her friends to download Piggyvest because of the project. She said that a company that could create something like this that is so honest about money is exactly the place you should want to keep your money. And I was wowed. That sells Piggyvest better than anything I could have said.”

In general, Daniel believes that content is an investment and you should try to get as much mileage as you can from it. This means he thinks about how to cut costs to increase ROI, but it also means he’s always thinking about how to repurpose projects to reach even more people. This includes digital efforts (like quizzes, short-form articles, videos, and emails) and physical ones (like the Grown Ups event and the Finance Roundtable held after the report).

“We’re constantly thinking about the ways we can engage that still feel true to what the business does. We do quizzes, so if we want to do a quiz about Grown Ups, it doesn’t feel out of place. Piggyvest likes hosting events [and so we held events]. We always try to think about what we can do that tie into what the brand already does so we can engage people and keep the momentum lasting a bit longer.”

Balancing Storytelling & Conversion

Stories are great, but they don’t always lead to results. Yet the Grown Ups comic series led to over 40,000 downloads of Piggyvest. I couldn’t end the interview with Daniel without asking how he manages to balance compelling stories with real results; conversion metrics like sign ups, as opposed to more vanity metrics like views.

The first thing Daniel disillusioned me of is the belief in binary comparisons of conversion metrics and vanity metrics. He explained how the path to conversion isn’t always a direct line; sometimes people need more content before they convert.

“You don’t have to use every single opportunity as a time to sell. Sometimes, you can just introduce something else. It’s not every time you ask a visitor to download the app; sometimes just tell them to join your newsletter. Allow them to go on a journey; you can’t expect them to convert immediately after engaging with you once.

It’s about being able to know when to use a different prompt. For us now, that’s getting people to join our newsletter. We then push at least two ads on the newsletter. And these things have been converting. That’s the power of content. You can take people on a prolonged journey.”

Daniel explains that it's important to make these expectations clear to management as well, so they don’t expect magic within a few weeks.

That being said, Daniel says that content can lead directly to conversion when you utilise product-led content. It’s a philosophy that Daniel strongly believes in and has trained his team on. With product-led content, content teams can use emotional stories to sell products; by showing people the direct impact of the product on people’s lives.

“Product-led content is about making your products such an integral part of the story you’re trying to tell and that’s what really makes it convert. It’s about finding the right positions and opportunities to put these things in.

For example, we started this new series called PiggyFirst, which follows people who have used Piggyvest to do something monumental for the first time. We put our first story out and it has done really well; the conversion from that story has been higher than most other content. And that’s because it’s very direct about how Piggyvest fit into this person’s life and fundamentally changed it. So that’s how storytelling can convert.

I think content marketers need to embrace the product a lot more and show how [the product] can actually help people by telling those stories. That’s how you do something compelling that also meets business goals.”

And that’s it. That’s the playbook behind “the Daniel Orubo effect” and how exactly Piggyvest’s content team manages to churn out such high-quality viral content.

📣Tweet about this.

You can see more of Daniel on LinkedIn, Twitter, or his personal website.

P.S. If you’d like to read the full transcript or listen to the recording of my conversation with Daniel, you can check that out here:

What project, product, or campaign should I focus on next? Feel free to recommend a project you love (could be one you worked on even) by leaving a comment.

What I’m Reading

The Growth Vault by Demand Curve — Definitely stealing this tactic soon for Marketing For Geeks. Love it.

Your ultimate guide to affiliate referrals for B2B SaaS

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