From Canine Blogger To Tech Unicorn Marketer 

Social media is rife with films and tweets encouraging job hunters to “fake it until you make it”. This means confidently nod to any job requirement and decide points out on the fly upon employment. At 24, Benita Riagbayire, a regulation graduate with a resume stuffed with wins—campaigns that boosted app downloads, an award naming her Most Promising Product Marketer—could have bluffed her means by an interview for a promoting operations place at Oyster HR, a world payroll unicorn. The place was managerial and promised a pay cheque that far exceeded her prior 5 years of working with  Nigerian companies.

Nonetheless, as a result of the interview progressed, Riagbayire realised how starkly utterly completely different the place was from the type of promoting she had executed beforehand. This was a further technical, behind-the-scenes place, involving each little factor from managing client lifecycle workflows to creating positive GDPR (Frequent Info Security Regulation) compliance and troubleshooting automation devices. It diverged significantly from the additional front-facing, creative work she had executed in content material materials creation and campaigns. She had been taking applications to upskill and knew the proper phrases to utilize to steer them she was capable of hit the underside working, nonetheless she did the unpopular issue: she chosen candour. This paid off. In a surprising twist, the company, considering her theoretical knowledge and eagerness to check, provided her a lower-level place that accommodated her should research on the job.

“All my life, I had labored in course of turning right into a world experience,” Riagbayire, who took the choice from Agbani, a distant village in Enugu the place she was visiting for a while, instructed me. “It’s a cherry on excessive that the job pays me adequate money that I don’t have to work numerous jobs to make ends meet.”

Riagbayire’s journey to a seven-figure place at Oyster HR appears like a pure growth now, nonetheless in 2020, as a 300-level regulation scholar on the Faculty of Lagos, her resume was faraway from polished. The pandemic had upended the world, and the ASUU strike closed campuses, leaving faculty college students with uncertainty regarding the future and quite a few time on their palms. 

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It was all through that time that Riagbayire decided to check tech talents. Though she has gone on to be a marketer in three startups, on the time, she wanted to be a programmer and had initially tried her hand at software program program engineering and was learning programming languages like Flutter, HTML, and CSS. She’d tried software program program engineering because of it was touted as a further worthwhile occupation. The frequent wage of selling personnel hovered at ₦200,000 ($131) or a lot much less, whereas software program program engineers have been paid significantly further on the entry stage.

She took up applications on FreeCodeCamp and recruited a buddy as an accountability affiliate. Rapidly, she realised that software program program progress was too boring for her, significantly when she observed one of the simplest ways her buddy’s eyes lit up when he talked about initiatives and debugging. 

Then bought right here a weird various: a contract gig writing about canine breeds on WordPress for ₦15,000 ($9.8) a month. It was her first paid foray into digital content material materials for a enterprise. She’d write about utterly completely different breeds—Lhasas, Shih Tzus, Rottweilers—detailing their choices and what potential householders must look out for sooner than shopping for. It was modest, nonetheless writing the posts and tweaking them for search engine optimisation (SEO) tickled her fancy. “I found these fascinating—like when on WordPress, your article turns from purple to yellow to inexperienced. I truly cherished all of that,” she talked about. She dropped coding after 5 months and shifted her focus to digital content material materials.

Her first tech job, her first layoff

Months after starting a social media supervisor job at an oil and gas company, Riagbayire moved to  Cloudley, a Nigerian cloud engineering startup based totally in Delaware. Not like her place on the oil and gas company,  social media promoting for a tech startup required tailoring one’s messaging to potential shoppers who’ve been largely builders. “The aim was to attract consumers for a product costing 1000’s of {{dollars}},” she outlined. She invested in B2B tech promoting applications and likewise tried to check the language of engineers.

Cloudley, nonetheless in pre-launch, was a whirlwind. Riagbayire constructed buzz for choices nonetheless in progress, nonetheless funding dried up, and the startup folded. “They despatched all people dwelling,” she recalled. The layoff, though cushioned with uncover and pay, was her first type of startup volatility.

 The experience didn’t deter her from the commerce, nonetheless. She landed a social media promoting place at Chekkit, a properly being tech startup using blockchain to fight counterfeit pharmaceuticals. Not like Cloudley’s scrappy, six-person crew, Chekkit provided development—a clear hierarchy with distinct product sales, engineering, and promoting teams. “I found most of what I do know working at this agency,” Benita talked about. Beneath a supportive supervisor who accommodated her scholar schedule, she found promoting automation, wielding HubSpot to streamline e-mail campaigns and social media scheduling. Six months into her place,  she led a advertising marketing campaign to affiliate with the Faculty of Ibadan and go to secondary schools for CSR initiatives. 

She labored rigorously with the engineering crew to make sure right data assortment and organize a system to nurture new prospects previous the preliminary receive. “It’s not adequate to get people to place within the app,” she outlined. “With out automation to keep up them engaged, you lose them to churn.” Her efforts paid off, driving a 40% spike in Chekkit app downloads.

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A turbulent flip  

While she thrived at Chekkit, Benita remained open to new options.  A digital promoting affiliate place at Figg Africa, a crowdfunding platform, promised a step up. Nevertheless the reality was far a lot much less rosy. The crew was smaller than Cloudley’s, piling an avalanche of duties on her plate. She managed client relationships, strong partnerships, and leaned intently on her e-mail promoting talents, honed by applications and observe. “It was tons,” she talked about. The company custom, she admitted, was “horrible,” and the stress lastly pushed her to resign. 

What was most ironic about this time, she says, was that within the similar month as her resignation, she was supplied with the Most Promising Product Marketer award on the No Code Tech Summit, organised by one in every of Nigeria’s fundamental tech communities for non-coding professionals. “It was insane,” she talked about.

No matter her experience at Fig Africa,  she sharpened her means to assemble promoting processes from scratch. Nevertheless balancing this work as a scholar demanded prioritisation. “There’s no good stability,” she talked about. “It’s about understanding when college or work comes first and managing expectations.”

Amid the depth of 2023, Benita briefly joined TechCabal. Her place involved amplifying the outlet’s digital presence and managing viewers engagement.

Promoting and advertising at a unicorn tech startup

Now at Oyster HR, a startup valued at over $1 billion, Riagbayire focuses on the technical backend of lifecycle promoting. “Each factor led to this second,” she says of her current place.

Her earlier coding experience, regulation diploma, and moot courtroom experience in data privateness are as important as the skills she’s developed in her earlier promoting roles. I requested her if she apprehensive that her honesty about her potential stage on the time would worth her the possibility, nonetheless Riagbayire talked about she wasn’t. Her completely different talents made her a priceless asset to any agency. “I moreover assume that folk [for] who use that approach [fake it till you make it], it couldn’t work, counting on how technical the place is,” she added. “My personal advice is to not lie all through an interview about your {{qualifications}} because of there’s a extreme chance you’ll get caught in a structured environment.”

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