PiggyvestExplainers

Piggyvest is one of the world's top 250 fintech companies, according to CNBC.

When I joined the content team, two strong editorial territories already existed: personality-led stories such as those on the Women & Money and On the Money verticals, and SEO-driven content designed to answer specific questions and attract users.

I saw an opportunity between the two.

There was room for content that could take a genuinely difficult, obscure, or timely subject and make it clear enough to understand, interesting enough to finish, and culturally relevant enough to remember.

That was the thinking behind the explainer format I developed for the Piggyvest blog. Rather than treating explainers as purely educational or search-driven content, I wanted to give consumers something genuinely useful for free — content that could earn attention first, and bring the brand into the conversation naturally.

I developed two editorial territories within the explainer vertical:

Current affairs

These explainers respond to things people are already talking about, but may not fully understand.

For example, when Nigeria's official inflation rate fell while everyday expenses remained stubbornly high, I wrote If Inflation Rate Is Down, Why Is Everything Still So Expensive?

The idea was to bridge the gap between economics and the lived experience of a person going to the market. Why does everything still feel so expensive if inflation is supposedly coming down?

When the Dangote Refinery IPO became a major financial conversation, I saw another opportunity to do more than report on it. Piggyvest's audience needed context: what is an IPO? Why does this one matter? And what does it mean for an ordinary Nigerian investor?

I translated the developing story into an accessible explainer that gave readers the context they needed without requiring prior knowledge of investing.

Midnight curiosities

The second territory is less economically obvious, but just as important. These pieces answer questions that exist in the periphery of people's minds and make them think, “Wait… that's actually true!”

For example: Why Are There No More ₦5 Notes in Circulation?

A story like this isn't necessarily designed to generate an immediate economic response. It gives Piggyvest room to be useful and interesting in a way that doesn't begin with a product.

Sometimes, you can make someone care about a brand simply by helping them understand something they've wondered about for years.

When building an explainer, I play with five principles:

• Start with a human hook. A technical subject should begin with a human problem the reader already understands. For the inflation piece, this meant starting with the experience of going to the market and wondering why everything still feels expensive.
• Give people something to hold onto. When a concept is abstract, I look for a concrete illustration to make it stick. In The Lifecycle of a Stock, for example, I use the story of Grace buying shares to give readers a mental model they can carry.
• Put the information in its cultural context. These pieces are written specifically for Nigerians, so the examples, references, humour and framing reflect that reality.
• Do proper research. The writing may feel conversational, but the thinking behind it isn't. I use direct, authoritative sources and seek advice from experts on the Piggyvest team to make sure there are no gaps.
• Introduce the brand naturally. Not every piece of branded content needs to end with a hard sell. The reader should first get what they came for before the brand enters the conversation: value → trust → alignment → consideration.

I never expect someone to read an explainer and immediately open a Piggyvest account.

I want them to leave thinking at least one of the following: That finally makes sense. I learned something today. That was actually fun to read.

Because brands don't only build relationships at the point of conversion. They build them through repeated experiences of being useful, interesting, or worth coming back to.

The explainers had a distinct role: make Piggyvest a brand people could learn from, even when they weren't actively looking for a financial product.

The strongest evidence of performance is quantitative.

The explainers generated 100K+ Google Search impressions, which is particularly notable given the growing role of AI Overviews in search.

Several pieces also reached strong first-page positions. The Nigeria tax piece averaged position 5.5, while Why Are There No More ₦5 Notes? averaged position 6.0.

The numbers tell one part of the story. Reader responses tell the other.

The reactions were a useful signal: people weren't just finding the articles. They were stopping to respond to them, share what they'd learned, and tell us when something had finally clicked.

Usefulness is a growth strategy.

The job of a content marketer isn't to produce more content. It's to notice what people are trying to understand, find an interesting way into the subject, and make something valuable enough that they want to keep reading.

Whether it's a major financial story or a question about an old ₦5 note, the opportunity is often the same: find the intersection between what people care about, what a brand can credibly contribute, and what can create measurable value.