Here’s how we grew our customer base, user activity, and revenue by 10x in just one month— with marketing.

We’ve all seen those headlines about going 10x without marketing, this is not one of them. This is a story about how I optimised our marketing to yield amazing outcomes at record conversion rates and costs.

I actually started writing this piece at 3x, then I stalled for a few days and it went 5x, so I decided to wait for 10x before I continued writing. Luckily, it wasn’t a long wait. 😉 P.S. we are currently at 20x, one month later.

INTRODUCTION

Mid-January 2021, I took on the role of Chief Marketing Executive at a new player in the Nigerian betting space. At this point, the product was in a naked form so I was a part of the branding, design, and positioning from scratch. As with a lot of tech products, there are always issues, fallbacks, and inadequacies you need to fix and smartly innovate around to make things work.

As new entrants into a saturated market, fixing and innovating we sure did. However, to know the Nigerian betting/gambling industry is to know that your unique feature is unique for 2 months max. The interesting part is, your competitors will not only adopt your unique offer, but they will also raise the stakes and try to outdo you. This isn’t hypothetical. We’ve only been live for barely 3 months and it has happened to us.

Anyway, I think that paints a good enough picture of how competitive the space is. Now let’s get into the product, and then the marketing.

PRODUCT

We all wish to have a product that has everything. Everything the customer asks for, everything the competitors offer, and even things the customers did not know they needed. This however is hardly ever the case, especially for start-ups. Well, we somehow managed to get 1½ out of the 3.

We got the key features most users ask for, and we also implemented the things even the customers didn’t know they needed. What we didn’t have were all the things the competitors offer. Now that, to an “average joe” customer makes your product look sub-par. One of the things other players have that we don’t is their primary acquisition scheme — the welcome bonus.

This is important to the subject because we have managed to drive this said growth without the popular “Welcome Bonus” scheme which is the go-to for brands due to the instant gratification their users derive from it.

The reason we don’t have this is a long story that includes the business strategy, a survey, and lastly, the fact that we couldn’t accommodate the welcome bonus like everyone else does with our existing product structure. About the survey, we did one where we asked users who have received a welcome bonus if they ever made anything of it or got to withdrawing their winnings. The results came back with a plethora of NOs.

Although we had an easy-to-use product, fast navigation, arguably the best odds in the market, and the most competitive accumulator bonus, we didn’t have that instant gratification factor.

Now you have understood the state of the product and where we stand in the market, let’s talk about the marketing and how we were able to sell this product without offering everything the competitors did or taking the same “welcome bonus” approach.

MARKETING

As with a lot of other things marketing, I doubt I’ll be saying anything you probably haven’t heard before, the trick, however, just as Thanos has shown us, is with putting all the gems together.

If I could summarise in one sentence what we did to pull this off marketing-wise, that sentence will be:

Finding the people who want what we’re selling and staying in their faces a̶l̶w̶a̶y̶s̶ at the right time.

Staying in their faces always will cost an arm and a leg, so we chose to stay in their faces only when they were looking to place a bet — which is the service we provide.

I should mention that only digital marketing channels were employed throughout this 10x run. That being said, I’m going to take a few steps back to outline the various key blocks of our marketing.

Finding our target audience:

We are not the first digital-only sportsbook in Nigeria targeting young sports & betting enthusiasts. With that being said, spotting our target audience wasn’t rocket science, reaching them was where we had to get creative.

Reaching our target audience at the right time:

One beautiful thing I picked up and stuck with from my days as a Google Ads manager is the idea of “In-Market Audience Targeting”. It is such a brilliant idea that I have since explored and introduced to all my marketing strategies even outside the google ad network.

The ability to reach users when they are actively looking to buy a service you provide is second to none. In my opinion, ad targeting doesn’t get any better than that. This was the basis on which our strategy in terms of “how and when to reach our target audience” was built.

With a limited budget, we couldn’t afford to be everywhere. We thus focused 90% of our marketing on the channels and placements our target users visit or consult while trying to place a bet. This approach led to us acquiring more active users who end up transacting multiple times on our platform.

Saying the right things to our target audience:

This is where things got tricky.

Although we do not offer the instant gratification our competitors are offering, our product offering meets the needs of the active bettor. You can only get the welcome bonus once, but great odds and accumulator bonuses apply to every bet. The same applies to our fast payout and other features.

Since we do not offer the welcome bonus, we couldn’t go the regular route of flooding the different channels with banners of “100% Welcome Bonus” as everyone else does.

We had to devise a creative way to inform our target users of our promotions as well as our other amazing product offerings that meet their needs.

One interesting copy we employed on most of our creatives was “Say no to Ojoro Promotions”. This simple sentence calls out almost the entire industry by subtly hinting at the deceptive nature of a lot of the promotions available in the market at the moment. With this, we were able to position our promotions and product offerings as the “real”.

It took a lot of tweaks both in copies and designs to hit the right spot, and guess what? To date, we are still tweaking. It never stops

Don’t forget retention:

We implemented what I’ll like to call the best retention marketing approach in the game.

At the forefront of our retention marketing is a simple SMS campaign that ties into the aforementioned strategy — reaching your target audience (or in this case your customers) at the right place, at the right time, and saying the right things to them.

With these three things at the back of our minds always, we were and still are driving great numbers with our retention marketing.

RESULTS

We experienced all-around growth, and I mean that in every sense of the word.

For obvious reasons, I can’t publish our business numbers. However, we did not only 10x our number of registrations, we also saw a 10x growth (or more) in the count and volume of deposits, number of active customers, number of returning customers, the volume of transactions (bets), and turnover value.

It’s also worth mentioning that we did not spend an arm and a leg on marketing costs, compared to our peers we haven’t spent anything.

We also managed to keep our customer acquisition costs below industry levels (as low as $1 on some channels), and we achieved registration-deposit rates that are way above industry averages.

LEARNINGS

1. It can be done.
2. Your USP may no longer be unique in a month. Don’t get stuck, keep innovating.
3. Your retention campaigns are just as important as your acquisition campaigns. Getting users to sign up is great, but that is not where the value is extracted. The value comes from getting them to carry out transactions again and again.
4. What took you to 10x may not take you to 100x. Not a lot of marketing executives will admit it, but there are ceilings to how far certain strategies can go. To go beyond these ceilings, you have to introduce strategies and channels that may not be as super targeted as the ones you are currently employing, but it indeed works for the greater good.
5. Learn to be flexible. Sometimes you have to give your customers what they want before they can accept you giving them what they need. Let me rephrase in case you didn’t catch that. It is easier to recommend a better product to a customer when they can see that you have the product they are asking for in stock. If you didn’t have it in stock, their instinct will tell them that you’re only saying your recommendation is better because you don’t have what they asked for. Now that’s deep. 🙂

POSTSCRIPT

I have led some kick-ass campaigns in the past (which I am too lazy to write about) but this is my current favourite as I was involved in building this from a non-existent product & brand to going live and driving the first wave of acquisitions (in a bid to validate the product & strategy), and then growing it 10x.