We’re blazing digital marketing trail for coming generations – Bandele, Managing partner, Forza Digital Media

A little over a year after its establishment, Forza Digital Media has acquired a reputation as the new go-to digital marketing agency.

This was not surprising since the founders, Seye Bandele and Chikodi Okaiwe, are renowned for their rich experience in e-commerce (specifically in marketing and sales) garnered from their working in various online retail entities including Yesmobile, Yudala and Konga.

In this interview with The Nigerian Xpress, Bandele, Forza Digital Media’s managing partner, explains how Forza Digital is helping clients to connect to their audience using a revolutionary data-driven process that guarantees results.

What is the objective behind the establishment of Forza Digital?

Forza was established in early 2019, but I and my co-founder have worked together for a very long time in e-commerce. Back then, he was in commercial operations while I was in marketing.

We eventually left e-commerce and decided to do this. During our time in e-commerce, we created brands that previously didn’t exist and ended up building an industry that didn’t exist in the market.

Technology brought new possibilities to our environment. And suddenly everyone had something they wanted to do or create; and who better to talk to other than the guys who are known to have the expertise?

So, we had a lot of people talking to us, from start-ups to wristwatch makers medium and large scale companies, several people who were seeking to create brands and engage a fresh audience. We decided to set up an entity to help these people to launch their products into the market. That was how Forza Digital came into being. 

How has the business been?

So far so good. We have been able to attract a number of valued-clients including the Coscharis Group and Flour Mills.

Simply explain what Forza Digital Media does?

We help connect our clients to the audiences that they are looking for and they want to connect to. Our process is very result-oriented and data-led. Unlike the conventional method of marketing where people say they want to get their message out to a certain number of people, we will only recommend to you based on the kind of offerings you are serving, the channels, techniques and different types of methods that will get you the kind of results that you are looking for.

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Importantly, everything we do is led by data. We never do anything from history or what we think works. If the data speaks differently, whether it is empirical, survey or sample data, we try to use data to inform our decisions. No matter what it is; whether it is using certain colours for designs or selecting billboards whether digital or analogue; all the decisions must be data-led.

Share with us some of the challenges that you have encountered since you commence operations?

One big challenge is customers not fully understanding what their problems are and thinking that they can just recommend to you what they want you to do.

For example, a customer has a product that is not selling and he thinks the problem with the product is that not many people know about it. When you engage us, the first thing we do is to try and look at the bigger picture. If a product is good, no matter the number of people you have channelled your communications to, you will see some level of engagement, and that tells you if you speak to a larger number of people, sales could go up.

Many things could be wrong with a product. Perhaps, due to the way the brand has been designed, it is not connecting to the target consumer. On the other hand, it could be that the product is not actually solving a real problem. We ask those questions and give very strong recommendations on what needs to be done.

Clients do come to us with a request that: ‘Please just help me package this’ – hey, you can’t really package your audience or market! A product needs to be solving a real problem, only then can you boost it with marketing to get the profits or the business that you are trying to create.

Nigeria presents a very peculiar environment. We are a country with a very large population. Unfortunately, a large number of that population is extremely poor. By extension, if the people who make up a country are poor, then it means that we have a poor country. So, as rich as Nigeria may appear on the outside in terms of resources, the people are inherently poor.

We are also not a producing country, so you who have a product have likely created that product using foreign exchange because it was created outside before it was brought in. So, for it to make commercial sense to you there is usually a range of costs associated with your products.

Before you can achieve a large number of customers for your product which will give you the volumes that you are looking for, you need to find a specific area of the market where their disposable income is enough to buy your product and become an active user of your product. With this in mind, the market now becomes a little bit small depending on the kind of product you are trying to sell.

You also have to be deliberate in your communications, know who you are targeting, ensure that you have done customer profiling so that you know that these people can afford the product that we are trying to sell to them. The billionaires in the country today are selling very basic things which are survival items like sugar, salt, food, oil, kerosene, petrol amongst others.

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This is because we have a large number of people who buy these things. If you are providing some level of luxury or semi-luxury products, you may struggle. That is a challenge. We need the economy to be buoyant enough for the people within to be making meaningful income so that they can spend again and grow at large.

How do you make a profit out of your engagement with customers who want to have their way when your recommendations run contrary to their expectations?  

We are a boutique agency. What that means is that we are not looking for thousands of clients. We are looking for very deliberate clients who value the quality of our work and who will be patient for us to do proper work for. An element of our offering is the Strategic Consulting Arm.

This means we sit with the customers and identify the problems before we proffer solutions. It is easy to market ourselves as a solution-focused agency, we identify your problems for you before we proffer solutions. We work with people who value the advice that we give, the insights we are able to expose them to, people who are willing to work with us to create impactful solutions in the market that we are trying to create.

The bottom line is that we want to create an enabling environment for those who are coming after us. We want a Nigeria that we’d look back in the next 30 years and it would be a Nigeria where opportunities abound because of the work that we have done.

How do you mean?

Digital marketing as it is today is an industry that did not exist 50 years ago. What that means is that a new industry has been created and there aren’t a lot of core professionals in the industry. There is nobody in the industry today that has studied Digital Marketing for 20 or 25 years.

Hence, it is difficult to say that someone is a veteran of Digital Marketing for 25 years. Given our environment, we are trying to create deep expertise in the field that involves creating solutions that solve the problems in our locality.

Many of the things we enjoy today are things from industries that have been created over time. So we also want to create a valuable industry for the younger ones and be able to impact our society.

How has the Covid-19 pandemic disrupted your business?

It has been very tough. The outbreak of the pandemic was characterized by serious financial losses that nobody could have predicted from January 1. At the same time, Covid-19 also presented some opportunities. Businesses are forced to innovate and think quickly about how to reposition themselves for maximum benefit in the face of today’s realities.

Nowadays we are engaging with clients all over the world who want to recreate many of their business offerings in a much more optimized way that gives them a superior advantage in a new, distributed yet connected world.