FULL TRANSCRIPT: 📈How Piggyvest Achieved Over 40k App Downloads From Content
Daniel Orubo, Head of Content at Piggyvest, shares how his team built the Grown Ups comic series and the Piggyvest Savings Report
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ICYMI: This is the first issue in my new series, Funnel Vision, where I deep dive into a successful product, project, or campaign through interviews with the product marketers who worked on them. In the first issue, I explore how Piggyvest built its content marketing machine, with insights from Daniel Orubo, Piggyvest’s Head of Content.
This is a transcript of that conversation. You can get a summarised version with key insights here:
So let me start with this. How did you come up with the idea for the Savings Report?
The savings report was actually borne out of a desire to understand our users more deeply. The initial plan was to conduct detailed user research. Piggyvest is very clear on what we do, which is savings and investments. But with the economic situation in Nigeria, things just felt worse and I was really curious about how people were navigating. I know Nigerians pride themselves in being resilient, but things were bad and I couldn’t imagine how the average Nigerian was going through it. I wanted to capture that.
But as I started working on the survey questions, I decided that the insights needed to go out, whether they validated our assumptions or not. I think data is very powerful for making people feel seen and represented.
I wanted to use whatever insights we got to better our product and better the content we create. And I realised I could turn it into a solid report and put it out to the world.
The initial plan wasn’t for us to do it ourselves, because we were juggling a lot and working on Grown Ups at the time. We reached out to a company to see if they could help us do it, but the bill they gave us was more than our entire marketing budget for the year. So I decided we had to do it ourselves in-house. The only thing I asked my bosses for was money for a Typeform subscription. I’m glad we decided to do it ourselves. Otherwise, I wouldn’t have come away with that experience. Doing that project fundamentally altered my brain and ideas just kept coming.
One of my favourite things about execution is that the initial idea keeps evolving. The initial idea was just a cool downloadable report. But as we worked on it, I began wondering how many people would want to read a long report. That was when I had the idea of having it sit on a web page. We decided to take the most interesting insights and distil them into an easy-to-digest web page that’s interactive. That way, even if you don’t want to download the full report, you can still interact with the web page and come away with the necessary information.
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 from it. Incidentally, both the web page and downloadable PDF served each other. A lot of people downloaded the full thing; I’m still shocked by the number of downloads and shares.
At the end of the day, we wanted clarity. I didn’t want to create something for finance bros alone; I wanted everyone to be able to engage with this. So we optimised for clarity and simplicity. That was the driving force for the project.
What were some of the difficulties that came from handling all the research yourself and getting a good sample size?
In the beginning, I pitched incetivising the survey to my boss; even if it were just 500 naira credit. But it was during that period where scammers were impersonating Piggyvest and we’d put out communication about how we would never ask users for anything in return for anything. I didn’t want to confuse users, so we just tried to reach out to many people to get the number of responses we wanted. We got the data team to send over a randomised sample of our users, and I shared the survey in different types of groups. We wanted to get a really diverse band of people. We set a goal for the number of people we needed to fill the survey, and once we crossed the number, we were good to go.
We had to collaborate with our in-house data team to help us ensure we were following the correct processes and analyzing the data properly. The process of doing that analysis was very stressful. I, our editor at the time and our content marketing process, would just sit on a call for hours breaking down the data.
How did you manage data storytelling, especially deciding what to use or not use?
For me, it’s similar to how I manage all kinds of storytelling. I start with what narrative I am trying to create. We had to decide what was interesting enough to tell a full story. So, there were things that we gleaned that we didn’t use in the final report.
For example, one of the things you might have noticed in the report is the breakdowns on things like generation. But we actually had other stats, like data on married people and people who had children. But the question was, does this feed into the narrative in a meaningful way? If it didn’t, we cut it out. There were some stats that we thought were really interesting, but they stuck out because they didn’t have meaning in every context. I had to trust my gut and my team’s gut a lot.
We also thought about the pacing. I’ve worked in media for so long, so I’m always thinking about whether a story is compelling from front to back. I want readers to go on a credible journey.
What was it like managing multiple teams and making sure your asks were translated accurately?
I actually turned into a bit of an insane person during that period. I was very nitpicky because this project was my baby and I wanted a lot of things in a certain way. I started feeling bad at some point, because it felt like I was asking too much. But my CMO reminded me that this was my project and I should ask for what I needed.
Once I got that clearance, I got bolder. I decided that even if we needed to make changes 5 times, that’s what we were going to do.
I really wanted the project to stand out and I wanted to create an experience that people would remember. I wanted us to create something that we could be proud of.
It was a lot of back-and-forth, especially with the design. I think we had about 5 design iterations before we landed on what we have now. We had similar back-and-forth on the live page. I wanted it to be interactive and we had a lot of discussions about how we wanted the graphs to turn out or the numbers to be represented.
We also had to make sure we were tracking the right actions. We wanted to track things like conversions and how people were navigating the page.
Another thing I ensured we did was testing. I got people to test on different devices to ensure we weren’t creating a user experience that only worked for one type of user.
In all, it was a stressful experience, but it ended up being very worth it.
How did you make sure you designed a great survey?
One thing we did was to give people lots of options in the survey. We also allowed respondents to type in an answer if the options didn’t cover their answers. Of course, that meant we had to do a lot of data cleaning.
After we designed the survey, I shared it with a few people to get their perspective about whether they thought the options were enough or whether the questions were representative.
Before Piggyvest, I led content at Zikoko, where I interviewed over 500 people, so one thing I know is how to ask questions. I know the kind of questions to ask to make people share and the kind of questions to avoid boring people. We tried to make the survey as engaging as possible.
The final thing we did that made a difference was logic linking in the surveys. So, if you say no to certain questions, there’d be some questions you wouldn’t see. That way, questions were based on your responses.
I saw that Piggyvest held a Finance Roundtable to discuss the report. Did you plan that far ahead or was it an opportunity you realised afterwards?
No, it wasn’t planned. I knew I wanted us to do something offline, but I wasn’t sure what that would look like.The Roundtable was actually the CMO’s idea. He loved the report and thought we could still do more with it I’m glad I have a boss as forward-thinking as he is.
I was initially worried that the event was coming too late, but he said the data was still relevant. And he was right. I wasn’t in the country when the event happened, but the people who attended had nothing but nice things to say about it.
This is the 3rd time you’ve mentioned leadership being supportive of your work. Has that always been the case?
The thing I love about working at Piggyvest is that the management believe in themselves. They believe that if they hired you and you’ve gotten to this point, then they can trust that you know what you’re doing.
Another thing that helps is the way I present ideas. I don’t just say I want to do something; I talk about how it would serve the business. When you go with that kind of approach, you’re more likely to get a yes. In fact, the only time I’ve gotten a no wasn’t because they didn’t believe in the idea; it was because they thought I was juggling too much.
I can’t imagine any other company that would have allowed us to do the comic series. But it helped that we could tie it into something with the business and our audience. We believed that it would attract a younger audience. Plus, we’d noticed, from previous content, that Nigerians like stories of people falling down and picking themselves back up. That was actually what inspired Grown Ups. The characters were built around our user personas.
The management team was supportive from the jump. The first meeting we had about it was actually at Odun’s (Pigyyvest’s COO) house. We were throwing character ideas around and she was giving feedback and showing a lot of support. Odun has actually read every Grown Ups script; she leaves comments and she gives feedback. When you work in a place like that, it makes you more creative. It gives you the courage to throw your craziest ideas around. When you have bosses like that, it makes it hard not to be excited about work.
Grown Ups was a project that had a lot of creative energy. What was it like managing the creative team?
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.
We had a weekly meeting where we talked about what direction we wanted to go in. We didn’t want to force certain outcomes; we just wanted to define our characters clearly and then throw them into different situations. That’s what made it fun; we allowed the characters to navigate situations based on our definition of them.
Those meetings went on for hours and we’d argue about whether a character would behave a certain way in a specific situation. I’m not the kind of leader who needs to be right all the time. So, there’d be times when I wouldn’t agree with something, but I’d put it up to a vote. If everyone else says yes, it’s a go.
I could trust my team because they all have good taste, which is something I look out for when hiring. I don’t look at CVs when hiring; instead, I use a questionnaire. I ask questions about content they’ve written before and content they like to consume. That lets me gauge whether the person has taste. You have to consume great content to get that kind of taste.
All that comes out in the work they do. My team is always passionate about making sure the story is strong and engaging with a good narrative flow without being preachy.
How do you make sure that the content flows and stays true to the story, especially after all the cutting and joining you do during those meetings?
We actually had someone specifically for that; a script editor whose job was to make sure the things we produced matched the character background we’d set. Her job is to say “Does this thing match what we said in season one? Is this timeline correct?”
It was important because sometimes ideas would be thrown around and we’d suddenly moved to a different planet. The script editor was there to ground us and make sure we weren’t flying off the handle in terms of continuity. We needed that to make sure we stayed consistent. With ideas flowing, it’s easy to get sidetracked, especially when you’ve come up with an idea that’s exciting. Tobe [script editor] was there to pull us back.
You did a lot of repurposing for both projects. What’s your approach to repurposing content?
Once you create any kind of content, you have to try to get as much mileage as you can from it. Creating content is an investment and you want to get as much return on your investment as you can.
For Grown Ups, we were really passionate about building a community beyond people who casually read the content. So, there’s a community of people who subscribe to the Grown Ups newsletter and they get it before everybody else. They always respond about how they love our content and are sharing it. So, we decided that we wanted to create something for them. Community is so important in any kind of work you’re doing because those are the people that will advocate for you.
We decided to host an event to bring those people together so they could talk to us and we could listen to them. That event was an eye-opener. I knew what we wanted to achieve, but it was different hearing people talk about it. I mean, there was a fan who said she forced two of her friends to download Piggyvest because of Grown Ups. She argued that a company that could create something so honest about money was the kind of place to keep money in. I was wowed, because that sells our market more than anything.
We’re always thinking about ways to engage that still feel true to what the business does. We do quizzes so doing a quiz about Grown Ups isn’t out of place. Piggyvest likes hosting events, so hosting events wasn’t out of place. We always try to think about what things tie into what the brand already does and that doesn’t feel out of place. The goal is to engage people and keep the momentum lasting a bit longer.
How do you approach distribution for Piggyvest’s content?
One of the things we did for Grown Ups that helped and got more people to share was offering people a chance to win merch. We promised that readers who shared on social media would stand a chance of winning Grown Ups merch, and that just shot up the number of shares we were getting—which in turn increased the number of people who visited.
For the Savings Report, what we did was to make it inherently shareable. For stats that we thought were interesting, we allowed readers to share the stats directly. Piggyvest trended on the day of the release because of that; because of those little share buttons.
There’s something you’ve mentioned in Marketing For Geeks before, about how somebody can love something you put out and they just forget to share. That’s why we’re constantly giving share prompts.
How do you manage to get stories & content to convert?
I think emotion & storytelling are very powerful tools. It is essential to use them to capture your user’s journey and how your product or service has changed people’s lives. It prompts users to take action at the right points.
That’s why I love product-led content. I don’t like it when I see an article and they throw a random hyperlink somewhere like “check us out.” That’s not enough reason. You need to make your product such an integral part of the story you’re trying to tell. That’s what makes it convert.
In the beginning of my career, I used to be worried about mentioning the product so much. But at the end of the day, it’s about finding the right positions to put these things in.
For example, we just launched a new series called PiggyFirst, which follows people who use Piggyvest to do something monumental for the first time. The first one was someone who bought his wife a car. We just followed his journey about how he used to save with his brother before but that wasn’t working out. But then he discovered Piggyvest and hit one of his big goals of buying his wife a car.
We put that content out and it’s done really well. The clicks from that story have been higher than most other content because it’s very direct about this person’s life and how Piggyvest fundamentally changed it.
That is how storytelling can work; by being very direct about how your product is going to help. Content marketers need to embrace the product a lot more and tell stories about how it helps people. When you do that, you can create a compelling story that also meets business goals.
Another thing is that you don’t have to use every opportunity as a time to sell. Sometimes, you can ask them to join your newsletter, rather than downloading the app. You can’t expect them to convert after engaging with you once. For Piggyvest, getting people to join our newsletter is very powerful because we push at least 2 ads on a specific feature or product in each issue.
So, it’s about allowing them to go through that journey rather than forcing them to convert immediately. That’s the power of content. You can take people on a prolonged journey and they don’t need to convert immediately.
When you first joined Piggyvest, you presented a strategy document to the leadership. What was in that doc?
At the point I created that doc, it was already clear I was going to get hired. But I knew I’d be building this entire department from scratch, which meant I’d eventually ask for things like hiring & budget. I wanted to validate those asks from the start by tying them to a promise. The promise for me was to get more users, more brand visibility, positive social capital, and conversions.
When people see the content we put out and enjoy it, they’re not going to say the writer or animator is really funny; they’d say Piggyvest is funny. That’s the power of content. The credit goes back to the brand. That was what I wrote in my doc. I spoke about how we were going to create a brand tone to solidify what already existed (Piggyvest had created some clever content before then via push notifications). So I wanted to build on that through content.
One of the reasons why there’s a lot of trust in the content team now is that I quickly fulilled one of the promises in the doc. I promised to get 50,000 people to visit the blog within the first 3 months. We crossed that within the first month. That immediately normalised the trust.
I think it’s really important, as a content leader, to lay that kind of groundwork. It also teaches the leadership to be patient with things that don’t kick in immediately, like SEO. I already specified in the doc that this was an investment where it would take a few months to start seeing results. It helps me make sure that expectations are clear. I’m an over-communicator in that way.
You built Piggyvest’s content team from scratch. How did you get them to embody the brand voice and vision that you had set?
In the beginning, we’d brainstorm topic ideas and I’d have to draw them back and say “this is a great idea, but how does this tie back to this?” I asked that question repeatedly and the more I asked, the fewer ideas I had to send back for not tying back.
Before, there’d be very funny ideas, but they 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, because it doesn’t serve the company or fit into the conversation we’re trying to have.” I never just say no. I explain why I don’t think it works or why it could potentially be a problem.
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. It becomes easy to forget and 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.
Are there any other projects you’ve worked on that you’re particularly proud of?
I’m proud of our newsletter, Money Matters. When we had the idea, I handed it over to Bolu, our content marketing associate. And he’s done such a great job. Now all I do for the project is to edit it, but he handles everything and that gives me so much pleasure.
I’m really proud to have a team that I can trust wholeheartedly to execute; that’s the dream. The face that the open rate, click rates, and general engagement have stayed so strong has made me really proud to have a team that’s so powerful and brilliant.
I’m also really proud of the numbers that some of the animated videos have done. Our first video to cross a million views on Instagram was an animated video made by Israel, our animator. Since then, we’ve made 3 other videos that have gotten 1M+ views and so many followers who have engaged in meaningful ways and converted.
It’s really exciting when you can see the clear impact your work has.
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