Ask Binjo Live Recap
A while ago, I went live on Instagram to answer questions concerning growth, marketing and communications for startups.
Here‘s a recap of the session, enjoy!
- We would like to know how you combined work and school together. How do you have 8 years experience when you left school 2 years ago
This is a 2-in-1 question. After I finished A levels in 2012, I took a gap year and pretty much spent most of the time exploring non-school options. One of the places I used to hang out was Co-Creation Hub, Yaba. It was near my house so I would go there to use the internet, attend events, hackathons, meetups, just generally meet people working in the space I wanted to work. At the time, I was also writing and editing for a technology blog that I founded with my friends called Technesstivity.
One day, a group of people who had read my writing and followed me on social media asked me to help manage social media pages for their startup. The job was fully remote and they only required me to check-in via a phone call every few weeks.
In 2013, I got into university and continued to work for this startup, I began to work for more startups — my first employers and their friends would introduce me to startup founders who needed my skillset. So I created a company called UP NEPA! Social and offered digital marketing services throughout my 4-year stay in university.
Now, to the next question on balancing school and work. University schedules are pretty much fixed(except when there’s a big issue), so I knew when classes would be held, when to prepare for exams and tests and when to submit assignments. I was basically aggressive with my time management and organised my life to fit into a flexible schedule — including time for fun, study and work. I also practised batch working, where you take a task you have to complete multiple times and run through it until you’re done. I took appropriate breaks off social media when I needed to — basically I did what was important. It’s good to note that because I had done A levels and took a gap year, I was about 3–4 years behind my peers so I took university as the opportunity to catch-up career-wise.
2. I feel there’s a time when you know you’re over learning and you need to take action or at least ramp up experience. I started my digital marketing career in August of last year. Before that, I’d done sales and journalism in bits. Now, here’s my question: how can I get my hands-on projects? I know it’s by doing, yeah? but I want practical answers and I feel there are people who this question will help too.
One year, I decided to learn SEO. I wasn’t working for anyone who needed SEO at the time. So I built a content-driven website and learnt how to drive traffic to the site via SEO. It was a good process for me, learning to drive this website from 0–100,000 monthly visits.
It’s important to think about the skill you’re trying to learn and figure out how to learn it practically. A lot of people learn how to use Instagram by curating content. They create accounts and they curate content around a particular topic or niche.
Think about the skill you’re trying to become better at and grow an audience with it.
3. Hey Binjo, what advice would you give to an upcoming digital marketing strategist who would like to have a fair knowledge of all the core aspects of DM? Any courses, classes or communities?
Marketing online or offline or on any platform requires an understanding of core marketing concepts. It’s important to first grasp these concepts. Here’s a list of books I recommend for anyone who’s looking to learn these concepts.
Platform skills are great but we’ve learnt time and time again that platforms come and go, marketing still needs to be done. It’s important to learn how to sell things to people — ideas, communities, courses, apps, etc.
Here are some courses, you can take:
- Udacity Digital Marketing Nanodegree
- Facebook Blueprint
- Google Digital Garage
- Moz‘s Beginner Guide to SEO
- Hubspot Content Marketing course
- Marketing Courses on Coursera
4. What’s the best way to go about getting the Lifetime Value of customers of an early-stage startup? Are predictions advisable? Especially given that the company is still in the early stage and might not, at that point, have reliable data on how long a customer sticks with them on average. And how much they spend throughout the course.
LTV is the Lifetime Value. This number seeks to define the monetary value of a customer in the long-term. I like how Wikipedia explains it. The formulas for LTV are also on that page.
For early-stage startups, I would recommend optimising for growth rate and retention rate, as opposed to optimising for LTV. Growth and retention rates are the two most important metrics for early-stage startups.
5. Brand journalism vs content marketing. In the Nigerian context, please explain. The pros, cons and which should be used when and for what type of products?
Brand journalism is an aspect of PR and Comms — Basically, how do I get my target customers who consume media to know about my product?
Content marketing — How do I create content that’s solving my customer’s problems and also generating interest in my product?
In my experience, both should go hand-in-hand. You want to make sure your target audience knows about your product and you also want to educate and generate interest via your own content. In Africa, many of the technology products being built are targeting non-consumption — people who have never used this service before. PR can help with visibility and gather trust while content marketing helps to educate hundreds of thousands of people who have never used a product or service like yours before.
PR helps you build trust when media outlets or personalities people follow online are talking about your product. Content marketing can take advantage of search intent via blog posts or answer questions users are asking on social media.
4. How do you generate content for a sales funnel?
Content for your sales funnel should depend on what part of the marketing funnel your customer target is in. This image helps to visualise different aspects of the funnel.
If your customer doesn't know about the product, you want to create awareness. This can be anything from landing pages or blog posts that capture their intent to ebooks, videos and podcast that teach them how to do their job better and more efficiently. While I led the marketing efforts at Devcenter, we published an ebook to help founders, CTOs and technology hiring managers identify, hire and manage software engineering talent. We used this gated content and used it as a lead generation tool. We also made sure we were present at technology events this category of people attended.
On the other hand, If your customer is already an expert or well experienced in the field, you want to tell why you’re the best service or product in that product category. You can do this by comparison pages and talking about the unique features your product has. Here’s a page from a company called Snappa that claims it’s better than Canva.
5. I just started marketing consultation and I need help with a breakdown of the consultation process. Just a few pointers to get me started.
The first thing I do is to find what the gaps are in a company’s marketing strategy — I ask myself: what are the marketing activities they’re not doing at all & what are the marketing activities they’re doing but not optimising for performance.
The second thing after identifying the problem is to quantify it — how much value will this bring the company and what numbers can I improve? Last year, I worked on an SEO project. Before taking the project on, I researched and found that the company was missing about 100,000 visits monthly because its content and website were not optimised for search.
The third thing is to find a decision-maker in the organisation who can make the decisions for marketing spend. If you don’t know the person personally, talk to people you know who work in the organisation or mutual contacts. You can also reach out on Linkedin.
The fourth thing is to place a price on the value you’re bringing. This can be a bit difficult to do but it’s important to understand the business you’re pitching to — how they make a profit, how many people will use the product and how sticky the product is with their users. Sometimes your efforts are better placed in another organisation because it makes a good profit and your solution will provide long-term results.
The final thing is your experience level — how confident are you that you can drive these results? It also helps to talk to friends and colleagues to find out how much they charge when they work as freelancers or as consultants.
6. How much time should be dedicated to SEO for early-stage startups?
It depends on the product and the search intent for that product and for content in the niche/industry it operates in. This is why keyword research is very important. If search is one of the primary points of the user journey and the volume is high, you definitely want to dedicate a team to SEO. An example would be in travel bookings for flights and hotels. For other industries, search might not be valuable enough. The principle is to create content where your customers are.
7. What strategies have you used in the past to tackle retention for products you’ve worked with?
Retention is an experience-driven problem. Users that dip from products are simply not satisfied. This means the customer experience needs to be improved — the solution could be design, engineering or customer success-driven and it requires some research(talking to customers and using the product) to find out what’s going wrong.
Another thing could be a miscommunication in user acquisition(ads, landing pages, social media, etc) so people are signing up with the wrong intentions.
8. In your years working in growth, what’re the biggest mistakes people have made? And what do you recommend?
I’m going to make a list of them here
I. Not pushing harder and communicate for growth initiatives that would improve growth dramatically — developing landing pages, optimising pages and analytic integrations.
ii. Putting too much effort into marketing channels that didn’t make a significant impact on the business’ bottom-line.
iii. Working in industries where the profit was too little and the competition for customers was too high to keep the business afloat. In this scenario, the business model was the problem and there’s not much growth teams can do because the competition will copy and outspend.
iv. Deprioritising growth efforts — this happens where the product team or company leadership deprioritises feedback and ideas coming from its growth and marketing team. Instead, more and more features are built into a product that’s been designed to be difficult to grow more users.
v. Programmer bias — Technology companies are more often than not, led by programmers(or technical leaders), it does create a situation where software engineering team members are treated much better or given priority attention, while the rest of the company suffers.
Thank you for reading through this recap. You can find the full video of the live stream here
I’m always willing to help and open to answering any questions. If you’ve got one, please send to binjoadeniran[at]Gmail[dot]com.
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