Creator and Influencer Marketing

Miva was opening its first physical study centre in Lagos and had no influencer relationships in that market, no shortlist, and a fixed budget.

I sourced creators — through manual outreach via their social channels, email, and WhatsApp, where they’d made their numbers public. No agency. I settled on 3 whose audience actually overlapped with ours and whose rate cards fit the budget, then negotiated each one, pushing for the maximum number of deliverables I could get inside the same fee. With this done, I flew down to Lagos and spent 10 days on the ground to ensure proper execution.

Then I structured it across the whole event rather than buying a single post each: pre-event content to build anticipation, live stories on the day, and post-event coverage to extend the moment past the launch itself. I wrote the briefs, reviewed everything before it went live, and tracked the results afterwards.

Pre-event. @kagantech opened the run, seeding the centre before anyone had seen inside it.

On the day. @callmedumebi covered the launch itself, live from the centre.

Post-event. @seelagos and @kagantech carried it forward.

@light_ot_world is a Miva student, not a paid creator. She was the only unpaid partnership in everything below, and the only one I wrote a full script for — shot angles, direction, the lot, the same way I’d brief a production crew.

It returned more views than every paid creator on this page combined, several times over. The lesson I took from it wasn’t “use students instead of creators” — it was that a real person inside the story, given proper direction, can travel further than a rate card predicts.

My idea, start to finish. I designed the contest format, wrote the entry criteria and the campaign around it, set the prize structure, and judged the winners.

The goal was word of mouth in circles Miva had no visibility in — the students’ own networks, which no amount of paid placement reaches the same way. Instead of buying access to an audience, the campaign turned the existing student body into the channel.

I was reviewing scripts, doing QA on content after it was shot and edited, following up on collaboration posts, and tracking results. Real work, but a different job from negotiating ratecards.

Programme pushes. Creators matched to specific degrees — Public Health, Information Technology, and the master’s range.

Study centre launches. The Lagos model repeated in Jos and Port Harcourt, using creators local to each city rather than flying in reach from elsewhere.

2026 Maiden Convocation. Six creators covering the ceremony alongside the student volunteers and the official channels, so the day reached audiences the brand accounts don’t touch.

My first exposure to influencer work was a general visibility push with 2 established creators. I wasn’t sourcing or negotiating at this stage — I was learning how the machinery worked from inside a campaign someone else had built. Everything above came out of what this taught me.