Why your campaign should never be in only one language
Luma Team5 min read
English is the default language of business in Nigeria — and the default language of almost every SMS and WhatsApp campaign template you'll find online. It's also, for a huge share of the audience most Nigerian SMEs are trying to reach, not the language they read fastest, trust most, or respond to.
Pidgin is not a translation of English
Treating Nigerian Pidgin as "casual English" misses what makes it work as a marketing language: it carries warmth, urgency, and familiarity that formal English can't fake. "Your favourite Ankara styles just got better" and "Original Ankara don land, come see am" are not the same message wearing different clothes — they read as coming from two different kinds of businesses, and customers respond to that difference.
When to switch languages — and when not to
Language choice isn't about picking a favourite; it's about matching the message to the moment and the audience segment.
- Compliance-sensitive content (OTPs, payment confirmations, legal notices) should stay in formal English — clarity matters more than warmth
- Retail promotions and event reminders to a general consumer list often perform better in Pidgin, especially for urgency-driven offers
- Segments concentrated in the South-West or North respond measurably better to Yoruba or Hausa variants when the business has the contact-level data to know which segment is which
- B2B and fintech communications to a professional audience usually stay in English regardless of region
The real barrier has never been translation — it's speed
Most SMEs don't avoid multilingual campaigns because they don't see the value. They avoid them because writing three good variants of the same message, in three languages, under a 160-character SMS limit, takes time most small teams don't have — so they default to English and hope for the best.
That's the gap Luma's AI Message Studio was built to close: describe the campaign once, and get channel-ready variants in the languages your audience actually reads, generated from the same brief and screened against compliance rules before they ever reach a customer.
A translation reads correct. A Pidgin variant, done right, reads like it was written by someone who actually knows the customer.
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