Hi Reader,

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Earlier this week, someone on my timeline asked what I regret that I didn’t do in high school. For me, there is no better answer to this question than volunteering. In secondary school, and even in university, I was a lot more focused on activities that could advance my career. Ironically, that is a career that I now have absolutely no interest in.

I’m now learning the importance of giving back to my community. As I mentioned in my last newsletter edition, volunteering as a Guest Writer at T E M S I Africa is a step in the right direction for me. Anyone at any experience level can decide to volunteer.

But if you’re just starting out in marketing, this is the perfect way to use your newly acquired skills and get noticed by potential employers. There are a few communities that are accepting volunteers right now, like T E M S I Africa and Smarketers Hub, so definitely check them out!

In today’s edition:

• Insights from the Fintech Marketing Outlook
• How to manually analyze SERPs

Estimated read time: 6 minutes 20 seconds

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Fintech marketing insights in a nutshell 🥜

If you work in tech, the chances that you work for a fintech company are pretty high. Last year, 40% of all equity funding in Nigeria went to fintech startups, so this report is actually super important to marketers in the tech ecosystem. Let’s dive into some things I found interesting in this report.

Content marketing came in second on the list of top customer acquisition channels in 2023 in a tie with programmatic advertising. The top channel according to the report was paid advertising. Just in case you can’t tell, this clearly shows how important content marketing can be for driving business impact in startups, and why if you haven’t built a content marketing engine in 2024, you need to start now.

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A lot of the other insights in this report were broken down into findings from different fintech subcategories like savings and investments, business financial management, merchant payments & POS, etc. I found this particularly interesting and to me, it meant one thing. It’s a prompt to know your audience and your industry. Basically, what works for one company may not work for the other.

The report also ended with 16 predictions for Nigeria’s fintech industry, and one stuck out to me. The authors of this report foresee that fintechs are about to become increasingly reliant on owned marketing channels—social media, SEO, and content marketing, and for good reason. The cost of paid ads are only getting higher, so companies will likely focus more on channels that don’t cost as much.

I really enjoyed reading this report. It was straightforward, presenting all the facts I needed to know in clear and concise copy. If you work in fintech, you need to read this. You also need to get a copy of Olabinjo Adeniran’s The Growth Handbook: Scaling Fintech in Nigeria with my 20% off my discount code REMEWEEKLY. And if you don’t, you still need to read this 😅
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SERP analysis without tools

Not every company has a wild SEO budget, and sometimes, the free tools just don’t cut it for SERP analysis. However, you still need to understand SERP rankings and analyze top content on these pages. First, here are a few reasons why:

• You need to know the search intent of the keyword.
• You need to understand why the ‘top content’ on the SERPs are ranking.
• You need to figure out their content gaps.
• You need to understand the opportunities for the keyword.
• You need a realistic picture of the keyword difficulty.

Good old-fashioned manual SERP analysis involves searching for your target keyword and manually reviewing top ranking content to figure out where you can fit in. When I search for a keyword, the first thing I do is take note of the related searches section. This gives you an idea of information related to your keyword that your target audience may want to know.

Next, if there’s a featured snippet, I take note of how it’s structured and browse through the article too. Make sure to note factors like the meta title and description, content length and structure, URL, and backlinks. Where are the gaps amongst these factors? And how can you create content to fill them?

Now to the other articles on the first page of the SERP. Scroll through and determine if only high domain authority websites are ranking for this keyword, or if there are some low quality domains and outdated content on the SERP. If the former is the case, then you may need to reconsider the keyword, as it may be difficult to rank for it.

For the keyword ‘SERP analysis’, the first SERP is full of landing pages and articles from SEO tools and experts like SEMrush, Ahrefs, Moz, and so on. In this case, I would probably switch to a long-tail keyword to have a better chance at ranking.

In addition to all I’ve already said, it’s also a good idea to browse through the top ranking content on the SERP to look for any information or new angle they might have missed. For instance, if all the articles list steps on how to do SERP analysis with tools, you can write about how to do it manually.

There are a few more things to consider when conducting proper SERP analysis but these are the basics. Writing these few paragraphs has suddenly made me want to write an in-depth article, so watch out for it soon.
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Two issues of this newsletter ago, I mentioned that I’m learning to create email templates with HTML and even shared some helpful resources if you would like to learn too. Now that I’ve started picking up some skills, I’m eager to put them to use. I’m toying with the idea of creating a short email course—5 or 6 emails sent over a week. But what would you like to learn about? I asked this on Twitter so you can reply to my tweet to let me know!

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Until next time,

Olohireme

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