Tag: Behind The Scenes

Welcome to Behind The Scenes where we interview your marketing faves. You’ll find out everything you want to know about them here, you’ll learn what they do when they’re not marketing and most of all how those genius minds work when it comes to dishing out brilliant campaigns and strategies that will leave you speechless. On this episode of BTS, we interviewed Edidiong M. Ekong, popularly referred to as Chief E! (As seen on his Twitter profile). A marketing beast who has championed logistics, Music, E-commerce, Fintech and other “-techs”. If you ask us, taking Boomplay’s 9 Million users to over 60 Million is no child’s play but hey that’s Edidiong. This B2B marketer gave us the “more than meets the eye” feel because he definitely isn’t how you might have perceived him to be. Want to know more about Chief E? Saddle up and let's see what happens behind the scenes P.S: This is not your regular “all-too-serious” toned content. Yes, we’re all about marketing but over here, 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 Storytelling For Startups: How To tell Your Startup’s Story Hi Edidiong Hi Vera. Welcome to your BTS with Blurpe Thank you. Thank you Edidiong, on your Twitter Bio your name reads “Edidiong M. Ekong”. What’s the M for? Oh it’s Moses. Moses. Nice. So who is Edidiong? Not just the marketer, who are you? I think I’m a fun person, I guess that’s the most important thing. I live a very simple life, most times always indoors. I spend most of my time reading, studying, researching but I can also be very fun if I decide to be outdoors. So it’s more like a party hard and work hard kind of situation. Sounds like there’s more. Share with us please. (He laughs) Well, I love street photography, I've done it a few times when I'm free. I love traveling; been to about 10 countries. I still have a list of three more to go before the end of the year. Oh and I love playing video games, FIFA. I used to play football but I stopped at some point. I love teaching so I do it a few times. I guess that’s about it You sound fun I know, right? Thank you You mentioned you play FIFA and you used to play football. What’s your favourite team? Favourite team… Hmm. So when I play online, I like to use the smaller teams. I don’t use any big teams so I go for Wolves or Everton. The very small, unassuming teams. Now to the main thing, I grew up being a Manchester United fan, I’m a supporter till today. Even in their bad days, I’m still with them. So yeah that’s my favourite team. Would have said Manchester city but that wouldn’t make sense cause we’re rivals. Definitely not. I’ll say though, when it comes to sports, I’m not a fanatic. I like the sport and just because I like a particular team doesn't mean i wouldn't watch other games or be angry at the other guys winning. The same goes for music. I’ve got a special love for Wizkid but at the end of the day, I'm down for good music really. See? Told you you were fun. Let’s talk about your bachelors degree. It was in Mathematics but here you are in marketing. How did that happen? Yeah, really great story. So firstly, I never wanted to be a mathematician or someone working in marketing, right? I’ve always wanted to be an engineer. I mean, if you had asked me in secondary school what I wanted to be, I’d have said a civil engineer or a chemical engineer. There were a lot of things that affected my decision, the environment I grew up in as well as what was the “in-thing” at that time. I took my exams the first time, had really good scores but didn’t get admission and so somehow, my parents were like “you’re very good at mathematics, why not try it out?”. In my head, I was like “Why would I study mathematics, you know?” but I said okay. I was very good at math in secondary school, the best in fact. So I went for it. Well, Well, Well… (He laughs) At the time I gained admission, there was a wave of tech, a lot of things were happening. After secondary school, while I was waiting for admission, I got a PC (personal computer) and I was already doing stuff. Stuffs like what? Graphic design. I was self taught and I was very good at it. I entered my year one knowing how to do graphics design. Then there was this passion. I wanted to understand why people took certain actions in terms of, say clicking an ad or deciding to buy something. That curiosity led me deeper into design because maybe it was colours, maybe if they saw good design it’ll make them click on an ad or buy that stuff. Again, out of curiosity, I pushed further into digital marketing. All of these were self taught really. You certainly had the drive. You could say that. I didn’t go through any major certification, it was just me and google. Then one of my friends who was a software developer had this startup called ShareCube, he was doing a lot of stuff with Google and Mozilla. I got in and was around a lot of business-oriented people and that helped me. In my second year, I started my own marketing agency with a friend, Marketer Digital. We got an office space from the money we made and started doing business. We wrote briefs, spoke to SMEs, big companies, governments and then we started getting those briefs approved, running big campaigns. You guys were doing good! Yeah. Yeah 😂 I think in like 6 months to a year, we moved to a bigger space. Had about 8 employees. It was more like making a bigger impact and more money. More money, yes please 🌚 Yes o. But past that, after school I got a job with Boomplay. Just to give context though, I was already doing stuff for Boomplay but now it moved into something more full-time as Marketing Manager for their Nigerian arm and basically growing the company and expanding. So yeah that about sums up how I got into marketing. You have very versatile skill sets. Over 50 mentioned on Linkedin and yes, we counted.. Lol. A lot of those skills for instance, coding seems far off from marketing. At what point did you decide it was marketing? The thing is a lot of people ask “why marketing” especially because I studied mathematics, right? Well, Marketing because it’s actually much like Mathematics. Being able to acquire users, retain them. There’s a lot of mathematics going on there and so if you don’t have that calculative and analytical mindset, you might quite frankly not be able to succeed or be very great at being a marketer. So with Mathematics, there’s a lot of formulas, concepts and stuff that you’re not practically using right? And then there’s Marketing that I had a grip on so the turning point was when I realized that these two formed the perfect recipe for success. And that has been a really great part of what has been helping most of the companies I've worked with succeed. Before all the big stuff, you started a design company in 2013 focused on advertising, marketing, and comms. What was that like and is it still running? Is it still running? Hmmm I can't fully answer that because I left the company so I really don’t know how it’s going right now. But yes, I did start the company, I ran it with my co-founder at the time and it was a really great experience for someone who was still in the university right? I really don’t put it out that I was a founder but I was, and running a company in 2013 with staff and paying 30k as salary… Hmmm Yeah, I mean it wasn’t like the best money but that was something. In 2013, 30k was good money. Again, good experience, in running a business and then secondly, managing people and ensuring that the clients that we served were happy with our services. Honestly, that is what set the tone for consulting because I currently do a lot of that. You mentioned that you left the company. Was it messy? To be very sincere, it wasn’t bad bad. It was more like there are some ventures where in order to go into it, you have to let go of other stuff. That was the case, I had to exit so I could focus on what I was pursuing. Hopefully in the future, I might decide to replicate or just do something entirely different. Guess it all worked out It did. It did. We’re all happy. Let’s talk about Boomplay. The numbers are crazy! On one end it's that you took users from 8 million to over 45 million and then on another end it's 8 million to over 60 million. Which is it? It depends on what is being reported. I mean, I don’t work there anymore so that’s just a disclaimer. What matters is active users. So it’s safe to say you brought in over 60 Million active users? It’ll be good to say users. At that time, it was a good number of users that came onboard the platform in Nigeria. Awesome stuff and that’s wild numbers. What strategy went into getting those numbers? On one hand we had a pre-installation strategy which is because Boomplay was an inside app for Tecno, Infinix. So most times, it came pre-installed but that didn’t mean that users were forced to use it. However it was a bit of a help, there was more work when it came to activating them to use the platform right? One of them was content. Content was really key. Content for us was the playlists or the kind of songs that were available on the platform. We did a lot of influencer marketing and I guess about that time was when it wasn’t as popular. The likes of Davido and Wizkid would come on and go “Hey I’m Davido / Wizkid, my new album is available on this platform so go stream it”. So that was us doing influencer campaigns using already existing assets to increase awareness and get a lot of new users to come in. Apart from that? We did a lot of events, campus tours around the country because we understood where our audience was, it was with students. And here, it now boils down to data, understanding how your customers behave so you can see where most of your users are. What region, what kinds of music they listen to and other really important information. And so it made sense to start thinking about these programs, to do a lot more so we could build trust and build an underground followership. We did a lot of campus activations, concerts, sponsored lots of artists events, and just basically built that buzz around the product. All of these and I’m pretty sure there’s more… Lol, definitely. We did gamification as well and I guess that’s something you can still find on the app where if you listen to music, you get points whi9ch can be converted into subscription. Those were part of key strategies we implemented. Also at some point, during my late days when I was about transiting, we did BBNaija. We created commercials with about 30 - 40 artists with them endorsing the brand. They basically said “This is what music means to me and you can find my music on Boomplay, go download it”. So honestly it was a lot put together but one thing we understood was who our key target audience or users were and we ensured we built our marketing initiatives around that. Let them tell people about us. We promise, we’re mind blown. 😂Before I forget, Data was pretty much very important. A lot of partnerships as well, like I said, you know, sponsoring of events, think about most of the industry events at that time. That was also the time when AudioMark and I think Spotify or Apple Music started moving as well, you know, so it was like a great world of competition, right? How did you manage to stay differentiated in the mind of people? Content was a part of it. We had to do lots of new releases and use that as mediums. Most importantly, when these artists make promotional videos, they also have to post those videos on their platform. There are a lot of things we had to do because we wanted people to see the premium version of the app so we could build up based on their first trial. Also the one where we had to try to increase subscription and so a lot of things had to go in for events that we sponsored, for instance, if you had a boom for subscription then you attend for free etc. In all, it was a really great time working with the whole team, ensuring that there was success. Yemi Alade sang this line in one of her songs, “Soup wey sweet na money dey cook am”, you guys must have had a very gigantic budget… 😂The budget was very good to be sincere so we had a lot of flexibility to do anything we wanted to do as long as we could bring in really great results. It was a great time at Boomplay. Fair enough. So you write a lot on your medium page. Is that to build your online presence and influence or have you worked in the content field before? I mean, for someone who studied mathematics, you would imagine that I shouldn't be the best writer, but I try, you know? I guess it's because sometimes I just have things in my head and I just want to pen them down, just for thought leadership. Plus, for someone who does marketing, I guess one very good skill set would be knowing how to write. Not everyone knows how to. I’d say I love writing as well, not one-liners and I've always been looking to contribute to popular newspapers but I didn't have the opportunity so I just put it on my own blog so people could learn one or two things from it. You sound pretty passionate about it… Yeah If you lead a marketing team and content is part of your strategy, trust me you need to learn to love how to write not because you're going to be the one writing every time but because sometimes if you don't like writing, you won't be meticulous enough to read voluminous stuff and make corrections or even know when something is wrong and how it can be done better. Would it be right to say that you’re very big on marketing comms then? I wouldn't say “very big”. I just, I feel like I'm more around product education. Those are sort of two different things. I guess it's actually very important to ensure that your audience understands what your product really does, right? And how your products can really help them so I'm really big on converting their education. Anything on marketing comms? Because you’ve written specifically about communicating right 🌚 Around marketing comms I would say be strategic about it and know when exactly you have to do it. I actually worked somewhere where marketing comms was a big thing because it somehow helped with backlinking. Not to mention that it also builds trust. If you look at marketing comms from the angle of messaging and positioning there is really no correct way to do it, no one size fits all. What matters is understanding who your audience is, understanding their pain points, what makes them happy and being able to differentiate yourself. Once you're able to differentiate yourself in their minds, then you're able to put out the right message, the right communication that keeps them going or keeps you in their mind over time. Hmmm… There are a lot of brands that have done really Marketing communications, whether it is paid or it is earned. Lots of them. Just understand your products. What category are you in? And then test. Just keep testing. You might realize “Oh, PR works for me really well” or “Oh, social media works” and even on social media, it might be TikTok that works for your business or LinkedIn. Just test. Test… Test…Test Yes oh. Even with messages, you can also test your messaging to see which one appeals more to people. You can start with your landing pages, you know, or maybe when you're running ads, you realize that people are a lot more keen with a particular message, right, than another right? Double down on it. So again, there's really no rule on how it should go. So how do you craft the right message? I guess for me, I'm always more looking at your products, what you're trying to build, looking at the category in which you exist and what your customer really wants. How does the product solve their problem? That’s what you use to craft your messages! The kind that appeals to them. Another important thing is meeting them at the right channels where they really exist. You’ve dropped a full Goldmine! Lol. Thank you. Thank you. So you have been Head of Marketing at both Klasha and Alerzo. Same title; Different companies. What was the experience and differences at both companies? Klasha is B2B2C and mostly fintech with a bit of e-commerce. Alerzo is B2B in the informal retail sector, more e-commerce. One thing though was that Alerzo was an early stage startup when I joined, I mean we were less than 5 at the time. So imagine me leaving a big company like Boomplay with hundreds of staff to a very small set up of five and trying to build the product, it was a bit of a challenge but with time it got better and we grew. That was the difference. And Alerzo? With Alerzo, a company with over a thousand staff and I was leading marketing. It had a large professional base. I was dealing with a lot of informal retailers who weren’t so digitally savvy so there was a bit of a gap, a digital gap. I needed to meet them at their level. All those big, big English wasn’t going to work so we had to come down and communicate in their language, the language they could understand. And this played out in our process of building the product, we simplified the product. Plus it informed our marketing as well, using local languages. People who couldn’t understand or speak English, we could not market to them using English, right? We went about using Igbo, Yoruba, Pidgin, personalizing it based on the location they existed and the language they said they preferred. That reflected on the app as well because users could switch between languages: Igbo, Pidgin, whatever they preferred. Very Customer Tailored… Right? But fundamental as well, was using Data because that gave us a clear understanding of how they behaved, their buying behaviour or their purchase behaviour. We used different models to analyze likelihood to buy, send recommendations, and build recommendation systems. There were times when we realized that we could incentivise them with promos or discounts and then that made them buy a lot more or we could do time-bound offers. So it was because we used data, we used information that somehow they passed to us. So both companies, B2B2C for Klasha, B2B for Alezzo, but in terms of product stage, size, product direction, it was a bit different. I enjoyed my time at both of them to be very sincere. All of them were learning curves. What is the dumbest thing you’ve heard about Marketing? I don’t want to switch short on that. I mean, someone popular said there is no difference between growth marketing and I think product or brand marketing or rather traditional marketing, and that there's no need to hire two different persons for that. You that was like, not so great, but it's I know you, I know you might know what I'm talking about, but it's fine. 😂 😂(We laughed) Lol, I guess that didn't really make sense because depending on the company size, right? and what they're doing, those are distinct roles. Someone who does brand marketing is mostly different from someone who does product marketing. Someone who does growth marketing is mostly different from someone who does brand marketing. Those are, as much as people say, you know, you keep dividing, those are distinct roles in big organizations that know what they're right? So what’s the disparity? Okay so, the principles are the same but for someone who comes from traditional marketing, it becomes a bit hard. I’ll give a very simple example. Most FMCGs do brand marketing. They shoot commercials and do distribution and media buying. Now, what relationship does an agency (if they worked with an agency) have with understanding how well Heineken's number is doing at the end of the year? They'll say, “Oh, the number did well”. For those guys, they’re big on distribution, right? What matters to them is distribution. So if you decide to do an Ad and distribute it across the whole of Nigeria, yes, there's an effect, but you cannot measure that effect. I don't think that translates entirely if you work with a digital or tech company, where they have very little budgets, and then you have to bring out results with a limited budget. Okay? You need to justify what you spend versus what you're getting back. Now there are a lot of discussions around bringing analytics into FMCGs to measure impact but there's still a gray area around being able to justify traditional media and how it affects the bottom line. And so most times when people come from the traditional side and bump into digital, they still have a bit of reservations. I mean, that's why you hear someone say, you know, why do you need growth marketing? You get? So yeah. But it's fine, I guess with time, it might get better. That was a lot but it was backed up with illustration Lol, yeah. I'm also not in favour of companies who don't have the ability at any stage to have those different roles and statements piling up all roles on one person. If you can find someone who can do at least two then that's fine. At the point where you get bigger and then you have the ability to hire for specialized roles, then yes. Because think about it: One person will run Ads, One person will create strategy, One person will drive retention, One person will still do product education. Just one person. It gets really hard, Shots fired. Yes because for someone who does product marketing, some people think it’s just a variety of content. There's a lot more. You need to also collaborate with the product team, the engineering team when they're building the products. Just a lot of things go into that level of work. Imagine one person doing all of that stuff. These are the issues you have in marketing and most companies, especially in Nigeria. I guess with time it's going to get better. Hello reader, at this point what you are reading is an Ad. Yes, an ad. You heard Edidiong talk about hiring to suit your startup’s stage and for specialized growth. Point blank: Your hires have a direct effect on your company’s growth. So two things for you: Here’s an article on how to hire a high-performing marketing team in 2024 (you can start now) Hire effective marketing talents with Blurpe with a guarantee for supervision 6 months after hiring. Reach out to us at Hello@blurpe.co. Ad over. Carry on 👍 Your account on Elon’s territory has takes on marketing taking a larger percentage. The other that you tweet about is pretty much serious stuff. So we're tempted to ask, is it because you've dabbled into B2B marketing, because we've heard that it can be serious over there? Is that why your Twitter is serious? 😂No, No, No, No. I’m pretty fun o but I guess my fun part is when people meet me face to face. The truth is I really don’t have energy for arguments or discussing controversial issues and sometimes there’s really even no correct answer. You get? (At this point let’s just say we answered “You get?” and “right?” over and over but hey it’s Edidiong!) I try to avoid people with bias. I’m not one to go “This one is better than this person” or all that stuff. Drop good music, I listen. Let everybody have peace. 😂Okay, Okay. Serious stuff now. You’ve overseen two B2B companies with incredible results to show for it. What’s the secret? I want to say God but I’ll say God and hardwork 😂 It’s a lot of work to be sincere. B2B is not so easy but it is possible to hack it if you do the right thing. There is also no one correct thing, right? Some people will say “This is what I did, this and this and this” but it might not work right? I’ll say understanding the basic principles around B2B marketing and understanding the kind of product you’re working on and then you carry out a lot of research to understand your customers and their pain points, what makes a difference to them and why they should choose you above the other person or product. Then you start to think, where do these my customers exist? How can I reach them with my message, that message of differentiation in terms of feature or experience. So you’re thinking, are you able to give them a better experience because everyone can have the same feature but experience is what really matters. I guess as long as you are able to reach them where they really exist then it becomes easy, very easy. In a nutshell, understand the products, understand your customers, have a very clear and unique message, and know where these your customers are. That's your success. Once you have that, you should be able to deal with anything. You spoke about experience over features. Talk a bit more on that please. Sure. So people now buy experiences, they don't just buy products with features, right? People don't just buy services. They buy experiences. And so If your product is not good enough, if it doesn't have an extraordinary experience, they will not remember you for good. It's as simple as you creating memorable and positive experiences, so they can remember you. What happens in essence is they would come back and that means Customer loyalty, Repeated purchase, Increased purchase, not just repeated. So how do you tie a positive experience to a seemingly random product? So the thing about experience is that people think about it from the five senses or at least from one of the senses. So you’ll think that an experience is one, if it makes you happy but happiness can be connected to sight, thirst, touch etc. I’ll give you an example of how you can connect this to software. Your onboarding is an experience, the design on your website, your content, I signed up and it takes forever to send an email of verification. I would have fallen off the journey and that’s a bad experience. But if you make that one customer feel very special, right? Tag that with great customer support. That’s memorability right there and you have pushed word of mouth marketing which literally brings down your cost of acquisition, right? Basically camping ground on all customer touchpoints? Exactly. Exactly because experience is linked with customer satisfaction and service quality. Have you ever taken a job that felt like a rope around your neck? Maybe not a rope around my neck exactly, more like what you expected is not what you’re getting. There are few but I wouldn’t want to mention brand names. Fair enough. But it really honestly happens around the tech ecosystem. I know people who have suffered from it. Bad work culture, high expectations with little to zero resources made available So direct “shoot your shot” question. What is your earning range? (At this point, he shouted) Ah! I cannot say it oh! 😂 In case my helper is there, so they won’t say, I don't want to help this boy again abeg 🤲 You’ve worked as a growth and marketing advisor in companies that have raised $2.4 million, $3 million, $6 million and $10.5 million respectively. With the recent exposition of founders mishandling investors funds, we’re tempted to ask, has that ever been a problem you've had to deal with at companies you've worked at? My work is to acquire customers and help people oh. My job is not to manage the money 😂 But yeah seriously, my work is to give advice on how to use the money, right? I mean, it’s basically to say “This is our plan for the next six months, This is what we need to do because we want to get here, This is how much of a budget we think we need that can get us there” and the budget gets allocated. That's all the money that I would most likely know that's allocated to marketing and then we use the money to achieve the goals. There are other parts of the business that require money. So yeah, my own work is to do your work. I don't know what happens with other monies of a company. But yeah, I know it's been a thing lately, you know, it's happening everywhere. Lol. Okayyy. Same state with Hilda Baci, can you cook to save a life? So I don't buy food outside, I cook. I’m not someone who cooks every single time but 95% of the time, I eat food at home, I cook. Akwa-Ibom living up to the reputation 🙌 I think majorly because I grew up in an environment where the boys were taught how to cook. We did home chores too and we rarely ever buy food outside. In fact, if you tell my mum you want to take her out for dinner, she'll ask you how much you're going to spend and say “Give me the money” 😂 So we need to make it a surprise, boom they’re there and they can say no or refuse 😂 You've been told that you can make anything happen and all you need to do is write what you want to happen on a cardboard and hold that cardboard up for 10 seconds. What are you going to write on your cardboard? “Make everyone live again” Including Adolf Hitler?🌚 I mean, I'm not God at that point to judge whether he was a good person or bad person, right? My own is, let everybody live again, then God can now decide. Fair enough. This is the longest interview I’ve had. Glad we broke your record. Yeahhh. I mean really great stuff Blurpe is doing to be very sincere. Not everyone would have the energy to, but I’m happy you guys do. In a space where If you think around startups, everyone thinks around finance or payments or e-commerce, you know, not a lot of people focus on education, which is something you guys do really well. And not just education, being able to connect people with young, junior, middle, senior level talents with roles that fit their career, it’s a great deal. A really great job and I'm hopeful you know, it gets better, um, in the coming days for everyone at Blurpe. This is the perfect way to end the interview. Power-packed! It was awesome chatting with you. You too Vera. Thanks for having me, I enjoyed the interview. If you have someone you’d like us to interview at Behind the scenes, just type in their name in this form and we’ll put your fave marketer on the Blurpe seat. Interview my fave marketer Share this story

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BTS With Edidiong: The B2B Playbook Of A Marketing Genius

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