A data-driven strategist with a Master’s degree in Digital Marketing with distinction from the University of Staffordshire, United Kingdom, Oguka argues that the real opportunity in AI marketing is not in coding but in interpretation, experimentation, and strategic thinking.

Industry demand supports her view. Hiring trends increasingly favour AI-literate marketers, prompt engineers with domain expertise, growth strategists who understand automation tools, and analysts who can interpret AI-driven insights.

Companies are not primarily searching for machine learning engineers within marketing teams; they are looking for professionals who can translate AI capabilities into business outcomes.

“The real gap isn’t in building AI systems,” Oguka explains. “It’s in knowing how to apply them intelligently to marketing problems.”

According to Oguka, most digital marketers already possess AI-ready skills. Keyword research mirrors prompt strategy. Audience targeting aligns with AI segmentation. A/B testing translates naturally into algorithmic optimisation.

Analytics skills prepare marketers to interpret predictive modelling outputs. Content strategy evolves seamlessly into AI-assisted content workflows.

“When I began working more deeply with AI-driven systems, I realised the hardest part wasn’t the tool,” she says. “It was understanding the business question.”

Rather than encouraging marketers to learn programming languages, Oguka recommends practical adoption through existing tools.

Platforms such as HubSpot’s AI content assistant, Google Analytics 4 predictive metrics, SEMrush’s AI writing assistant, and Mailchimp’s AI segmentation features already embed machine learning into everyday marketing workflows.

By automating repetitive tasks like data analysis, reporting, and draft generation, she has reduced campaign analysis time significantly while improving performance outcomes, without writing a single line of code.

She outlines a four-step transition plan for marketers. First, learn AI through marketing problems, not abstract theory, ask how AI can improve campaign reporting or SEO research.

Second, build measurable case studies demonstrating outcomes such as improved ROI, lower acquisition costs, or faster content production. Third, publish learnings and document experiments to build credibility. Fourth, collaborate with technical teams to understand data inputs, model limitations, and performance metrics.

“You don’t need to code,” she emphasizes. “You need to understand how AI supports decision-making.”

Oguka also warns against the biggest mistake marketers make: waiting until they feel technical enough.

In a rapidly evolving environment, curiosity and experimentation matter more than perfection. For global talent, particularly those seeking competitive roles or sponsorship pathways, AI literacy is increasingly becoming a differentiator.

Companies want marketers who can automate growth, improve ROI, and apply AI responsibly.

Currently open to digital marketing roles, AI consulting projects, and speaking engagements, Oguka continues to mentor students and promote digital literacy for girls in African schools.

Her message is clear: the transition into AI marketing begins not with code, but with better questions, smarter workflows, and measurable action.

The continent’s foremost SEO and digital marketing event will hold at Mike Adenuga Centre, Alliance Francaise, Osborne Road, Ikoyi, Lagos State from 10:00am to 5:30pm and will feature a panel discussion on ‘How African Culture Influences Digital Marketing and Consumer Engagement’ by Ife Durosinmi-etti, founder, Herconomy; Shina Charless Memud, founder, Yournotify and Crystal Nyarko, founder, Clear Narative Media.

Topics that will be treated at the conference include:  ‘Transforming Business Visibility Through Local Search Expertise’ by Amaka Chukwuma(SEO and Content Strategist), ‘Common SEO Mistakes and Quick Wins for African eCommerce Brands’ by Safia Marmon (Project Leat at Sunbowl), ‘Smarter Search Strategies: Diversifying Ad Platforms in the Age of AI’ by Serge Nguele (Founder Your PPC doctor), ‘Scaling Your Business Responsibly with AI, Even on a Tight Budget’ by Emina Demir (Head Of Digital Marketing-Vixen Digital), ‘Building Keyword Strategy’ by Juliana Turnbul (Semrush), and ‘Content & Product Auditing with Google Tools and Crawl Data’ by  Marco Giordano (Web & Data Analyst).

Others are; ‘Using Case Studies To Uncover Pain Points and Buyers’ Behavior’ by Stella Inabo (Content Marketer, Float), ‘How Search Happens: Before and After you Hit Enter’ by Dave Cousin (Founder Dave the SEO &co), ‘Insights From African Startups That Are Killing It With SEO and Content Marketing’ by Shehu AbdulGaniy (Founder, Your Content Mart), ‘Crystal Clear Socials: A Framework For Standing Out on Social Media’ by Crystal Nyarko (Founder, Clear Narrative Media), ‘Emotional Connections: Using Brand Archetypes to Enhance Engagement’ by Rejoice Ojiaku (Co-founder, B-Digital, UK), ‘Data-Driven Digital Marketing: The Importance of Data in Decision-Making’ by Ifeoma Nicole Oraekie (Product Marketer) and ‘The 5 Channels You Need to Become a Thought Leader’ by Chima Mmeje (Founder FCDC).

According to the convener, Ebere Cecilia Jonathan, this year’s event will offer a more immersive experience for participants as they network under a convivial ambience of music and poetry with the leading lights in digital marketing, sharing experiences, challenges and solutions.

She says, “Digital marketers, SEO professionals, Tech marketers, business owners, brands and entities interested in improving their online presence and visibility will be gathering to learn how to improve their skills, rethink internet marketing strategies, and connect with like-minded individuals.

“Join us for Africa’s must-attend SEO and digital marketing event to learn strategies and gain inspirations to improve your business and personal digital presence. It is an opportunity to meet the faces you’ve always interacted with online, so join industry experts, business owners and make new connections.

“We’re taking the conversation to the streets of Lagos the next day with Search AfriCon outing.  Don’t miss this exclusive opportunity to unwind and create valuable relationships.”

The Search AfriCon 2025 event is supported by Google, The Gray Dot Company, USA, Women-in-Tech SEO, UK, Semrush, Bax Analytics, Turn Global, Spain, and Nisa Digital, Dubai.

In other words, expansion is the blaring light that signals that a particular financial sector or business has achieved growth remarkable enough to push it into entering new market spaces. In today’s digital era, one of the economic sectors leading this charge is the Fintech industry.

With the spike in online banking, digital wallets and mobile payments, the Fintech industry has become an international sensation.

The sector has experienced substantial revenue growth in its market segments over the years, which has made it quite the ‘Universal buzz’.

In fact, since the 20th century, the fintech space has kept ticking success boxes.

In 2022, McKinsey & Company estimated it accounted for 5% of the world’s banking sector’s net worth, which is a whopping 150 to 205 billion dollars. That is an incredible ‘humble beginning’ if you ask me.

Despite these tremendous achievements, entering newer markets always poses a difficult task, especially when the expansion is hanging on the edge of several international borders. In a bid to break into these new market areas, Fintech organisations are faced with the daunting challenge of connecting with customers of diverse languages and regions.

This is where Localising Content SEO comes in handy. It has become the ‘smart’ strategy that fintech industries can utilise to win organic traffic and dominate the global market.

Let’s clear up your confusion about this strategy.

What does localising content SEO mean?

It is your adaptation of online content to meet the unique preferences of the local market. Some other definitions would add that it is the act of creating and utilising website content, especially to attract local customers.

Picture it this way: Bank A, a British bank, wants to sell its digital services in a Chinese market. Localising content SEO here means that Bank A has to adapt its online content, language, and cultural references to Chinese preferences if it wants to witness an overflow in sales.

How can fintech companies utilise localised content SEO to drive organic traffic on a global scale?

Localising your Fintech SEO demands that you succumb to a nuanced approach because entering different market spaces across the world comes with complexities, such as other languages, local currencies, dates and formats. Therefore, to ensure that the fintech industries achieve this, here is an array of strategies that can be used to penetrate various markets all over the globe:

1. Running Local Keyword Research

In the online world, keywords are very essential for content SEO. They are the bridge that connects users’ search to the contents of your organisation’s website and helps search engines give a rank to your pages for relevant queries.

This, in turn, boosts the visibility of your organisation and increases traffic.

Bringing this down to gaining recognition and engagements in new markets, organisations should ensure that thorough research is carried out on the local keywords used in the specific region they are targeting before diving head-first into offering their services.

This includes identifying the financial terminologies or region-specific terms used in that zone, like the slang name they use for money or local dialect names used for certain financial products.

You can achieve this by using helpful tools such as Google Keywords Planner, Ahrefs and SEMrush to discover and explore local search trends that could be helpful to your organisation.

2. On-Page Optimisation:

This strategy is what I call the ‘production stage.’ It’s the stage where everything needed to draw the attention of the locals is infused on the content page.

It’s all the measures you employ within the content page to improve its position in the search ranking and reach a wider audience.

This means that the page in question must comprise information relatable to the market space you want it to reach.

On-page optimisation comes with several sub-components, including images, content/body information, external and internal links, header tags, etc.

However, there are a number of them you must watch out for while localising content SEO, and they are:

Title tags: These are the Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) elements that specify the title of your web page.

It’s so important because it helps search engines and consumers understand the purpose of your webpage.

Therefore, it is important that in creating these title tags, words that resonate with your target market or local keywords are used.

Meta descriptions: Many times, once the search engine result page is on display, there is a snippet of text underneath the page title. Those texts are known as meta descriptions in SEO terms.

They are used to inform and interest the user enough to engage on that page. Similarly, while drafting out these descriptions, local keyword usage should be a priority.

Internal links: If your fintech organisation offers a wide variety of services, then this is very important. Internal links are hyperlinks that are used to navigate to different pages within the same website, almost like a redirection link to a certain type of service.

Another arm of this component that can be utilised is location-specific landing pages.

This is when a page on your website directs users to another page within the same domain. It can be employed to direct viewers to the local addresses near them, featuring contact information and hours of operation.

This will give the locals of those regions easy access to the services you provide nearest to them.

Google Business Profile (GBP) Maximisation

This strategy is scarcely used because not many companies believe that it can bring massive traffic to their pages. In reality, it is a significant strategy used in building traffic on your page.

This is because a good percentage of the world’s population uses Google browsers to make their findings; it is also one of the most popular browsers in existence.

Therefore, utilising the Google Business Profile gives companies an added advantage in new marketplaces if leveraged.

Organisations can harness this option by including the relevant categories they have and the services they offer while utilising local keywords related to the target market or regions.

Localising content SEO offers any company, not just Fintech companies, a wellspring of benefits, including increasing their online visibility and building trust and credibility with the local audience.

It is one of the major tactics that guarantees improvement in organic traffic in diverse markets only if it is harnessed by industries globally.

*Kelechi Anyikude is a seasoned digital technology expert with a background in digital and growth marketing. Kelechi specializes in crafting targeted marketing strategies that leverage the power of SEO, social media, and content marketing. He is passionate about staying ahead of industry trends and regularly contributes insights to marketing publications and speaks at conferences worldwide.

A new study from WordTips analyzed Google search data to uncover the most searched-for word definitions in every country.

“There is no nation without language, because there’s no collectivity without a language,” says Ilan Stavans, Lewis-Sebring Professor of Humanities and Latin American and Latino Culture at Amherst College. “[L]anguage is more than simply the way that the nation communicates with itself. Language is the instrument to create history and also a vision of where the nation is going.”

The words we choose, the words we borrow and the way we interpret them — even within the same language — are both personal and political. While we may not need language to think, words are how we articulate our thoughts and shape our (collective) identities. And so it is that word meanings evolve and come to fit our world as our cultures change and grow — with old words often growing into new uses that leave many of us grappling for dictionaries, “Urban” or otherwise.

In our new study, data scientists at WordTips found the word definition that each country searched for the most in 2024.

Using the Keyword Research Tool from Semrush, we ranked words based on the volume of Google searches for their definitions.

Searches were conducted in local languages to uncover the most googled word definitions worldwide.

Key Findings

• Demure, Fascism and Resilience are the most searched-for word definitions in six countries each.
• The most searched-for definition in the S. is Gaslighting, which has 110,000 monthly searches.
• The UK’s most searched-for definition is Diversity (9,900 monthly searches).
• Integrity is Canada’s most searched-for definition (8,100 monthly searches).
• In Australia, Genocide is the most searched-for definition, with 4,400 monthly

Key Findings

• TikTok’s Rise: TikTok saw a dramatic increase to 41.8B visits, a growth of 6015.0% since 2019.
• Five-Year Growth: Social media visits jumped from 582.9B to 1.98T, a 70.56% increase over five years from 2019 to 2023.
• 2023 Visit Highs: Combined visits for the top 10 sites reached a record high of 1.98 trillion in 2023, with a global average of 165.0 billion monthly and 5.4 billion daily visits.
• Dominant Platforms: In 2023, YouTube led with 1.35T visits, followed by Facebook and Twitter.
• Top Visiting Countries: The US (436.1B), India (171.8B), and Brazil (123B) led in social media visits in 2023.
• User Demographics and Devices: Male users dominated at 68.65%, with most accessing social media on mobile devices (59.10%).

TikTok Overview:

TikTok, the breakout star in the social media space, has seen an explosive 60.15 times increase in its growth rate, the highest among the top platforms.

From just 0.7 billion visits in 2019, the platform has skyrocketed to 41.8 billion visits in 2023. If numbers like this continue before long it might be claiming the top spot.

With an even distribution of male and female users at 69% and 31%, respectively, TikTok has made a remarkable 78.35% of its access from mobile devices, reflecting its status as a mobile-centric platform. And in an increasingly mobile-centric world, the odds are very much in TikTok’s favor.

Here are some key numbers:

• Total Visits 2023: 41.8B
• % of Total Visits of the Top 10 Sites: 2.11%
• Average Monthly Visits in 2023: 3.5B
• Average Daily Visits in 2023: 114.7M
• Growth (2019-2023): 41.2B (98.34%)
• Average Visit Duration in 2023: 9:34
• Gender Distribution: 69% Male, 31% Female
• Device Preference: 78.35% Mobile

10 Most Popular Social Media Platforms

1. YouTube:

YT maintained its leadership in social media, skyrocketing to 1.35 trillion visits in 2023 from 263.3 billion in 2019, marking an impressive 80.49% growth.

2. Facebook:

Although it lost its top spot, Facebook remained a key player, with 216.4 billion visits in 2023, up 15.33% from 2019.

This growth, albeit more modest, demonstrates Facebook’s enduring relevance in social networking, with a fairly balanced gender distribution and almost equal use of desktop and mobile platforms.

3. X (Twitter):

Exhibited notable growth, with visits soaring to 112.9 billion in 2023, a 63.19% increase from 41.6 billion in 2019.

This reflects Twitter’s appeal for real-time content, with a slightly male-dominated user base and a significant preference for mobile usage (77.51%).

4. Instagram:

Capitalized on the visual content trend, escalating to 87.3 billion visits in 2023, a 62.40% increase from 2019.

Instagram’s growth underscores its strength as a mobile-first platform, popular for visual entertainment, with a gender distribution leaning towards male users (67%).

5. Reddit:

Emerged as a significant player with 81.0 billion visits in 2023, up 68.72% from 2019. This growth rate highlights Reddit’s role as a key platform for community-driven content, with a majority male user base and a high percentage of mobile traffic (72.27%).

6. TikTok:

Apart from being banned in many countries, TikTok showed the most explosive growth among all platforms, with a 60.15 times increase in visits, reaching 41.8 billion in 2023 from just 0.7 billion in 2019.

This surge underscores TikTok’s rapid rise as a mobile-centric platform, equally popular among male and female users.

7. WhatsApp:

Saw significant growth in visits, reaching 31.3 billion in 2023, a 68.72% increase from 2019. The platform is predominantly used by male users and has a surprising number of desktop users, indicating its broad appeal as a cross-platform communication tool.

8. LinkedIn:

Continued to grow steadily, reaching 20.5 billion visits in 2023, up 59.41% from 2019. This growth reflects LinkedIn’s importance in the professional networking space, with a majority male user base and a preference for desktop usage.

9. Twitch:

Nearly doubled its visits to 20.0 billion in 2023, marking a 48.14% increase. Twitch’s growth is indicative of the rising popularity of live streaming, especially within the gaming community, with a significant male user base and considerable mobile device usage.

10. Quora:

Experienced notable growth, with visits climbing to 19.0 billion in 2023, a 60.25% increase. This growth rate shows the platform’s increasing relevance in knowledge sharing and information seeking, with a slight male dominance in its user base and a strong trend towards mobile usage.