Communiqué 66: Come for the content, stay for the money
How PiggyVest used comics, videos, and clever content design to become one of Nigeria's most beloved fintech brands.
1. Do or do not. There is no try
It’s World Savings Day on October 31, 2023. PiggyVest, a Nigerian wealth management fintech, has just released its inaugural Savings Report. Its findings were grim: nearly 30% of Nigerians were in debt, battered by inflation, currency devaluation, and soaring fuel and electricity costs.
PiggyVest had spent the last two years building a content engine that chronicled the financial lives of Nigerians. Tales of hustles, windfalls, and survival found expression across different content formats. But that was not enough. Real influence required stories that were contextualized correctly, with up-to-date data. So, the PiggyVest content team set out to get that data with the savings report. In 2023, they surveyed a little over 1,000 of their users.
The following year saw the team ramp up its effort, polling over 10,000 people, a more representative sample of Nigeria. The results were even more staggering: only 1% of Nigerians could afford to spend more than $609 monthly.
Each report didn’t just make headlines—it reinforced PiggyVest’s position as an authority in Nigeria’s financial industry. The media cited the report, policymakers referenced it, and everyday Nigerians shared it on social media.
The day after the 2024 report launched, PiggyVest received the single largest savings deposit for the year.
Several organizations pay lip service to content as a marketing tool. But, PiggyVest has shown that it could be a worthwhile investment if done right—its content marketing engine has propelled it to over 5 million users and cemented its status as Nigeria’s most influential wealth management platform.
2. Building a blog that converts
When Daniel Orubo resigned from his second stint at Nigerian pop culture publication Zikoko, he had no idea what he would do next. He knew his next job would be in tech, but he was unsure how that would materialize. As he mulled over his future, his close friend, Odunayo Eweniyi—who also happens to be Piggyvest’s co-founder and COO—approached him with an offer to lead the company’s content department.
Orubo and Eweniyi had been friends for years, and he was wary of taking up any job that could muddy those waters. But Eweniyi was persistent and convincing enough, promising creative freedom. She managed to win him over.
From inception, PiggyVest had cultivated a strong social media presence, but there remained an untapped opportunity to drive growth using content. Its blog was the most obvious vehicle.
Orubo’s first instinct was to flood it with articles—a holdover from his time running a busy newsroom. In his first month running the PiggyVest blog, Orubo’s team published three times more than their initial target, driving significant traffic. But traffic by itself was meaningless. "If 100,000 people read an article without bringing in new users, that’s a failure," Orubo told Communiqué.
PiggyVest wasn’t a media company; its content had to fuel growth directly. The team slashed output, focusing instead on fewer, higher-impact pieces designed to guide readers toward a single conclusion: “PiggyVest is the solution to your financial problems.”
The formula was deliberate to get people to tell their full money story and show where PiggyVest fit in. These stories were then broken down into categories: My Money Mistake explained the mistake Nigerians made with their money; Women and Money showed the gender dynamics of money; and the Life column spotlighted people who had attained some level of financial prosperity. Interviews with high-profile users lent credibility to the site and helped increase views, while everyday narratives made the blog relatable.
The content team also implemented an SEO approach focused on answering real financial questions Nigerians searched for. Each SEO piece began with careful research into local search trends and combined insights from PiggyVest's in-house financial experts with practical wisdom from successful savers. For instance, when writing an SEO piece about saving money, they avoided generic advice like the 50-30-20 rule. Instead, they interviewed Nigerians who had built substantial savings to understand what worked in the local economic context. The results were transformative. The company began dominating search rankings for financial queries, and its domain authority surged, helping more people discover the app.
3. The PiggyVest creative collective
The most significant driver of PiggyVest’s success with content has been the people behind it.
When Orubo put out the first vacancy for content writers and editors, he was inundated with responses from over 1,000 people applying to fill three slots. In selecting the early content team from this multitude, he had to prioritize people with more than one creative skill. “I needed people who could do more than one thing," he said. A writer had a higher chance of getting into the PiggyVest content team if they could also design or produce video. This philosophy resulted in a small but agile team whose cross-functional skills birthed some of Piggyvest’s most engaging content formats.
The early members of the content team included Agnes Ekanem, who wrote the My Money Mistake column, and Tobechukwu Nwosu, who helped develop the Women and Money series. Ifeoluwa Adekoya later joined to lead Piggyvest’s SEO efforts.
Extreme resourcefulness was also important. When Boluwatife Akindele cold emailed Daniel Orubo to highlight some of the issues he felt were wrong with the website and how he felt it could be better, Orubo immediately hired him. Akindele would later rise through the ranks from an intern to lead the content team after Orubo resigned in 2024.
Ekanem, a brilliant writer who also created comics, best exemplified the full stack creative model. She started repurposing blog stories into social media-friendly comic strips, which would become the foundation of the PiggyVest Grown Ups comic series. The comics, which had characters that humanized some of PiggyVest’s key user personas, distilled complex financial topics—like resisting Ponzi schemes or the dread of automatic savings withdrawals—into relatable, humorous vignettes. The comics’ popularity revealed an appetite for visual storytelling, prompting the team to conclude that adding video to the mix could elevate their level of results.
So, Orubo recruited Israel Obasola, an animator who has attained online fame for his distinct humor, to turn the comics into animated shorts. These videos became instant hits, racking up millions of views and outperforming other marketing assets in conversion rates. The comics also enabled PiggyVest to reach a subset of the audience who would not read their articles.
But beyond digital content, PiggyVest deepened engagement through physical events. After the first season of Grown Ups, the team organized a meet-and-greet for fans. Furthermore, each Savings Report launch was complemented by industry roundtables with financial experts and stakeholders. These forums served a dual purpose: strengthening community ties while providing crucial feedback that directly informed content strategy and product development. Insights from the first Savings Report and roundtable discussions revealed a critical need for housing solutions, leading PiggyVest to launch its popular 'House Money' feature - a dedicated savings product for rent payments, becoming one of the platform's most important features.
When PiggyVest launched its content team in 2021, it wasn’t alone in recognizing the power of storytelling to drive growth. Across Nigeria’s tech landscape, venture capital-fueled startups invested heavily in content, poaching top media talent to build out blogs, social campaigns, and video series. Yet, while many of these initiatives have fizzled out, drowned out by unrealistic ROI expectations and shifting priorities occasioned by the current economic climate, PiggyVest’s content engine has thrived and contributed to the company’s growth.
The key difference? Unwavering support from the top. Unlike competitors, where content teams often battled for resources or struggled to prove their worth, PiggyVest’s leadership gave the content team the freedom and resources to experiment. For instance, when Akindele pitched Orubo about joining PiggyVest, there was no vacancy on the team or budget for the role. But the company's leadership trusted his instincts and made resources available for the hire.
Whether it was comics or animated shorts, the C-suite understood that driving growth with content required patience and creative risk-taking, and it was willing to bet on the team it had assembled. That bet is paying off massively.