sion, revenue contribution and profitability. These are not finance concepts that happen to sit outside marketing. They help explain whether marketing is actually creating economic value.
The same principle appears throughout the material in Marketing Africa magazine. Marketing measurement needs to move beyond views, clicks and likes toward metrics such as acquisition cost, retention, churn, campaign-driven revenue, pipeline growth and brand equity.
That does not make impressions, reach or engagement useless. They are useful. The problem begins when the measurement of activity becomes the measurement of success. There is a fundamental difference between saying our campaign reached 100,000 people, and saying our campaign generated 400 new customers at a sustainable acquisition cost, and 35 % of them remained customers six months later. The first tells us that something happened. The second begins to tell us whether it mattered.
This is not an argument for abandoning creativity or communication. In fact, the opposite is true. Good marketing still needs ideas that capture attention and communication that people remember.
But creativity becomes more valuable when it is connected to a clear understanding of who the customer is, what problem the business is solving, and what outcome the organization is trying to create. That is the difference between producing marketing activity and practicing marketing.
Social Media Is Not the Problem
This is where the conversation around social media and influencer marketing needs some nuance. It would be easy to criticize businesses for relying heavily on social media and influencers. That would be unfair.
Social platforms have become an important commercial entry point for African businesses for very practical reasons. They are accessible, mobile-first, relatively inexpensive to enter, and already contain communities where businesses can communicate with potential customers.
Research by GSMA found that among surveyed African MSMEs already using e-commerce, a majority relied exclusively on social-media services to sell online. So social media is not the problem. Stopping at social media is. Social media may be where marketing begins. It cannot be where marketing ends.
A business can learn how to create a better 55 MAL74 / 26 ISSUE
TikTok video without learning anything about positioning. It can hire an influencer without knowing which customer segment it is trying to reach. It can spend money on Meta advertising without knowing its customer acquisition cost. It can increase its follower count without increasing the number of people who actually buy.
The same applies to influencer marketing. An influencer can be extremely effective at generating awareness, credibility, trial or even direct sales. But the strategic question should not simply be: which influencer has the most followers? It should be: what job do we need this influencer to do? Are we trying to create awareness? Change perception? Reach a particular segment? Generate trial? Build trust? Drive a measurable number of purchases? Launch a product?
And once the campaign is finished, what happened? How many people became customers? How much did acquiring them cost? How many returned? What did they buy? Did they become more valuable customers over time?
The influencer is a tool. The strategy determines why the tool is being used. That distinction is central to marketing maturity. A hammer is useful. Knowing that you have a hammer does not mean you understand construction. The same is true of marketing. Having access to Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, influencers, paid advertising or increasingly sophisticated AI tools does not automatically create marketing capability.
In fact, this is becoming a wider African business challenge. IFC research found that 86 % of African firms have access to digital tools such as mobile phones and the internet, while many businesses still use those technologies below their potential.
The implication is important. Africa is not simply facing a problem of access to technology. Increasingly, it is facing a problem of how effectively businesses use the technology they already have. And marketing sits directly inside that problem.
From the Marketing Department to the Business
This is why marketing cannot remain isolated from the rest of the organization. A mature marketing function should be able to sit in the same room with finance, sales, operations and leadership and understand the same business reality.
When finance asks how much did it cost us to acquire this customer, marketing should understand the question. When sales asks which customers are actually worth pursuing, marketing should have insight. When leadership asks why are customers leaving, marketing should be part of the answer.
And when a campaign produces impressive numbers but sales remain unchanged, marketing should be willing to investigate the uncomfortable possibility that the campaign worked while the marketing did not.
That is not a contradiction. A campaign can successfully generate attention. But marketing ' s responsibility is bigger than generating attention. It is to understand the market, identify opportunities, create relevance, build preference, facilitate the customer journey and contribute to sustainable business growth.
A company ' s brand is not created only by the marketing department. It is experienced through the salesperson, the customer-service representative, the product, the price, the delivery, the payment process and the way the company responds when something goes wrong.
A beautifully designed campaign cannot permanently compensate for a poor customer experience. A strong influencer cannot make an overpriced product suddenly represent value. A viral video cannot fix a business that consistently fails to deliver what it promises.
Marketing can create expectations. The rest of the business has to fulfil them. That is why the next generation of marketers needs to understand more than marketing communications. They need commercial literacy.
They need to understand why a customer is worth more than a single transaction. They need to understand retention, margins and pricing. They need to understand why acquiring a thousand customers is not necessarily better than acquiring five hundred if the economics of those customers are fundamentally different.
And they need to be able to connect those questions back to the market. This is where marketing starts becoming a genuine growth function rather than a department that simply produces campaigns.
But this creates another problem. If we expect Somaliland ' s marketers to understand customers, strategy, economics, data, positioning, research, technology and business growth, where are they supposed to learn all of this?
That question takes us to the next stage of the