Are silos really sabotaging your brand’s growth? Many businesses in Africa are investing heavily in digital advertising, chasing impressions and clicks, yet struggling to see sustained growth. Welcome Tomorrow’s analysis reveals a critical disconnect: the problem isn’t always your paid media performance; it’s often the siloed approach between marketing and product teams.
This fundamental misalignment is a silent killer of growth, especially in dynamic emerging markets where user journeys are often mobile-first and unforgiving.
The Hidden Churn: Funnels Falling Apart at Activation
Traditional growth models often overemphasise the top of the funnel – awareness and acquisition. While essential, this focus overlooks the most critical stages: activation and retention. We’ve observed countless campaigns driving healthy install numbers, only for product metrics to show abysmal retention rates.
Industry reports consistently highlight high mobile app churn, often exceeding 85% on iOS and 95% on Android. This means a seemingly low cost-per-install can quickly inflate to a prohibitive cost-per-retained-user, draining budgets with little to show for it.
The real breakdown occurs at activation, the moment a new user genuinely experiences your product’s core value. For a fintech app, it might be the first successful transaction; for an e-commerce platform, it’s completing a checkout.
If your product isn’t designed to guide users swiftly to this “aha!” moment, your marketing efforts, no matter how brilliant, will be undermined. Users are caught between a compelling ad promise and an onboarding experience that fails to deliver on it immediately.
This challenge is particularly acute in fintech marketing, where trust and immediate value demonstration are paramount for user activation.
Without this crucial alignment, even the most innovative fintech solutions risk high abandonment rates, losing potential customers before they’ve even truly engaged.
Bridging the Gap: Marketing & Product in Sync
The most impactful growth strategies in emerging markets aren’t born from isolated campaigns but from seamless collaboration.
This is where partnering with a growth marketing agency that understands both acquisition and retention becomes invaluable. Such an agency acts as a unifying force, helping to align disparate teams towards a common goal: the user’s journey to value.
Consider the local success stories where marketing insights directly inform product development, and the product experience itself becomes a growth engine.
When marketing and product teams operate in isolation, communication breaks down. Marketing might promise “instant loans,” while the app’s onboarding focuses on “savings features,” leading to user confusion and high bounce rates.
This isn’t just a miscommunication; it’s a fundamental misunderstanding of the user’s immediate need and expectation set by the initial marketing touchpoint.
The user’s first interaction with your product should be a direct, intuitive fulfilment of the promise that attracted them in the first place.
Sustainable growth hinges on a unified vision. Your acquisition strategy must be intrinsically linked to your product’s core value proposition. This means:
● Defining the Moment of Value: Clearly identify the single, most impactful action a user can take in your product. Every marketing message and product flow should be engineered to get users to this point rapidly. This isn’t just about functionality; it’s about the emotional connection and problem solved.
● Integrated Onboarding: Design onboarding experiences that immediately fulfil the promises made in your marketing. This isn’t just about smooth UX; it’s about delivering on the initial user expectation and reducing friction to the core value. A seamless journey from ad click to first successful in-app action is paramount.
● Shared Metrics: Shift focus from vanity metrics like clicks to deeper engagement metrics like cost per activated user and day 7 retention. These unified metrics foster cross-functional accountability and ensure everyone is driving towards real business outcomes, not just channel-specific numbers.
● Continuous Feedback Loops: Implement regular mechanisms for marketing and product teams to share insights, A/B test results, and user feedback. What are users complaining about in the product? What messaging resonates most in campaigns? This iterative process ensures both sides are constantly learning and adapting.
Beyond CRM: Retention Starts at Conception
True retention isn’t an afterthought solved by CRM campaigns and re-engagement flows. By then, it’s often too late. Retention is fundamentally a product decision, influenced by how quickly and clearly a user perceives value.
If initial user experience is confusing or lacks immediate gratification, no amount of post-churn communication will salvage it. Think of retention as a fundamental design principle, not a bolt-on solution.
The most effective retention strategies begin with a product that inherently delivers value and an onboarding process that makes that value undeniable.
At Welcome Tomorrow, we emphasise that for sustainable growth in Africa, you must:
1. Stop Blaming Media: If your funnel breaks post-install, the issue is likely activation, not your CTR. Re-evaluating your media spend without addressing the underlying product-market fit or activation challenges is akin to pouring water into a leaky bucket.
2. Centre Your Strategy on Value: Optimise every step to get users to their core value proposition fast. This requires a deep understanding of your target audience’s needs and pain points, and ensuring your product offers the clearest, most efficient path to solving them.
3. Tear Down Internal Silos: Foster continuous dialogue between product and marketing teams. Product marketing should be a strategic bridge, not an afterthought. Encourage joint workshops, shared OKRs (Objectives and Key Results), and regular cross-functional meetings to ensure complete alignment from ideation to execution.
Your growth funnel isn’t broken; your teams just aren’t building it together. By adopting a cohesive, cross-functional approach, businesses can unlock exponential and sustainable growth in Africa’s rapidly evolving digital landscape.
Ready to build a truly integrated growth strategy for your brand in Africa? Contact Welcome Tomorrow today to see how we can help.
About Welcome Tomorrow:
This article was written by Welcome Tomorrow – a team of growth marketing experts partnering with ambitious African brands to drive sustainable growth through performance marketing, mobile growth strategies, creative content, and data analytics.
They integrate data, media, and creative services under one roof to deliver measurable results, focusing on emerging markets across Africa.
