Member story: From midnight data to AI Workflows: How curiosity shaped Abimbola Lawal’s career.
Member story is a monthly Smarketers Hub series where we connect closely with a member of Marketers Room, our Slack community, to explore their career journey, capture their industry opinions and work philosophies, and document what being a Smarketer means to them. Each story will leave you with a fresh perspective on doing excellent work and growing your career through community.
For this month’s entry, we sat with Abimbola Lawal, an SEO content writer and Smarketers Hub member whose career is fueled by truth, curiosity, and impact.
He shares how he struggled to buy data to learn design in his early career stage, to working in social media and now building a thriving career in SEO content writing.
Hello Bimbo, how are you doing today?
Good afternoon. I'm doing great. Thank you for asking.
If you were creating a time capsule to represent your marketing career so far, what three items would you put inside, and what story do they tell you about your professional journey?
Hmm, time capsule. First, I’d include data subscription, which resonates with my early-career stage, when I started having to wake up at night for 25 naira for 500 MB. It also represents the version of me in 2017.
The second thing I will put is the printout of my first Google Sheets automation.
Finally, it will be Claude AI, which represents the stage where I am right now. With everyone talking about AI, and where I am coming from, it is shaping how I work now and get tasks done.
That makes a lot of sense because even from the data subscription, it just shows how much you've grown, how you started, and where you are going now. Thank you for sharing that.
So, who is Bimbo? Tell us a bit about who you are as a person and who you are as a marketer.
Bimbo as a person is someone who is genuinely curious. I like to figure things out and try to see how things work. And I think that curiosity is what actually pushed me into SEO content writing.
I started from web design and then to social media. Then I finally knew I wanted to do SEO. And also, I'm a married man now.
Bimbo as a marketer, is primarily an SEO and content guy. But I don’t like being boxed into one thing, which is you are this SEO person or you are a content person.
For both work and personal matters
Outside of work, I’m also a person of faith, and that shows a lot in how I show up, treat people, and handle losses.
Let’s now touch on this. You also mentioned that you're a married man now. How is it like being married?
Yeah, it's good and fun. There's something Davido said. Love is sweet, but when money enters love is sweeter.
So, it's been sweet. It is also you having a companion that you can share your wins and struggles with, and they're there to listen and comfort you. So, yeah. It's definitely a good thing, and I enjoy it.
That's so great. Happy married life.
Can you share a project, people or community experience that shaped how you are as a marketer?
From a work perspective, that will be my former companies, Aceall and Exceed SEO. More specifically, my colleague, the kind of work we did, and the people I got to do it with, they shaped a lot of things about me.
The way I think about marketing, especially the next approach to a task, how I approach clients and what good content and good SEO actually looks like.
So outside of work, right? My biggest influence would be Ryan Stewart from the Blueprint training, which I joined in 2019, where it teaches SEO and the way you think about systems and automation mindset. Seeing them from his angle changed how I approach SEO.
I have to mention Devesh and Benji of Grow and Convert. The way they approach content marketing really resonates with me. They think about pain points, SEO, and having to understand your buyer before you write content. Those are like the people and projects that actually shaped me.
What tools are you currently exploring that you think marketers shouldn't sleep on?
Right now, I'm deep in Claude AI, and I don't mean just using it to write emails or come up with content.
I'm using it to build workflows and skills. I have a couple of skills that are built on Claude AI, including reporting, keyword clustering, and all of that. If you're a marketer right now and you're just using AI as a fancy tool or a fancy version of Google, I mean, you are leaving a lot on the table, like a whole lot. It's not just giving it a keyword and typing “Write a 1,500-word article about this”. Now it's way past that.
I remember a time I was able to create a proposal on a discovery call. That’s how fascinating and mind-blowing AI is. So marketers shouldn’t sleep on it.
What's one marketing innovation or conversation you're excited about, and how do you see it shaping the industry?
I mean, all the conversation right now in marketing is all about AI, and it's no surprise.
But here's the thing, I've been excited about this stuff long before AI became mainstream. I've been building automation in Google. “How can I do analysis about a particular keyword on Google Sheets?"
So when AI came along, for me it wasn't a shock, I saw it as a next level of what I'm already trying to do, and what excites me is how much marketing work it does. I was working on keyword research for a client, which usually takes me a lot of time, but now with AI, I do that in less time. So it's really mind-blowing, and the industry is going to split into two groups – marketers who learn to build with AI and those who just consume it.
And I want to be in the first group. I want to be part of a community that builds with AI, and I also want to help others get to that point.
What advice could you give yourself as a newbie techie?
I will work with three pieces of advice.
First, learn the basics. Know the fundamentals because the basics are very important.
Second, understand power dynamics in the industry. I would say one of the things that really helped me is understanding who has influence in my industry, who knows you, and how careers are actually being built will help you scale in your career.
Finally, build a personal brand early. And I wish I knew this earlier on because there was a time that I got featured on Search Engine Land, right, for one particular article about keyword research that was like maybe 2020 or so, but I didn't capitalize on that and build my personal brand. Maybe if I had done that, I might be bigger than this, but yeah, don't wait until you feel like you're ready to build your personal brand because you never feel ready, you know, just start putting content out there. It will be rough at first, right? It gets better when you begin to build an audience and you have people who like your content. Do not overthink it, share your story when you can, and always know that action beats perfection every time.
Let's touch on personal branding. When do you think beginners need to draw the line between documenting their journey and acting as experts?
Documentation is part of building a personal brand. Share what you learned: “I just learned about how to filter keyword research." This way, you are not acting as an expert, but you’re showing people the way you think about your job. Recently, I got active on X, and I have been sharing my views on topics, and no one calls me bluff because I am sharing my personal experience, and I have results to show if I get asked.
Just put yourself out there. If you are scared of people calling you out, and if they do eventually, get feedback, and you move from there. Just be yourself, be authentic, and do not lie.
No matter how clueless or how novice you think you are, if you learn something, put it out there.
How did you discover Smarketers Hub, and why have you stayed?
I discovered Smarketers Hub in 2025. I was working with a startup at the time. They built a tool for freelancers, specifically content writers, to showcase their portfolios. I was searching to see if we have a database in Nigeria that talks about content marketing, and I came across a blog from Smarketers Hub, and I realized it was a community. So I joined the Slack community right away, and I saw how everyone engages, and I knew I wanted to be part of this community, especially because it's like home-based here in Nigeria.
And then there was a time we started having this session called 'focus hour', whereby everybody would get on a call and then get their task done and share feedback, that kind of accountability and energy is rare.
Recently, you've been giving back to communities. You were a tutor for Smarketers Hub’s SEO content writing mentorship, tell us why that is important to you.
So when I look back at how I started my career, it was mostly me figuring out things myself. Just like I said, I have to stay up from 12 pm to 5 am for cheap data from Airtel because I couldn't even afford internet back then, and this was the only way I could watch videos, and download PDFs.
So for me, the whole point of being early at something or being able to pass through something is that the people coming after you can have a smoother ride, not a perfect ride, but at least less rough than it was for you.
So if I can shorten the learning curve for someone to a year instead of three years, that’s something for me.
That’s why I tutor, and that's why I keep giving back. I just want people to maybe not make some mistake I made or instead of having to make that same mistake, you can make another mistake that can be unavoidable, and not the same mistake that somebody else has made.
What advice would you give marketers in the early years of their careers?
That will be the same advice I gave my younger self.
Learn the basics, understand the power dynamics, and build your personal brand early, and just do stuff.
Don’t wait to feel ready to do stuff. Just do it.
But I will add one more thing, and this one is important to me, and that's just trust in God. Because it's not only about working hard. I had a conversation recently, and I was telling them that a lot of people work harder than you and I, and they don't have much to show for it. So hard work matters, but you also have to involve God in what you're doing.
If you put your trust in God, everything will fall into line for you.
Which marketer would you like to give a shoutout to?
Thinking about my journey, the first person will be Ryan Stewart, that man basically shaped how I think about SEO and automation and I'll be a different marketer today without his work.
The next set of people are Eddie Johansson and Josef Essafi from Exceed SEO, my former bosses.
And the next are Benji Hyam and Devesh Khanal from Grow and Convert. I learned a lot from those guys too, and I'm still learning. Followed by Smarketers Hub, the community, the energy, and what we're building, big love to you guys.
Finally, I'm going to shout out to myself, to a version of me in 2017. So shout out to the past me for not giving up, and shout out to the new.
Connect with Bimbo on LinkedIn, Instagram, and X(formerly Twitter). And join Marketers Room to engage with more like-minded professionals thriving in their career.