For Princewill Akuma, the move from DJing to digital marketing wasn’t just a career move. It was a chance to prove he could reinvent himself.

Growing up in Port Harcourt, a city in southern Nigeria, he was heavily influenced by the creative interests that ran through his family. While spending holidays with his grandparents, he would spend hours reading in their library before listening to music from musicians such as Lucky Dube, Biggies, and Tupac.

Those hours spent listening to music and watching his grandfather play the piano ultimately fuelled an interest in music. At the university, he began trying his hands at DJing and briefly co-owned an entertainment magazine. His start as a DJ and on-air personality while in university is packed with lessons for everyone.

“I walked into the radio station one day back in the university, and the music had gone off. I got in and started playing from a disc I had when a lecturer walked in and said, ‘Hey, who are you?’ I was like, ‘Sorry, I’m a student in this department, and nobody was in here, and there was dead air. The receptionist didn’t know what to do, so I just walked in and played a CD I had.’ The lecturer went. ‘You stay on here. Whoever was on this show is no longer part of this team.’”

By 2011, he was done with his undergraduate programme at the University of Port Harcourt and was beginning to consider a career change. He had also moved to Lagos, where he had a much smaller network than Port Harcourt and was getting fewer gigs. Something needed to change, and soon as he was fast depleting his savings.

Flowing with the tide   

His first step was to do a skills audit. At the time, he was undergoing the national youth service programme at the now-defunct FinBank, where a direct manager frequently got copies of the Harvard Business Review. Tasked with receiving it for the manager, he would first make photocopies, which he read after work.

Reading those magazines opened his eyes to a world beyond music and customer relations. His research soon revealed that so many companies in Nigeria were hiring digital marketers, and so he spent the next year upskilling with online courses and practising using the social media pages of the churches he attended and friends’ businesses.

He soon felt ready to start searching for a job and fortunately landed one at Cool FM within a year of searching. Though his task was to grow the radio station’s social media pages to a million, when he left, it was a revenue-generating arm of the business.

Leveraging social media for personal and professional growth   

Jobberman and LinkedIn have played a huge role at different stages of his career.

While reading the Harvard Business Review helped him identify digital marketing as a potential career path, it was Jobberman that aided his job search.

A few years later, he would work there, but his path to Jobberman wasn’t linear. While at Cool FM, he discovered that LinkedIn could help with his visibility as a professional and started sharing about his work.

Those posts soon got attention, and recruiters were reaching out. Some applications were successful, but many others were not, as he often couldn’t agree with them on a favourable salary. Other times, the role was in an industry he had no interest in.

In 2016, he landed an interview with Cheki Nigeria, but after getting to the final stage, he failed to reach an agreement on compensation. A few weeks later, he got a text from one of the hiring managers involved in the Cheki role.

He was impressed with his performance during the interview and wanted to recommend him for a role at Jobberman. Ultimately, he got the role, calling it a proof of concept.

“Looking back, it felt really amazing. Funnily enough, when I resumed very early at Cool FM, I often saw cars that were branded Jobberman that used to come and pick up their employees at Egbeda, and eventually I got the job. It felt like a full-circle moment for me.”

Founders set the tone for marketing   

Beyond being a full-circle moment and being his first role at a startup, his time at Jobberman left him with some valuable lessons, particularly how founders can shape the tone of the work done by the marketing team.

Shortly after he joined, Olalekan Ayodeji, one of the Co-founders at Jobberman, walked up to him and requested he move his seat closer to the sales team. He didn’t understand the request because he wasn’t part of the team, but he obliged.

“It really transformed me. One of the things was that I could hear the questions that candidates called to ask them, and I could hear the kind of conversations that they had with recruiters, and this informed some of the campaigns that we created. It was from one of such conversations that I figured out that we were not really optimising the use of LinkedIn.”

User-centric marketing   

In the eight years since joining Jobberman, he has held roles at Octamile, Workforce Group, and emerchantpay. He identifies a few principles that guide his work as a marketer.

The first is a focus on the user above all else.

“When I worked in tech recruitment versus traditional business and consulting recruitment, one thing I figured out was that the way you construct messaging for a senior business HR manager that is a woman is different from a man there. There are certain campaigns that will have suitability to one demographic but not another.”

The second is an understanding of the relationship between sales and marketing. Drawing on lessons from his days at Jobberman, he says that understanding a business’ sales cycle significantly impacts how marketing is done.

Focusing on a business’ journey is also crucial. For startups operating in competitive sectors, there’s the temptation to have a reactionary marketing strategy, but he insists that each business has unique goals and should develop strategies that help them reach those goals.

Noting that LinkedIn offers huge benefits for individuals and businesses alike, he states that the first step is understanding the goals of a business.

A business that chooses to pursue thought leadership should involve its top brass, ensuring they regularly publish content on the platform. In some cases, this could mean ghostwriting content for them or hosting webinars.

Understanding how the platform works is also crucial. He notes that LinkedIn is increasingly favouring short-form video content, and organisations like TED are already taking advantage of that.

For some organisations, this could mean publishing industry reports that establish their expertise. Ultimately, the key is to always have an understanding of the business’ goals.

Technical founders may lack an adequate understanding of marketing, but the success of their startup depends on it. A founder’s role, he says, includes outlining the product roadmap to new hires but also getting their thoughts on the product.

“You cannot have great marketing if the founder doesn’t understand marketing,” he insists.

An often-repeated mistake is waiting until a product is ready before marketing begins, but he advises that marketing considerations should always be baked into the product development process.Startups often delay hiring marketing talent until much later in the journey due to financial considerations. He advises that founders either speak with experienced marketers to get their input or hire them as consultants.