The Rise Of Product Marketing in Nigeria and Africa

‘Great products sell themselves’

Going back to six to seven years ago in Nigeria, this was still a quote most young tech startups put right at the front of their minds (I was part of this too). We thought up great ideas that really had the potential to disrupt a whole sector, we mapped out the development plans, wrote the codes ,launched these products and created a buzz around them.

Mark Zuckerberg’s tour of Nigeria tech space in 2016

Then we set up a marketing team to get users by giving them KPIs. This approach had some success to be fair, but eventually the cost of acquiring one customer compared to the Lifetime Value of the customer became very unsustainable and this led to the painful process of startups shutting down or being absorbed by other startups after a few years of trying really hard.

This is not a fantasy or some cooked up story, this is the reality many people have had to live through.

As startup founders or as people working in these startups. The saddest part is that so many startups still go through this at the moment, building and bringing a marketer to perform wonders.

But a new wave of product leaders and founders came into the scene backed up with so much market intelligence and understanding of the real problem their customers had, understood the size of the market, who the exact customers were and how best to reach these customers before building a version to test the market. This didn’t make the products or the founders less technical but they set up from ground up with growth in mind. This has led to sustained growth for these startups and in return attracted investors increasingly over the years ($460 Million was invested into Nigerian Fintech startups in 2019). (Source: McKinsey)

Many sectors and founders have since come to realize these three things;

1. Don’t assume a problem on users’ behalf and then build a product based on this assumption. This usually ends in premium tears.
2. Growth and marketing strategy shouldn’t be left till after launch, it is important to factor this in when planning out development.
3. Don’t copy and paste a marketing template from America to Nigeria, they are two different markets.

All these led to the emergence of growth and product marketing specialists in the tech sector. They are not your regular digital marketers, they are equipped with rare understanding of different markets and how best to position products to scale in these markets. As we continue to have many more startups building intersecting products with great user interfaces and experience like we have in the west, the great differentiator will be marketing, but not just any marketing, Product Marketing.

Treford will be hosting the first product marketing bootcamp in Nigeria with focus on scaling products in Nigeria and Africa. To find more about the bootcamp, register here.