Amina Tokunbo Banu: Decoding Demographics & Mastering Ethical Marketing

Hello and welcome to the show. Sorry I've been unavailable for a couple of days and that's because I've been recovering from a throat infection, a sore throat, and I had scheduled a what's it called? A LinkedIn audio event last Friday a couple of days ago on podcasting for growth expertise and your wallet and I had to handle that session having had a sore throat. Now the reason why I had to muscle through that was because I had cancelled.

Well not cancelled. I had accidentally terminated the 1st edition and I just thought that if I cancel the second one because I had a sore throat, then people would just assume I was unserious or something. So I'm also through it and I'm also it's an interesting experience trying to hold a room even when you have a sore throat. But those are some adventures that we can talk about in future episodes. Now today I am bringing to you guys insights from a conversation that I had with a lovely lady, Amina Tokumbo Banu.

Sorry, forgive me if I'm not pronouncing your name properly, especially the surname. Now, even though her name is Amina Amina Tokumbo Banu, some of you who are familiar with the middle belt of Nigeria will be surprised to know that she's actually is a tea woman born teeve. So strange to those of us who are from the middle belt, we tea people or we Plato people. Because no, it's not usual to know one of us having Northern Ish sounding names.

Well anyway, that's beside the point. And of course we discussed lots of personal stuff during our conversation relating to the state of the country in general, prospects for economic growth in the middle belt region and things like that. So it was a wonderful conversation that lasted well over an hour. She is brilliant, insightful, a true professional when it comes to marketing communications and wise and adept on a number of things.

But anyway, the things that we spoke about that relate to the focus of the podcast, which is sales, marketing, business development, those sorts of things. So those are the insights that I'm going to bring to you guys today. So First off, I started the conversation by trying to clarify, since she's in marketing communications, to try and clarify exactly what that is or exactly what that means. Because you check your Instagram, you check your LinkedIn, you run into people at networking events, and lots of people call themselves marketing professionals, but everybody has a different idea about what marketing is or they have a different idea about the space of marketing that they play in.

And so she was very quick to clarify from the outset and that she is involved in online marketing strictly. So she's a marketing communications professional, yes. But she only plays in the online space. So if you want to know about billboards or put things on TV or radio, she's not the sort of professional that you should talk to. But of course, as a layman since OK, well, I know a bit of marketing, but that's by extension because my my bread and butter, the thing that I

focus on every single day is sales and actually more of personal selling. So if you look at the framework that I've been discussing about these sorts of things, you will say she's much more closer to the broadcast side of things, which is messages that are one to many, while I am much more on the personalized end of things, which is messaging, which is 1 to 1. So I wanted to know what's the distinction, any areas of overlap and things like that.

Now, of course, she says that there is an overlap when it comes to marketing online and marketing offline or marketing in the real world, as I said it during the conversation. Well, she had a laugh about that because, you know, there's some people who say online or some people who say in real life. But then of course, there's the push back that really what's the difference if you're doing it online, Are you doing it to fake entities?

So I guess there's no distinction like that, but so let's just keep it to online, offline. So yes, there's a certain level of overlap when it comes to marketing online and marketing offline. But she says that there's a different approach whether you're online or offline and you're dealing with a different audience. Now she said that it's really important to know your audience. And of course, knowing your audience, you know the demographics, you know where they hang out, things like that.

If you take that sort of approach, you're quickly going to see that if you are talking to an audience who spends most of their time on radio, or who spends most of their time on television, or who spend most of their times on Instagram or some other online space, you know that you have to talk to them differently. The language that you're going to have to use to be different, the assumptions that you bring to the conversations are going to be different.

And well, of course there's the practical realities that of course if you're going to do people on Instagram, then the number of channels that you're limited to, you know, reuse, reuse, advertising, inbox, you know, blah blah, blah. A whole lot difference than when you're dealing with radio and television. You know, the channel is already fixed. And then the the KPI is the metrics for success are also different. You know, so if it's radio, TV

or talking, what's it called, the impressions, impressions per million or something. But anyway, you get the point. So yes, it is a different ball game and I guess it's going to make a lot of sense that if you are talking to a marketing professional because you require their services, I guess it'll make a lot of sense to try and figure out where this person is comfortable playing, you know, online or offline. And she went into talking about some of the differences and that's why I derailed the conversation unfortunately,

because she mentioned that when it comes to online, surprisingly the demographics for people who have disposable income or spending income online is predominantly that's for Nigeria anyway. So this does not apply if you are in Ghana, America or UK, Saudi Arabia, wherever. So it's predominantly men who are between the ages of 25 to 34. And of course, I wanted reasons behind that because I'm quite skeptical because looking at the buying behavior of my sister-in-law, my mom, my household, people that I knew, I

just assumed that it's women who spend more money online. But summary, she says, it's a data science sort of thing. And whether or not women spend more time online or whatever, that's the state of the data science for now. That is predominantly men who are between the ages of 25 to 34 who are spending money online. So yeah, that was my shocker for the day. That is, surprisingly not women. And unfortunately, I let the conversation get derailed on that.

So I didn't get the full scope of what the other differences were when you're talking about online and offline marketing. But we can see that the customer avatars, the ideal customer profile might be significantly different because of course back to the radio and the TV example, men between the ages of 25 to 34 in Nigeria, that might not be the demographic if you're talking radio. And then of course, like she mentioned, radio is also fragmented.

So national radio is not the same as state radio, it's not the same as local government radio. So national radio, what's it called? BBC African Service or Radio Nigeria was not the same thing as advertising in radio in Vandika. Vandika is a local government area where we come from. Like I said, Amina is a team just like I am. So the considerations for advertising on BBC African Service are quite different for advertising on Radio Nigeria.

And of course it's quite different if you're picking a radio station that operates only in Vandeke. So without online or offline knowing your customer avatar, your ideal target audience, absolutely important because it's going to determine the tactics about how you go about trying to reach these people. But then of course she says that even though in the online space, average. So excuse me, excuse me, I'm still recovering from the the sore throat.

So even though in the online space, on average it's meant 25 to 34 your business, your business's target audience might differ. You might have a different audience depending on exactly what it is that you sell. So it doesn't mean that no matter what you sell, if you sell, if you're trying to sell Coca-Cola online, that you should be targeting 25 to 34. If you're targeting, if you're trying to sell sheer butter soap, you should be targeting men who are 25 to 34.

You know, that's just a rough, that's just a rough average that she gave us, but that is not who your actual target target audience might be. So the demographics, like I mentioned earlier for your ideal target audience are going to differ. So the words you're going to use will be different. Let's see, what else? Oh, that's because primarily they come from different different backgrounds then. OK. Well, she tried to get granular during the conversation to point out how the differences might take shape because even though predominantly it's online,

you're looking at 25 to 34 year old men in Nigeria. You might have a product that requires you to market to young ladies who are 18 to 26 and maybe in particular you want to hit people in the northern part of the country. So if you're targeting a lady, let's say her name is Halima, 18 to 26 year old, lives in Kano and who is a Muslima, Then the the kind of words that you're going to use, the kind of copy, the kind of imaging, all of that is going to be different.

Your words, your, the whole approach is going to become much more targeted because you're trying to resonate with a particular group of people and the campaign is supposed to affect a particular demographic. And so these are the sorts of things that determine how you select your. They're going to determine the channels that you're using online advertising. So let me see. OK, Like I said, the concert was over an hour. So I'm looking through our notes.

My notes rather, OK. I've already gone through how targeting is different. If you're looking at radio raw versus federal, let's see what else. OK, yes. Aha. Then I also wanted to get a sense of how they come up with the customer avatar, because for those who have been listening to this show for a very long time, we have over 760 episodes from now. You are well familiar that I come at this using a traditional sales approach when it comes to deciding who your customer advertise.

So traditionally in sales what we do is you want to grow your sales. We have to figure out who the ideal customer target customer is, the the customer avatar, whatever it is that you call it in your discipline. And the reason why that's important is because you can't start any sales activity and of course, by extension, you can't start any marketing activities if you don't know who you're supposed to be chasing after.

If you don't know who you're supposed to be running after and you just go and hit the streets and you're talking to everybody, you're spending money trying to chase everybody, you're going to waste a lot of time and resources and all get many conversions. Conversions means getting people to take the next step. So if you hand somebody a flyer, then I guess the conversion is you want somebody to send a text message or to call.

And if the person calls, then I guess the conversion might be book a meeting. If the person books a meeting, then I guess conversion might be show up for the meeting and look at samples, let's say a wedding photographer. And then if the person comes and looks at the samples and they like it, then I guess conversion will be now paid the deposit. So you've seen how at every single stage the person is supposed to do something next that leads up to the sale.

And so those are conversions. So if you don't get the ideal customer profile, the customer avatar, right, you're going to waste a lot of time in marketing, but waste a lot of time in your selling activities. So from a traditional sales point of view, what we do is we look at the person's trading history, Let's see your WhatsApp messages, let's see your SMS, let's see your invoices. Who are the people that you've been dealing with?

And that's going to get us to who the ideal customer avatar is. Because this is something that, I mean, I agreed with quite often. You'd find business owners who want to deal with a particular kind of person. The example that she gave was Dangote. There's some business people who want to deal with the Dangotees of this world. You know, people who are going to drop cold hard cash, millions and billions. But if you look at their records, you might find that a bulk of their profits actually come from the regular man who is down the street.

So it does cause some problems about how you're going to build a sales campaign while marketing campaign around the whims of the business owner who wants to target only the Dangotees. But actually the business is being supported by the regular Joes. So for we sales people, it's quite easy because it'll all be there. So I go look, Madam, we've looked at your messages, we've looked at your receipts, we've looked at everything.

And actually it's the common man or the common woman down the road who is bringing you most of your profits, the Dangote clients. Yes, you have. If you maybe three or four, the money sounds big. By the end of the day, they're not even dropping up to 10% of your profits. So let's see how we can focus on the average man and the average woman we do that we might be able to grow your income. So yeah, so she says there's actually no problem with that approach looking at trading history.

But from the marketing perspective, especially when you're dealing with clients who do not have an established trading history, then they have to rely on external research. They have to go into market market research. We've already done episodes on on the podcast in the past about quantitative versus qualitative means of market research. So I'm not going to go into that a bunch over here, but bottom line, quantitative market research, that is when you're going to send out Flyers.

Sorry, not Flyers. What are those things called? Gosh, what are these things called? You know, like research questionnaires? Yes, that's what I had in mind, questionnaires. So you send out questionnaires. Some people do. SurveyMonkey, Google forms different things. So those are much more qualitative. Sorry, quantitative methods. You're sending out stuff that is going to give you cold hard figures. You send out to, you know, 500

people or 1000 people and then some people get back and they analyze the data. Then quantitative methods. Sorry, no that those are quantitative, then qualitative. That is what I prefer, which is you actually go ahead and have a conversation with someone that gives you feelers about what the main issues are and where to look through next. And then of course, you can also do research using second resources that is looking at things that have already been published about your industry,

about your sector. That gives you a sense of what to look at next. So the podcast episodes over here on that. So you can, after you're done listening to this episode, just check the episode titles and you will find things on market research and you get caught up to speed on that. So those are some and of the techniques available to those people in the marketing space to try and figure out who the ideal target audience is.

But yeah, she's sympathetic to that traditional sales approach. We figure out who the main person is for now. We can be chasing down those people while we are coming up with a plan to target the other people that the business owner might want to run after. Ideally then, apart from demographics being important in trying to figure out who you're supposed to be running after, she also says industry also matters. Let's see what else.

We also have to look at social political trends. Now those are also important. And yes, there are some people who have been talking about how social political trends in the in the North East part of the country, for instance, have affected different sectors, whether it's a consumer products, sorry. Yeah, yeah, consumables or even all the way up to agriculture. So these things are really, really important. Then demographics and social political trends, all of those are important because you're trying to figure out who exactly has the disposable income they're supposed to be chasing after.

Because sometimes you might be chasing after some people, but then those people cannot afford the margins that you would like to make on your product. And then you guys are dead in the water. Then we also had lots of conversations around professional associations. I wanted to know what her own take was. And this is our opinion. She says that there are some associations like the Nigerian universe. Sorry, NUJ, what's NUJ again?

Nigerian Union of Journalists. Yes. My father was a member of that. He was a journalist. So there's the Nigerian Union of Journalists. And then there are also associations around cinema distribution in Nigeria. So our own opinion, some of these things are absolutely required. You can't practice without being a member of them. For instance, lawyers. My first degree was in law. So Nigerian Bar Association. You have to be a member of the Nigerian bars.

Sorry, no, not bars. What's it called? The Bar Association is when you're on the role of the Supreme Court. No, I'm not mixing things up. Yeah, forgive me. I might be mixing things up. You're you're OK to practice, you have to be on the role of the Supreme Court. So basically it's like a huge book is a registrar of everybody who has passed law law exams. So you're registered in Supreme Court, but then you also have to be a member of the Nigerian Bar Association as well.

Bar, yes, spelled the same way as in bar alcohol, but we don't spend most of our time drinking when we lawyers show up, when we hang out together. So some of those things are absolutely required. Nigerian Bar Association, Nigerian Union of Journalists, Cinema Distribution, Nigerian Association of Dentists and Neurosurgeons and blah blah blah blah blah. But when it comes to marketing, it is not something that is absolutely required, especially for people who work primarily in the online space.

Although she says that there are lots of things that marketing professionals have to pay attention to when it comes to ethical issues in online marketing. And then we also had a brief conversation there too, explore what some of the ethical issues were or are. And one of the things that she mentioned, one of the ethical issues there is how marketers can accept briefs from clients who engage in unethical business practices.

So it's one of the conversations that they have amongst themselves. Should you be having those sorts of people as clients? So somebody says come do this for me. We're trying to achieve this and you take the person on as a client. Even though you know that the person is experiencing poor customer satisfaction, the customer experience is poor. People claim that they're not receiving the services that they're supposed to get.

So as well, she was involved with that. Should you be representing such a client, sending more traffic to the person, knowing that this person is going to deliver a poor customer experience and things of that nature? Now, of course, she says that people who look at it from a purely practical and financial point of view, like, hey, I have to eat, he's a customer, the pay is good or she's a customer, the pay is good, so I might as well take the money.

So anyway, these are some of the ethical issues that are involved in. Well, for those of us who are in The Who are communications professionals, whether you're involved in sales or whether you're in marketing, because I have also been asked from some by some family members in the past like, OK, you say you're talking to this person, but from a Catholic perspective, remember we're Catholic. Should you actually be promoting this kind of business?

So I guess these are conversations that are not just limited to people who are in the online marketing space. Then we also went through what the campaigns for success were, and well, we've already done a podcast episode on that, so there's no need to go into that in detail. But she said that she's much more in favor of the key performance indicators, basically numerical goals that show whether the objective was supposed, whether the objective had been reached.

So they had call numbers, the cold numbers. Now I brought up the thing about client satisfaction and hold on, let me look at the my notes so that I don't misquote her. OK. So she says client satisfaction is good and absolutely important because if you achieve client satisfaction, the person is happy and then the person is going to come back and do business with you in the future. And I give her top marks for recognizing that.

But she says that clients satisfaction for her, she views it more as a customer relationship management issue or an interpersonal issue or a relationship goes issue, those sorts of things. But she doesn't really take that as a hardcore pass mark or fail mark. Whether she got things right or she got things wrong, okay. So let's see. That's it then What else? OK, yes, I mentioned that she's a marketing communication professional.

She's mostly in the online space and the name of her company. I had been calling it Loggia until we had the conversation and she corrected me that it's actually is a Loggia. And so I wanted to know the meaning, the rationale behind it. Loggia as in LOGIA. As for those of you who want to check out after we're done, you're done listening to this episode, but you can find you want to find her name, her links to some useful resources in case you want to find out more about her or if you would like to engage her services for some online work.

So log here. That is LOGIA. So I wanted to know if it had anything to do with logos. And she agreed that yes, logos, the Greek word. There are closely links to writing and from there pulling across this whole idea of creativity because there's certain amount of creativity that her and her team members would like to imbibe in all the things that they do. So even though we have been talking about Log Gear communications, there actually are other arms to the business.

There's Log Gear Publishing and there's Log Gear Productions. That's going to be the film making arm of the business, film music, serialized content online. So that's videos and stuff like that. So let's see what was that? OK. And then one more books. Yes, Log Gear books. So they try to infuse creativity throughout the whole process and that's the reason why they have the name. Then let's see personal details, Personal details.

What personal details did I get? Oh yeah, so she is a, she has a masters from Toronto University in Canada and that's where we got into that conversation on ethical issues involved in online marketing. Then let's see what else. OK, I mentioned she's Steve. She's also married with kids just like I am. And OK, not Abuja based, even though she spends a lot of time in Abuja and that's because they live in KD in Kaduna and Kaduna is a stone throw from Abuja.

Well, at least people who live in Kaduna, they consider it to be a stone throw. But for me, I think if I'm going to be spending, you know, an hour and a half or two hours shuttling either way, I wouldn't consider that a stone throw. But anyway, Kaduna people, that's what they think. You think I can just wake up in the morning, dashed Abuja conduct business and then dash back so KD based. But then of course in this world where a lot of us do a lot of stuff online, that's not a hindrance anyway because I'm talking to people currently in the East to see if I can get some work done with them, have clients in Lagos.

So location is not a hindrance at all. So those are some of the key insights that I can share with you guys concerning the conversation that I had with Amina. And if you're interested to know some more about her business, then you just check the show notes after you're done listening to the podcast episode. So thank you very much for your time and attention. Yeah, I'll catch you guys at the next episode and I don't have my list of questions with me, but we'll just pick off from wherever I left off after the sorry rather before the sort Rd.

episode. So thanks for your time and attention. I'll catch you guys at the next episode.