Dear Ms. Ovwighose, please introduce yourself to our readers:
Hello, my name is Mary Ovwighose. I am a Growth Marketer, I work with startups to develop growth strategies and experiments to achieve sustainable growth. I have a bachelor’s degree in Marketing, majoring in digital and growth marketing. I also have a degree in Digital Analytics. I currently worked in Founders Factory Africa (FFA).
Before joining FFA, I worked as a growth and marketing lead helping to create growth and marketing experiments that achieve 10x acquisition and retention growth.
I have a passion for helping African startups achieve unicorn status and training young marketers to do the same.
How would you best define the role of social media nowadays? Do people have the right concept of who they really are in this online/offline world?
A lot of companies have got it wrong with social media marketing. We have run with a perception of we need to be on social media so that we can sell. While that is true in itself, I dare to say it’s not the total truth.
Companies have entered with the perception of sell, so they start selling from day 1. Social media is much more than a channel for selling but building a tribe.
Companies should go beyond selling and focus on building tribe and brand advocates from social media by interacting and listening to their potential and current customers and creating valuable content/products that will meet their needs.
How do you define the success of a brand today?
A lot of metrics can be used to define a brand success. But for me, the most important is the perceived value that the potential and actual customers give to the brand. This is most times attributed to a brand’s Net Promoter Score.
A high NPS show a positive signal of Product-Market Fit which translate to good standing with your customers. The success of a brand is always centred on its target market.
Do you consider developing communities as one of the most important aspects of marketing in the digital age? Why?
Yes.
Building a community is paramount for growth in any company. A company growth lies in the hand of the market. No matter how good your product is, without customers that use your product, believe in your product enough to tell others about it, your product will crash.
Community building is a way of securing your customers and turning them to brand advocates. As you can tell, I am a big fan of turning customers to brand advocates
Do you think that TikTok has potential when it builds a digital marketing strategy? In your opinion, how will TikTok evolve in the next few years?
I believe the video content creation platform is still in its early stage and can still develop for better user engagement.
Adding more personalization in video creation, better interaction between the content creator and their audience.
Tiktok is still an underused channel for marketing. Just like content creation (SEO) was an underused channel 10-15 years back. So I believe more brands will begin to look into utilizing micro-influencers on TikTok for their marketing campaign.
What lessons have you learned from the pandemic? (in terms of digital marketing and startups)?
Be flexible and ready to pivot on your strategy. When the pandemic hit, a lot of businesses were cut unawares and most took time before pivoting to meet the current demand of their target market. The businesses that adapted early on and modified their marketing strategy to meet the current situation thrived. If I have learned anything is not to be too rigid on marketing strategies.
A major pandemic might come once in a while but customer needs change almost every season. So the ability to know and understand what your customers want per time and tailor your product and marketing to meet those needs is crucial for success.
