The Daniel Orubo effect: How Piggyvest drove growth with storytelling

Imagine your startup’s blog driving thousands of visitors in organic traffic, with hundreds of leads converting to users monthly.

That’s the dream for many content marketing managers. But for Daniel Orubo, the Head of Content and Content Strategy at Piggyvest, it is not just a dream but his reality.

Daniel’s innovative approach to storytelling, especially with the Grown Ups comic series, was game-changing—driving over a hundred thousand visitors to their website in its first few months and converting up to 10% in app downloads— contributing to Piggvest’s status as one of the most successful fintechs in Nigeria.

For context, Piggyvest grew from paying out N242 billion to users in 2021 to N400 billion in 2022, bringing their total payout volume to N1.1 trillion. 

In this conversation with Daniel, we share his trusted methods for growing user acquisition and building a memorable brand with storytelling. Let’s get into it!

Let's start at the beginning- why is storytelling important?

For every search query, there are over a million websites with answers. Beyond ranking on search, how do you get customers to choose you? How do you build brand loyalty in a valley of similar startups?

The answer? Stories. Relatable stories. 

According to research done by Harvard Business Review, people respond better to narratives than to other forms of content-sharing. Also, studies show human brains are naturally attuned to good stories, with storytelling boosting conversions by 30%. 

If your brand will stay top of mind for the reader, you need to give value by telling memorable stories. 

Daniel’s team understood this, and using serial storytelling, they kept Piggyvest users engaged on the blog, publishing stories that drove thousands of readers to the Piggyvest website. The same stories led to increased app downloads and high engagement rates on their social media channels.

As a strategic content lead, Daniel understood that for content marketing to drive conversion and generate revenue, it had to be hinged on storytelling. 

For example, Daniel mentioned the interview series: ‘My Money Mistake,’ stories about daily struggles with money management, converted more than technical “How to” articles because users could relate to personal experiences.

One thing is clear. Like Piggyvest, more startups need to start growing their in-house content library or work with a content strategist to build one from scratch.

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Having a boss who believes in content makes all the difference

Many people don’t know this, but Daniel and Piggyvest’s co-founder, Odun Eweniyi, were the very first writers hired at Zikoko, a Nigerian media company, years before he joined Piggyvest in 2021. 

Daniel and Odun understood how content marketing worked. They knew engaging content could drive results for any brand. That made it easy for them to convince Piggyvest’s management team to give Daniel the freedom and resources he needed to execute his content ideas.

One of the first things Daniel did after being hired was to present a strategy document, ‘How content can benefit Piggyvest,’ to the management team. He shared his ideas, the proposed results, and how they would convert. He prioritized retention strategies—keeping users engaged—alongside acquisition goals. 

Initially, Daniel had predicted it would take about five months to reach their goals, but after implementing his strategy, he hit the numbers he promised in one month, earning him more trust from the management team.

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Understanding Piggyvest’s Content Strategy

Here are four things Daniel Orubo did to build Piggyvest’s content engine, driving over 100,000 organic traffic monthly. 

At whatever stage your startup is, you can learn from Daniel’s strategy and build an engaging content library for your brand. 

1. Understand your target user

“The type of content you create shows whether you understand your audience or not,” Daniel shared.

We agree. To create compelling content, you need to understand the problems your potential users face and address them with your stories.

The first step is finding their actual pain points. To do that, you’ll need to speak to your customers. Don’t assume your audience’s problems, but make sure you talk to them. 

An average marketer struggles with randomly calling customers and speaking with them. But to create anything worth reading, you must get over that inertia and schedule those calls. 

Even though he was also part of Piggyvest’s target audience, a young Nigerian trying to build healthy savings habits, Daniel didn’t draw the insights from his experience alone.

He researched his audience, booked calls with customers, and collated their top issues about Piggyvest and money management in general.

This data informed the topics they addressed in the Grown Ups comic series, proving that those who know their audience are those who can write for them.

2. Create product-led content

Daniel answered the age-long marketing question: ‘How do you create content without sounding salesy?’ with the Grown Ups comic series.

Using the product-led content approach from the strategy phase, Daniel identified the use cases and narratives the Piggyvest product naturally fit into. 

As a marketer, you can copy this, identify the problems your customers face, and insert your product as the solution in natural situations. 

Take this seasoning cube brand Royco’s ad in the early 2000s as an example. Royco used the typical husband coming home to a delicious, aromatizing meal use case, to sell their product and build a memorable brand. 

By setting their product, the Royco seasoning cube, in their audience’s natural use case; enjoying a home-cooked meal, they told a memorable story—and still sold their product— a move that still triggers nostalgia in every Millennial today.

Your job as a story-led marketer is to find this use case for your product offering and use it to tell engaging stories.

3. Work with a multi-talented team

Daniel’s second win was his team. After he pitched his ideas and got the go-ahead, he knew he wanted a lean team with multiple skills. He needed a team who were, according to him, "inherently creative and could do multiple things."

For example, Agnes Ekanem, whose primary task is writing for the Grown Ups series, also draws relatable comics for social media on the side. Every member of Daniel’s lean team had cross-functional skills that helped maximize the team’s potential. 

This was a huge lesson for me as a fractional content strategist helping startups build their content team from the ground up. For many startups, the lean budget is one of the typical constraints in building an effective content team. 

Your best approach to overcoming this is hiring people with core skills who can assist in other areas if needed. And no. This doesn’t mean you should hire one person to do the work of five people. It just means you should look out for people with multiple skills who can fill the gap when necessary.

4. Tell real stories

“Storytelling works, especially serial storytelling. We’ve seen series convert more.” Daniel mentioned.

Piggyvest’s Grown Ups comic series portrays its main characters with relatable, everyday money struggles. The unexpected expenses, the black tax, struggles as a new graduate, and so on.

Daniel also wanted users to see themselves in the stories on the blog. So his team spoke with Piggyvest’s users about their sound, bad, and ugly money habits. These interviews formed the stories that converted the most.

Their conversations also fueled character personalities for the Grown Ups comic series. Telling those stories in a fun way led to increased traffic, app downloads, and engagements. According to Daniel, some users even opened the app just to engage with the series.

Good stories are compelling. Every brand needs a content strategist who can help them understand their audience, find their authentic voice, and share it in compelling stories that connect with the audience. 

5. Set realistic deadlines

Creating quality content requires work, and seeing results takes time. As a content strategist, it is your job to set your management team’s expectations and communicate how long it would take to create high-quality content.

A lot of Startups approach content creation in a microwave fashion approach. They think creating quality content takes two working days. Nothing could be farther from the truth... 

Again, many people don’t know this, but Grown Ups didn’t launch until after a year of in-house content efforts. Thankfully, the management team at Piggyvest understood the time factor involved in content marketing and were patient with the team.

Setting a realistic time frame for every specific task helped Daniel and his team prioritize more demanding deliverables, like weekly social media content, while working on the Grown Ups series. It also helped that no one pressured the team to deliver faster than they had agreed. 

As a startup interested in content marketing, giving your in-house content team adequate time to create high-quality content is vital.

Good stories convert: featuring a founder’s testimony

The best part of this story? Daniel and his team measured everything they did and recorded actual conversions. 

I’ve always insisted that marketers move from being ‘nice to have team members’ to ‘you-deserve-a-seat-at-the-table’ team members. 

How can I do this, you ask? Simple. Measure your results. Show proof. See, hiring and paying salaries are business decisions. No one will keep you on a team just because you’re nice. They need to see proof of your work.

The Piggyvest blog currently generates almost 100k monthly organic traffic, converting nearly 10% of these visitors. Also, each comic issue has been read over 20k times. These are all impressive numbers.

The icing is this tweet from his boss, Odunayo Eweniyi, Co-founder of Piggyvest:

Content works. When done correctly, content marketing gives a good return on investment. If you struggle with measuring results as a content marketer, I’ll advise reading this blog post on how to measure your content efforts. 

Conclusion 

This story shows one thing clearly. Quality content converts. 

However, quality content also takes time. As a content marketer, it is your job to set realistic expectations by showing what’s achievable and how long it takes. 

Also, don’t just jump into creating content. Take time to research, analyze, and know your audience and the product before suggesting ideas for content.

If you enjoyed reading this, please look through more of our work here. You can also follow us on Twitter @atbloomcontent for more content strategy and storytelling reviews like this one. 

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