On one of her trips to Lagos, Ore Badmus met Izzie Ekong at a Christmas dinner party and they hit it off. They became friends, and subsequently, this friendship would blossom into another relationship, making them co-founders.
Izzie and Ore, both marketers, are founders of the Tech Marketers Support Initiative aka TEMSI. This initiative seeks to provide newbie tech marketers with support to effectively navigate their marketing careers in the form of mentorships, scholarships, and internships, among others.
Izzie Ekong
Tech Marketing deeply appealed to Izzie from the start, as it was just the perfect cocktail of tech, arts, and psychology — all of which were fields she was already knowledgeable about. Ore, on the other hand, didn’t have such a straight trajectory. With a background in film, she started her career as a creative lead at an edutech startup before transitioning into marketing.
At the start of 2023, Ore had goals, and one of these was giving back to the tech ecosystem. At first, she was going to create and host courses for newbie marketers but decided on a more holistic and robust approach, which was what birthed TEMSI.
“Quite a number of similar programmes were being announced at the time, but the majority of them were only for technical roles in tech, and I realised that non-tech in tech roles, especially marketers tend to be overlooked and not as valued in the ecosystem. I shared my plans with Izzie and she came on board,” Ore shared.
According to Izzie and Ore, tech marketers do a lot for the tech ecosystem but without so many accolades.
“Marketers don’t get a lot of attention. The people doing the technical work always get prioritised and marketers are like the afterthought. This makes little sense because marketers are the people who sell these products the tech guys are creating and if we’re not there, what happens? Who’s going to market your product? Who’s going to bring in the revenue?” said Izzie.
“Tech marketers encounter a lot of challenges and the reason that TEMSI exists is to close that gap. People do not really see the work and expertise that goes into tech marketing and this affects every aspect of the journey, from the learning side of things to how well we get paid,” Ore added.
Together, Izzie and Ore have established TEMSI. Application for the first cohort is now open and will provide five lucky women in tech marketing with support. This support includes a complete scholarship to Treford’s product marketing or content marketing boot camp, internship placements at tech startups, performance monitoring, access to resources, and mentorship with people like Tofunmi Alo, Enniye Timiebi, Toni Ajewole, Joanna Okey, and Sandra Tabansi.
Marketing is a crucial part of any startup, and the founders of TEMSI believe there’s a huge market for it spanning all the different types, from content marketing to social media marketing, growth marketing to product marketing etc. The digital marketing industry is projected to witness even more aggressive growth in the coming years as the population of people consuming and creating content on the internet increases. This has made marketing skills in demand, and TEMSI wants to play its part to ensure that the new crop of marketers are given all it takes to thrive.
So far, the TEMSI team have been able to garner a lot of support which has made their work less challenging.
“We reached out to communities in the tech ecosystem, NonTech in Tech and Smarketers Hub, because we believe that the ecosystem needs to be connected. Most of the people and communities we reached out to understand our mission and why it is necessary that we do this,” they shared.
They are partnered with Tech Women Support, Pade HCM, Cloudax, Xend Finance and the learning platform Treford.
According to Ore, the goal is for TEMSI to become a reputable platform for tech marketers.
“We want the name TEMSI to carry weight. We want candidates who have passed through the TEMSI program to be associated with excellence, and for hiring managers to see that on a resume and have more confidence in that candidate,” she stated.
