Chipper Cash is a no-fee peer-to-peer cross-border payment service in Africa that’s transforming the way African folks manage their money and connecting the diaspora with friends and family back home.
Although Chipper is more B2C-focused than the majority of our clients, our experience helping fintech giant Wise grow to over a million organic visitors enabled us to hit the ground running in the African fintech sector.
At the start of our engagement, Chipper was poised to become Africa’s next fintech unicorn — a goal that it achieved shortly after we began working together, when it raised $150 million in an extension Series C funding round from (now defunct) FTX. The investment pushed Chipper’s valuation to just over $2 billion.
Since then, Chipper has expanded its operations throughout the African continent and the States, touching not only the huge African market but also the African diaspora in other parts of the world.
At the end of 2022, the company, like many businesses that were using crypto for good, was affected when FTX filed for bankruptcy. Literal Humans has been by Chipper’s side the entire time, helping them weather the markets by pivoting to new strategies when necessary.
Here’s the story of our partnership.
1.6 million new visitors (and other stories)
Let’s start by looking at what we’ve accomplished with Chipper since we began working together. Then I’ll break down how we did it.
Since the last quarter of 2021, we’ve helped Chipper Cash gain 1.6 million new website visitors.
But what kind of traffic is Chipper getting on a monthly basis? Well, between mid-January and mid-February 2023 (the time of writing this), the Chipper website had 64,000 users — of which 61,000 were first-time visitors.
Of those, a total of 36,000 sessions — over 50% — were driven by organic search.
Looking further back, between February 2022 and February 2023, the number of sessions driven by organic search grew from 640 to 1,530 organic searches per day.
Here’s the strategy that achieved those results.
The strategy
Before creating a content strategy for Chipper, we ran all the usual audits to evaluate its strengths, weaknesses, and position in the marketplace while identifying ways to strengthen the brand.
The audit phase includes social, web, and brand positioning audits, as well as a messaging workshop to establish the company’s ideal customer profiles (ICPs) and key messages.
The primary target audience Chipper wanted to aim for was the daily user — the average African person who wants to send and receive money, shop online, stream international services like Netflix, and even dabble in crypto and investments.
The secondary ICP was the African diaspora, particularly in the US, where Chipper operates.
One of the many advantages of working with a truly diverse, globally-distributed team is that we can pull in different team members according to their expertise or alignment with a target audience’s profile.
That was exactly what we did with Chipper. Two members of the writing team fit the primary and secondary audience profiles: Naume, a young professional from Zimbabwe, and Dozie, a member of the Nigerian diaspora in Canada.
Both of them, extremely talented writers, got to work on the Chipper account to deliver content that would speak to Chipper’s ICPs in a way that was both authoritative and authentic.
The third ICP Chipper wanted to target was potential employees and recruiters to attract talent to the company. To achieve this, a third prong of the strategy would focus on internal content, such as employee spotlights, customer testimonials, and pieces focused on Chipper’s values and corporate social responsibility (CSR) work.
With the ICPs established, it was time to build out the pillars that would inform our strategy. The next few sections will break down those pillars and the rationale behind each one.
Showcasing Chipper value
First and foremost, we needed to highlight the problem Chipper is solving with content that focused on sending and receiving money transfers within, across, and beyond Africa.
The aim of this pillar was to showcase the ways both individuals and small businesses can use the Chipper Cash app to participate in the global economy.
Empowering content
Because Chipper is on a mission to empower folks in Africa to make the best financial decisions for themselves, their families, and their businesses, it was important to have a strong focus on financial literacy.
According to research, African countries have some of the lowest financial literacy rates in the world, so providing financial education was not just a smart marketing strategy but also a moral imperative.
We created a “Learn” pillar, which included various topics such as investing, crypto, and creating multiple income streams. The latter subsequently reached the number two spot on the Google SERP for the search term “how to create multiple streams of income in your 20s.”
Talking the diaspora’s language
Although the diaspora users were a secondary audience, it was essential to include them in Chipper’s messaging.
The first piece of content we created for Chipper was the announcement of its US launch, which was promoted through a partnership with Nigerian superstar Burna Boy. The announcement coincided with Chipper’s integration with Twitter Tips, which allows African creators to get paid directly through Twitter.
Naume worked her magic and produced the announcement, written in the voice of Chipper co-founder Maijid Moujaled. One of the advantages of working with the Literal Humans team is that we can take a busy exec’s ideas and direction and turn them into a compelling story that builds a sense of excitement around the company.
We also made room in the strategy for ad-hoc pieces, such as coverage of the Nigerian Independence Day celebrations in Houston, Texas — one of the cities with the largest Nigerian diaspora populations in the US.
Internally-focused content
Because Chipper was trying to attract top fintech talent to join the company, the team wanted powerful internal content to highlight life at Chipper and demonstrate the company’s values.
This type of content became even more crucial as talk of a recession began to loom, the global economy appeared to take a turn for the worse, and FTX self-destructed.
We created customer testimonials, collaborating with a production company in Uganda that conducted the interview. We told them what raw footage we needed, produced the final edit, and wrote an accompanying blog post.
Dirt off your shoulder
‘Shoulder niches’ is one of those curious terms content marketers like to come up with to describe something they do. Basically, a shoulder niche is a topic that’s not directly related to your main product niche but is of interest to your ICPs. You can use them to introduce new product lines but also to provide a more well-rounded content experience for your readers.
Not everyone has a natural interest in fintech, so we needed to find other ways to connect with Chipper’s target audiences. We researched what they like to read, then created content pillars that tied those topics to fintech and Chipper Cash.
Since football is a unifying force across Africa and the 2022 World Cup was coming up, football seemed like a natural shoulder niche for Chipper. So we created content covering the teams representing Africa in the tournament and a brief history of African countries’ World Cup performances.
We also wrote blog posts promoting Chipper’s World Cup-related initiatives: ‘Trip to Qatar’ and ‘Africa to the World’, as well as the CSR campaigns, ‘Chipping Away Illiteracy through Football’ and ‘Professional Training for Underprivileged Football Coaches.’
As we move through 2023, we’ll be introducing a new pillar — food — that will focus on perhaps the only thing that brings people together even more effectively than football.
Walking the talk
Chipper Cash’s mission is to support and uplift people all across Africa, not just with its products but also through its CSR program.
Some of the interventions we’ve covered for Chipper include the ‘Chess in Slums’ project and the emergency relief Chipper sent to flood-hit communities in Bayelsa State, Nigeria.
Web development support
At the time of writing, Chipper is in the middle of updating its website, and the LH team is supporting the process through a web page development project.
Writer Victoria is putting together a page template using which the Chipper developers will build explainer pages for each African country the company serves.
What next for Chipper Cash?
Despite the current economic climate, Chipper Cash leadership understands the value of working with a dedicated, dependable marketing partner that can speak authentically to its ICPs and adapt to its changing needs.
With a product that’s empowering people throughout Africa and showing a profound commitment to its values in a world as (evidently) adventurous as crypto and fintech, we’re confident that Chipper will continue pioneering African fintech for years to come.
Book a strategy session with me to learn more about how we help fintech startups grow with smart, creative content strategies.
