Peace Obinani is the Head of Online Marketing at Piggytech. For this month’s Lead Talks, she talks about her career journey and how she went from Customer Success Intern to Head of Online Marketing. 

What’s your day-to-day like as the Head of Online Marketing?

My days are pretty unpredictable. But, typically, I have my first meeting of the day with the marketing team in the morning. Then, there’s a content meeting. After that, work really starts. 

This involves going through all of our online channels. What’s happening there? What are people saying? What’s going wrong? What’s going right? I go through the DMs, our timelines, our comment sections. I do a lot of social listening.

In addition to that, I approve content for the week across all Piggytech teams (PiggyVest, PocketApp and Patronize). Where necessary, I give feedback. 

My role requires me to work with other cross-functional teams like the Product, Content and Engineering teams. We work on feature rollouts, product rollouts and other things that require marketing input.

Sounds like you have really busy days. What are you working on at the moment?

I am currently working on the rollout of a new feature on the PiggyVest app. Watch out for that.

I’ll definitely be looking out for that! Please, walk me through your career journey? 

Let me start by saying that I never knew I was going to work in marketing. Well, maybe I knew, but I just didn’t want to admit it. I’m someone you’ll call a natural at marketing. I’ll effortlessly talk you into buying something, doing something, taking an action. 

As a child at my mom’s shop, I was always happy to call customers and convince them to buy something. People would say “Oh, you should be a marketer,” but it didn’t make sense because I was in the sciences; I wanted to be a doctor. But, yeah, somehow, the stars have aligned.

I started at PiggyVest as a customer success intern, then I moved up the ladder to becoming the Social Media Team Lead. I then became the Product Marketing Manager. And now I am the Head of Online Marketing.

Fantastic!  What advice would you give to people who are starting a career in marketing?

I think it’s very important to have a passion for marketing. Ask your friends what they think and, most importantly, ask yourself if you’re a good fit because with a job like this, you need a surfeit of passion to keep you going. You have to enjoy what you do. That’s my recommendation.

Take classes. Find ways and opportunities to practise. Practice is very important in marketing. You learn faster and better when you apply your knowledge and get hands-on experience. Hands-on experience is more valuable than theoretical knowledge.

What are three challenges you face on the job?

Number one is unpredictability. Everything could be right, and then something happens to throw you off course. But that is one of the things that makes it exciting. No two days are the same.

Another thing is that there are many moving parts. You have to be someone who enjoys a bit of chaos to thrive in marketing. If you like things in a certain order, you may struggle a little bit. 

Lastly, your work depends on many factors and a lot of people. As mentioned earlier, marketing is very cross-functional and has a lot of variables and dependencies. On some days, you may want to do your own thing and, you know, get it over and done with. But the job involves a lot of input and feedback. Things can’t get done at the ideal pace .

If you could switch roles, what role would you choose?

Hmmm. Maybe operations.

Interesting. Why? 

I think it’s similar to marketing because it’s a system that has that level of chaos and organisation and involves a lot of people as well. I think I’d like to be part of making processes smarter, better and more efficient. So, operations is probably something I wouldn’t mind trying out.