When no one’s heard about your product and it’s the first of a kind, how do you describe it to a cold audience? How do you educate and reach them?

When BigPay, a consumer facing neobank based in Malaysia, launched four years ago, no one knew what a neobank was. At that time, digital banks were still a very new thing.

The first marketing play BigPay relied on was referrals. And as you’ll hear from Jonathan, Head of Marketing at BigPay, referrals worked very well. Especially, when certain travel bloggers realised they could make money referring readers to BigPay. One blogger referred over 8,000 people. Jon says himself, these bloggers did a lot of the heavy lifting to get BigPay off the ground and acquiring customers. When no one’s heard of your product type, it seems referrals are still the way to go. 

In today’s episode I chat with Jon about how BigPay implemented referrals when they first started, the recurring payday campaigns they implemented and why he thinks content marketing is so difficult and why BigPay has struggled with it as an acquisition strategy. 

I’ve known Jon since 2019, when I was living in Kuala Lumpur for a few months and I even helped BigPay myself with some of their articles and website copy. So it was really nice to connect with him again. Jon is a great marketer and a very inspiring person. I highly recommend checking out his Medium.

BigPay's website: https://www.bigpayme.com/
Jonathan's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jonathannyst/
Jonathan on Medium: https://medium.com/@jonathan.nyst