Esther is a brand and marketing communication manager and the founder of The Creators’ CommYOUnity, where she helps young creators with brand clarity. Over the years, Esther has worked with brands like Nestuge, Zikel Cosmetics, Yellowlyfe Travels, Nerd Operations, and many more.
In this interview, she shares her career’s origin story, role of storytelling and consistency in brand communication, career lessons, and much more.
How did the journey in brand communications begin?
Growing up, while going to Church with my dad, I was deeply fascinated by the big billboards from Cadbury and Coca-Cola. They were the big guys in the industry then.
I would see those billboards and how they make the product look exciting, and I would think of how it would be better, “What if that was supposed to be italicized?” That built my interest in advertising.
But I didn’t follow through with advertising because there’s this stigma that we don’t like to talk about with mass communications and ladies that tow that path.
Anyway, I started out with English, and I think in 2017, my best friend at the time would tell me, “Hey, what’s up? There’s this brand looking for a social media manager.”
He didn’t even call the role social media management. He just said I would handle the socials and post captions. The pay was N20,000.
Was that your first job in marketing?
That was actually my first corporate job. So, I eventually became the social media manager for this brand. I didn’t even know it was called Social Media Management at that point. My offer letter did not also say that it was social media management.
Later on, I learned more about what I was doing and understood that it was social media management. My love for research helped me to understand the intricacies of social media management.
As the year rolled by, I gained a lot of knowledge and started explaining to people that social media management isn’t random, and soon, I started doing social media strategy, which is still the love of my life now.
So, I moved from being a social media manager, or rather a caption writer for social media managers, to a social media strategist. Then, I worked in an advertising firm for a couple of months as a content creator, and I was that video girl doing vox pop, interview sessions, and presentations because I love to talk.
Later, I fell in love with branding and started thinking, “How can we mix branding and social media, branding strategy, and all of that?”
Throughout this period, I was a brand ambassador for a beauty and skincare brand. Then, I moved up to a brand liaison, where I helped distributors understand the product better in the eastern part of Nigeria.
I gained momentum in understanding how brands, PR, and corporates work. It was at that moment that I understood that I wasn’t going to work for SMEs because I loved the corporate world and the trail of their marketing pipelines.
In 2021, I decided to get a marketing degree from the Chartered Institute of Marketing, UK. And here I am.
What is brand and marketing communications? What does it entail?
Essentially, as a brand and marketing communication manager, I’m responsible for leading the communications team.
So, think of internal communications, external communications, advertisements, point of sale, partnerships, relationships, and marketing after sales.
I’m responsible for thinking about the partnerships that make the most sense for the brand. I collaborate or reach out to these partners and establish structures that benefit both brands.
For instance, if you’re hosting an event and want 10,000 users after it, you think of how to reach that number with the partnerships in view and the venue you’re going to use.
I like to think that the brand communication manager can be anything at any time. You could be an event manager all of a sudden (if you are in that industry) or a point-of-sales person.
If you meet a brand communication manager at a tech conference, we are the ones who would break down the product on how you can use it as a business, as a brand, or as an individual.
Basically, you’re supposed to understand the brand like the mark on your palm and communicate it as the person needs it – a solution to their problems. So, if you’re thinking of becoming a brand communications manager, you would obviously have to understand leveraging relationships, communicating, and breaking down the most difficult conversations to the barest minimum.
What role does storytelling play in brand communication?
Storytelling is everything you need in marketing. From point A to Z, there has to be a connection. Why is B-C-D-E-F before G-H-I?
Everything we do on social media is actually storytelling. For instance, if you take a selfie and make a post, what’s your goal for that post as an individual? What’s the goal?
The only people who can relate to that image other than ” Oh, that’s a fine woman” are the people who already know me. They know me because I’ve created a pattern in their head that builds a story.
So, you have to build patterns to tell great stories, and great stories have a beginning and almost no end. I like to think of it as a continuous system.
When you tell great stories, you are so roped in that I could use a thought pattern from the previous conversation to leverage a new one. A smart brand uses storytelling to tell its story in the most likable and most relatable way.
How do you ensure consistent messaging and tone across different marketing channels for your brand?
Embodying a personality! If you want one person telling a story, it’s easier. You could switch on and off a character.
I’ll start from a team perspective. When you have different people on a team, you need them to understand the why and you also need them to become a part of the character.
For instance, I had a friend tell me that they saw a video from a brand I’m working with, and they could tell I didn’t create it because the ”videos are not videoing.”
That’s supposed to be a compliment, but I didn’t take it as such because it meant that I had a team structure problem. It meant that they were not telling the same stories that I was going to tell.
If there’s a gap in your brand communication, you could get great acquisition but have low retention. Besides the fact that your product may be bad in itself, great communication helps to keep a user.
There’s a meme of a product marketer, a product manager, and a developer. The product marketer says, “We have a cashback feature,” or something like that. The product manager says, “We are going to implement a cashback feature.” But the developer is confused. “Do we have a cashback feature? Am I supposed to develop that? I didn’t know that.”
Check any brand you really love right now. It’s not their products that you love. You might like the functionality of the product. The experience that has been communicated from top to bottom is usually the main reason, and I think that’s the primary role of the brand communications person in any company.
How do you think the marketing industry will evolve over the next five to ten years?
There’ll be a lot of AI tools. But I think after five years, or before the end of five years, there will be a drop in AI tools as well because you need human touch and humanness.
That’s the essence of marketing. If you don’t have that as a brand, customers will drift towards people who can communicate better.
What is a marketing trend that is here to stay? And what is another that you think is overrated?
Storytelling is here to stay.
Growth marketing for the second.
Why growth marketing?
I’ve not been a fan of one person doing multiple roles. I’ve also not been a fan of duplicating roles. If you have a marketing manager with quite the experience in your company, you do not need a growth marketer.
We like fancy words a lot in marketing. So, maybe that’s the thing – the fancifulness of those words. But in an actual sense, I don’t think that anybody should have duplicated roles in your company.
I think it’s good to note that the primary responsibility of any marketer in your company is acquisition, retention, and growth. So, if you have an acquisition manager, it makes a lot of sense. Retention manager also makes a lot of sense if you have the facilities and resources.
But hiring a growth marketer just because you expect growth is like hiring a growth growth.
A marketing manager’s role is
- to promote products and services
- develop and implement marketing and pricing strategies, plans, and projects,
- conduct marketing research and analysis of customers’ needs and industry trends,
- generate new business leads,
- oversee the marketing department staff and marketing budget,
- and ensure brand identity.
As a marketing manager, you should have the skill sets to be able to do these responsibilities and train your team members to replicate them.
So, if you are saying that you need a growth marketer, what exactly would the growth marketer do differently from developing and implementing marketing strategies, which is the role of your marketing manager?
Your growth marketer is your marketing manager.
If you could go back in time to give your younger self a piece of marketing advice, what would it be?
Have a mentor, document your process, and go for more events. The last one is personal.
Documenting your process, as little as it is, gives for thankfulness, especially in your days of drought. You can see how much you’ve actually grown.
Looking back, what mistakes did you make along your career journey and what lessons did you learn from them?
Procrastinating! You know you can do it in under 6 hours, but you will wait till the week is over before doing it.
At some point, I stopped reading and researching because I was too confident. And that played a terrible role. So, yeah, I do regret that.
Where do you see yourself in the near future for your career? What is the next step for thetopazbrand?
I’ll be doing a lot of collaborations and teaching a lot. I also have a course coming up on brand communications.
It will be a video course and give you a breakdown of how to build a career in brand communications. It’s quite an investment of what you need to know.
What tools do you use as part of your brand communication workflow?
- I love the benefits of HubSpot. It’s a hub for a lot of information.
- I’m Google’s best friend. I search for the weirdest and the most unimportant things or things that don’t make sense, but I’m trying to make them make sense. I think that Google is great for learning behavioral patterns.
- I use Sendgrid for automation with emails. You could also use it for your drip campaigns.
- I love Capcut for editing videos and adding captions.
- I use Adobe Studio for voice recordings.
- I use existing Google tools – Google Docs, Sheets, Slide, and the like.
Where can we go to know more about Esther Felix?
I’m “thetopazbrand” on any social media page.