This is our first, should we say episode? Well this is our first episode of Behind the Scenes. As you very well know by now, Blurpe is committed to the marketing industry especially placing African talents across various sectors. Essentially we are marketers; for marketers. In our aim to do this, we will be bringing you the best marketing professionals, we know you know them and you have probably watched an interview or two. This is different. Behind the scenes will make you see the marketing industry from their lens, make you feel like you know them and how their marketing genius minds operate. This is going to be your favourite marketing dish served hot with a cold drink to go.
P.S: This is not your regular “all-too-serious” toned content. Yes we’re all about marketing but over here at behind the scenes, we want you to relax while learning a thing or two about your favourite marketers.
PPS: Here’s something else that’s more straight to the point and one you’ll learn a lot from 👇🏼
How to use social media marketing to drive product growth
The first person that sat on our seat was Feranmi Ajetomobi, a.k.a Black Jaguar. First thought during the interview was “He’s quite warm and friendly”. We’ll leave you to see whether or not you agree. Let’s meet Feranmi.
We did our research on you Feranmi and apart from the fact that you are a growth lead for fintechs, we’re interested in Ni-fries. What is “Ni” short for?
It’s actually Ni (say Nai), short for Nigerian, so Nigerian fries. We started off making fried yam, sweet potato and akara. The idea was, how do we serve local fries in such a way that anybody, anywhere can eat them, not just anyone on the street and that’s how Ni-fries started.
Cool… Cool
Thank you very much
Your twitter handle says “Black Jaguar”, quite interesting. Let’s get into that. Why “Black Jaguar” and who is Feranmi behind the scenes?
(Laughs) Okay, so I’ve always found myself in situations where I always need to adapt myself to a couple of things. Starting with black jaguar, the jaguar is a very adaptable animal, anywhere. That’s why.
I wanted to go for Black Panther but I didn’t want it to seem like it was because of the craze for the movie and everything. So that’s why I got the name Black Jaguar.
Behind the scenes?
Behind the scenes, I am a sleepaholic, I like to sleep a lot and dance.
Ouuu Dance..
(laughs out loud) I can’t dance, I always end up jumping. I go out in the water and I jump and I just see myself dancing.
Lol. Okay
Yeah, but in all of that, at the end of the day, I am an advisor to a number of startups. Many that I can’t mention, some I can mention and I focus on helping startups make money from their customers. So growth, most people think of growth as acquisition, but I am always focused on retention. “How do we retain your customers?”, “How do we get your customers to transact?”. That’s my focus.
Great stuff. So you said “some I can mention”. Can you mention those?
Oh yeah, I’ve done some work with PayDay, Pillow, Cowrywise, Flutterwave, Engage messaging. At one time, I delved into FMCG… with integrated diaries. Integrated dairies are makers of FarmFresh yogurt. I was the head of digital demand, helping to drive demand from digital channels for them.
Did you enjoy that?
It was a great experience actually because that was my second and longest experience with FMCG.
Tell us about how you got into marketing
Okay so I got into marketing at the start of 2011, and it wasn’t that I wanted to do marketing. I liked to write. When I was in primary school I enjoyed the idea of writing so I’d write on social media. I used to run a personal blog then and I enjoyed that.
At some point I realized that it was possible to use content to actually drive marketing for brands.
So you were once into content marketing?
Yeah. So most times what people don’t understand is that you have to have a core. My core is content. Some people’s core is paid marketing, while for others its email marketing. My core is content marketing and up till today I still do a lot of content marketing.
Since your core is content marketing, don’t be critical of this when it comes out o
No, I’m not critical of anybody actually, I believe everybody does things according to their tastes. I’m not critical, I promise you.
To get to where you are right now, you must have paid your dues. So I mean, tell us about that. What was the journey like as a newbie in marketing right up to this moment? Twitter, sorry, Elon Musk said we should call it X. X has been crazy about internships and getting paid, and whatnot.
It started with content. I started to work with an agency. It was pretty rough, the money was not a lot. Also I was never an intern. I don’t know, I just have never been an intern. Everywhere I have been, I have always been part of the founding team or a core member of the team
Agba 🙌🏼…. Boss moves. (we said this inwardly and in the most professional way)
I’ve never had the grace of being an intern anywhere to learn, under anybody or anything like that. It was always building from the get-go. So yeah, I started off at an agency called Infusion, then. It was a very small agency, two friends. They brought me in to work on content. I used to do a lot of live tweeting for events and from there I was able to grasp a lot around managing twitter pages, managing social media campaigns. One day I was on my friend’s whatsapp status and I saw that they were at Cowrywise office trying to get the student ambassadorship. So I just decided to google Cowrywise, a very young company then, I checked their twitter and they had like 1k followers.
Hmmm… Go on
At that point I was organizing an event in school. That was my second course, I was supposed to have graduated but that’s another story for another day. I was organizing an event in school and I needed sponsors, so I reached out to Cowrywise and told them I had a plan to help them get more students. I told them I would share the template with them and if they liked the template they could go on and use it without me but if they wanted me to work with them on the template I was available.
That was pretty daring. How did that go?
It was a cold pitch to Cowrywise then and I think that impressed them that I was willing to give them a free template so they brought me on board. That was about six years ago. I had a call with the co-founder Rasaq, very long and interesting. We spoke for over an hour and after that he invited me to have lunch with him and that kicked off everything for me.
We watched your interview with Wale Adetona and somehow knew the story about Cowrywise would come up and we were curious to know the nitty-gritty details of how you reached out to them.
You watched it?
(At this point, the interviewee became the interviewer)
Vera from Blurpe: Yes we did. We slept on your page and did deep research
Feranmi: (Laughs so heartily, you’ll think Black Jaguar was blushing) Thank you
You have led a lot of market entry campaigns for reputable brands. Walk us through the process of bringing those campaigns to life.
For market entries, I look at it like you’re trying to propose to someone. One thing about proposals is that sometimes people have been heartbroken before, so there’s no trust, they don’t trust you. To be with you, there’s a cost of leaving whoever they’re currently with as a provider. With this in mind, my first process is to touch grass, literally. I speak with customers, talk to them, and understand their pain points. There’s a value table I always stick to and that is where you have the current option that your potential customers use, the solution being offered and based on that I build an action statement.
When a value proposition has been made, I use that to build my case. I go back and speak to the customers to cross check whether or not the value proposition makes sense, if it really connects with them and if it is something they really want.
After that I start to pinpoint influencers within the target audience that we are trying to target. These influencers will be the first point of contact to try out the product. That way there is trust because they are seeing influencers, not a regular type of influencer but people who are opinion leaders… By the way I don’t really believe in everyday influencers, even though I use them sometimes, I believe more in opinion leaders to drive adoption of a product.
Once these opinion leaders try out the product, they put out word about the product and then I follow up with a lot of content.
Yeah, we remember you saying Content is your core so that makes sense
Yes. I put out content like “How can I use this product?” basically informative content and one that helps answer a lot of questions. Speaking about questions, that’s an approach I learnt from someone called Fu’ad Lawal, he used to be at Zikoko. He had an interesting approach to building products. Fu’ad’s approach is that he builds an FAQ page for the product before the product even goes live. That FAQ page answers questions that customers would want to ask about the product after speaking to them. This way you can view backwards because the key questions to the products have already been answered. That helps you build your product and also helps with messaging when you are taking the product to the market.
So these are the ideation processes I currently use for my market entry campaigns
It pretty much screams “Customer Centric!”
Of course, 100%. Seth Godin said something about marketing. Marketing isn’t really necessarily about your product, it’s about showing people how exactly you’re going to make them better and how you can take them closer to their goal. That’s how marketing should be.
Let’s get candid, you have quite a radical view of marketing being a subset of growth and quite a number of people don’t agree
Yeah, they don’t know what they’re saying… I’m sorry
👀We are interested in your take. Can you shed light on that?
So people take it wrongly when I say that marketing is a subset of growth and I’m going to explain it properly now. The essence of marketing is the distribution of a product to drive the adoption of that product. If you are distributing a product through sales, content, emails, socials, influencers, everything at the end of the day should drive adoption. Growth is focused on the increase of that adoption. A channel for driving the increase of that adoption is Marketing.
Another channel for driving adoption could be Finance. The finance team can say “we are going to give a 10% discount after we look at our models to ensure that more people can adopt our product”.
Another channel of growth could be design, so redesigning A – B part of a product or app, to see if more people would complete transactions. All those actions that drive adoption are all subfunctions of growth. There’s the finance part of growth, there’s the HR part of growth, that’s why in some companies, the growth effort sits with the COO, that’s the Chief Operations Officer, because hiring people is when growth starts. If you hire the wrong person on your team, your product will not grow. That’s why I always say that marketing is a subset of growth.
In summary, all marketing activities are growth activities but not all growth activities are marketing activities.
Break in Transmission: We interrupt this interview to let you know that this is your cue to hire the right marketing talents with Blurpe. Growth starts with hiring the right people, don’t sabotage your company’s growth. Get in touch with us at Hello@blurpe.co
What has been the most challenging part of your journey as a growth lead?
Making the money!
Most times it’s easy to just collect money for XYZ. As a growth lead, you’re no longer focused on vanity metrics. You’re now showing things like “I spent ₦10,000 and I brought the company ₦250,000. It took me a while to be able to link with the money so I just focused on “we’ve done this, we’ve done that, we’re everywhere”. Getting to that stage of ideation and ensuring that every activity is accounted for in terms of revenue, it was hard but I’m happy I’m there now.
Along with being a growth lead for multiple companies and also playing an advisory role to many others, you run Ni-fries. How do you balance that?
I have two co-founders, one is in charge of operations, another is in charge of the tech side of the business which we are trying to develop and I just focus on marketing and partnerships.
What’s one thing people don’t know about you?
Well, I don’t like burgers
That’s ironic and surprising. Have you tried?
Yeah I have, I’ve tried to eat them but I’m not a fan of burgers.
What’s one thing that irks you about the tech space in Nigeria?
Oh too much talk. Everyone just talks and talks and talks. We just need to keep building. There’s a lot of talk everywhere.
What’s next for you, Feranmi?
(Ruminates for a bit) In 10 years, I hope I have the ability to travel around the world and cook.
Very insightful interview, I gained more than I bargained for.