Growth & Marketing

Key Takeaways

• Customers now expect businesses to remember their preferences, behaviours and context, not just their names.
• Effective personalization is built on data, systems and good customer experience design, not clever email copy.
• Five practical steps can help businesses move from superficial personalization to meaningful customer experiences.

Earlier this week, I received an email thanking me for attending a webinar. This was a nice and good gesture, but there was just one problem – I hadn’t attended the webinar. I had registered, yes, but something came up and I couldn’t make it.

So, somewhere between registration and follow-up, the system had decided that everyone who signed up must also have shown up. Yes, this was a small mistake, and most people would probably delete the email and move on. But moments like that tell customers something important about a business. They scream, “We know your name, but we couldn’t be bothered to really know you.”

That’s the difference between basic personalization and meaningful personalization.

Read More: Increase Your Customer Value, Not Your Marketing Budget Cuts

Personalization Isn’t Just Writing “Dear Lola”, It’s Acting Like You Actually Know Me 

For years, marketers equated personalization with adding someone’s first name to an email.

“Hi Lola…”

Today, that’s simply table stakes and customers expect much more than that. They expect businesses to remember what they have done, understand what they’re interested in and respond accordingly.

If I didn’t attend your webinar, don’t thank me for joining. If I have already bought the product, don’t send me an email telling me to buy it again. If I have told you I prefer email over phone calls, don’t call me trying to pitch an add-on to my internet subscription. 

The businesses getting personalization right aren’t necessarily the ones with the smartest copy or the most sophisticated automation. They are the ones that behave like they are paying attention – and customers notice.

Personalization: Connecting the Data Dots 

One thing I noticed across the organisations I have worked with is that the businesses creating the best customer experiences aren’t necessarily the ones with the biggest technology budgets. They are the ones that connect the dots and use these insights to speak to the customer directly.

They know which products you have shown interest in. They avoid recommending products you have already bought (except it requires routine top ups, in which case, they note your frequency and remind you). They don’t ask you to fill in information you have already provided. They remember whether you prefer email, SMS or WhatsApp. They recognize when you make a card payment in a new country and give you insights to keep your spending on track (shout out to Monzo for my always awesome international payment experience!)

None of those things feels revolutionary on its own, but together, they create something much more valuable and make customers feel recognised.  This, in turn, can significantly increase the value you get from customers – in one of my client engagements, we nearly doubled the conversion rate from an email sequence, simply by acknowledging the channel through which the prospect entered the funnel in the welcome email.

The opposite is just as noticeable. 

We have all received emails encouraging us to open an account we already have. Or promotions for products we have just purchased. Or calls immediately after choosing email as our preferred communication channel. Those moments break trust because they tell customers one thing – “We’re collecting data, but we’re not using it very well.”

Why Many Businesses Still Get Personalization Wrong

In my experience, this isn’t usually because marketing teams don’t care, it’s because the business has not built the systems needed to support meaningful personalization.

Customer data sits in different platforms and departments. Marketing can’t see what Customer Support knows. Product data doesn’t connect with CRM. Communication preferences aren’t consistently captured, updated or respected.

All of these result in fragmented experiences, where each interaction makes sense on its own, but they don’t feel connected. Customers need to experience one brand, but too often,  businesses operate as several disconnected departments.

That’s why it’s key to recognize that personalization is not primarily a content challenge, it’s an operational one.

Five Ways to Build Better Personalization

Getting personalization right doesn’t have to start with artificial intelligence or expensive software. More often than not, it starts with asking better questions.

1. Build a single view of your customer

If customer information lives across five different systems, no one has the full picture. Start by connecting your data so every interaction builds on the last one instead of starting over. 

2. Respect communication preferences

Like me, some customers prefer email, while others respond better to WhatsApp, SMS or phone calls. Asking for preferences is easy, but actually using that information is where trust is built.

3. Personalize based on behaviour, not demographics

Knowing someone’s age tells you very little. However, knowing they have visited your pricing page three times this week tells you much more. Behaviour is usually a better predictor than demographics.

4. Make every interaction feel connected

Customers should not have to repeat themselves every time they engage with your business. Whether they’re moving from your website to your app or from customer support to marketing, the experience should feel continuous.

5. Audit your customer journeys regularly

One of the simplest exercises I recommend is experiencing your own business as if you were a customer. Subscribe to your emails; complete a purchase; abandon a cart; contact customer support etc. When you do this, you will often spot personalization gaps that never appear on a dashboard.

Conclusion: Personalization Is Really About Respect

The businesses that stand out today aren’t necessarily the ones sending the most communications. They are the ones sending the right communication at the right time, through the right channel, with a clear understanding of who the customer is and what they are trying to achieve. That’s what customers increasingly expect. This is not because personalization has become a competitive advantage, but because it has become the minimum standard.  

Personalization is not a marketing tactic. It’s a capability that sits between data, technology, customer experience and marketing. When those pieces come together, customers notice, because every experience with the brand feels better and effortless.  

If your business still thinks personalization starts and ends with “Dear Lola,” in communications, there’s a good chance your customers have already moved on or you will be losing them very soon. 

Many businesses have the data they need to personalize customer experiences. The challenge is turning that data into coordinated action across marketing, product and customer experience. That is an area I work on regularly with organisations looking to improve customer journeys, lifecycle marketing and growth systems.

If you are trying to move beyond surface-level personalization, I would be happy to explore what’s getting in the way.

Key Takeaways

• Brand, Product and Growth Marketing often have different priorities, but customers experience them as one brand.
• Many marketing problems are actually alignment and governance problems rather than capability problems.
• The strongest marketing teams don’t communicate more—they communicate with more structure and purpose.

Three Marketing Teams. One Customer. Completely Different Priorities.

One of the biggest misconceptions about marketing leadership is that you’re leading one marketing team. The reality? You’re not. You’re leading several specialist teams, each with a different job to do, different metrics to hit and different ideas of what success looks like:

• Brand is thinking about trust, awareness and long-term perception.
• Product Marketing is focused on launches, adoption and helping customers understand what’s new.
• Growth is thinking about acquisition, activation, conversion and revenue.

The funny thing is that every one of those priorities is valid, but the challenge is that they’re not always aligned.

Read More: Driving Business Growth: 3 Customer Value Lessons from a Butcher

Setting Marketing Priorities When Everything is Important

Many years ago when I joined my employer at the time as Head of Digital Marketing, I spent as much time helping teams work together as I did talking about campaigns. Looking back, some of the toughest conversations weren’t about creative or media budgets. They were about deciding whose priority came first.

Everyone believed their initiative deserved the spotlight. Most of the time, they had a good reason for thinking that. 

The problem wasn’t that people disagreed, it was that everyone was making good decisions for their own team without anyone stepping back to ask a much bigger question – what’s the customer experiencing? 

How Misaligned Marketing Teams Affect the Customer Experience

I remember how shocked I was after opening my customer account to receive multiple messages from the bank in the same day. Like, seriously? Three different emails from the same bank in a single day?

One email promoted a new feature of the mobile app; another supported a brand campaign; a third was driving adoption of USSD banking, a commercial objective that the Product team needed to deliver before month-end.

Every one of those emails had been signed off, and each had a solid business case. I remember how every team believed their communication couldn’t wait. From inside the organisation, it all made perfect sense, but from the customer’s perspective, it just didn’t. 

Customers weren’t thinking about product launches or quarterly targets. They weren’t distinguishing between Brand Marketing, Product Marketing and Growth Marketing. They were simply wondering why their bank kept showing up in their inbox. It wasn’t surprising that open rates, click through rates and other email engagement metrics started to suffer. Our emails weren’t competing with other banks anymore, they were competing with each other.

This was not a lone experience, as many years later, I encountered this same peculiarity at a fintech I had a brief consulting contract with. Different market. Different customers. Different leadership teams, yet, I found exactly the same pattern. 

I noticed something similar on social media, where every team had something worth talking about and kept jostling to have their posts run. The result? Social media pages over-burdened with the plethora of information we kept churning out. 

Building Better Marketing Systems Through Governance

While every request was reasonable, collectively, we were asking customers to pay attention far too often. In both instances, it became clear to me very quickly that the issue wasn’t whether every team’s message was important to the customer; what we had was a systems problem.

The solution wasn’t to send fewer emails or post less on social media, it was to introduce better structure around how communication decisions were made. This involved two critical actions:

1. We created one central communications calendar that everyone worked from. Suddenly, teams could see what was already planned before adding something new.
2. We agreed on much clearer rules around when an update could be sent as a standalone email. Instead of asking, “Do we have something to say?” we started asking, “Does this deserve the customer’s full attention?”

That approach changed a lot of things, because some announcements became part of the newsletter instead of another campaign. Others moved to social, while some waited until they could support a bigger story rather than becoming one more message competing for attention. 

This also helped for easier conversations, because instead of teams defending their own priorities to the exclusion of everything else, we started discussing what made the most sense for the customer and the business.

Marketing Leadership and Building Systems

People often think senior marketing leaders spend their time approving campaigns or reviewing creative. The longer I have worked in leadership, however, the more I realise that  at a certain level, your job is to build systems.

Systems that help teams make better decisions, reduce duplication and stop departments competing with one another to the detriment of the customer. That should be the goal of every marketing leader at the top of the decision making matrix – how do we build systems that make the customer experience feel intentional instead of fragmented?

Brand, Product and Growth Marketing are different parts of the same growth engine. They just have to work together if sustainable growth will be achieved. If they are pulling in different directions, marketing becomes noisy. 

But, if they are aligned, everything gets easier. Customers receive fewer, more relevant communications, teams stop competing for attention and budgets work harder because channels reinforce one another instead of overlapping. Most importantly, the customer experiences one brand instead of multiple.

Conclusion

Growth doesn’t come from getting Brand, Product or Growth Marketing to work harder, but from getting them to work together. While this may sound obvious, it’s not always the case that you see this happen by default.

As organisations grow, so do competing priorities. Without clear governance, shared planning and someone looking across the whole customer journey, even great teams can end up working against each other without realising it.

If your marketing teams are producing plenty of activity but the customer experience feels fragmented, the answer may just be better alignment. That’s a big part of the work I do with businesses today, so please reach out if you would like to have a conversation.

Key Takeaways

• Early growth isn’t about doing more, it’s about focusing on the few things that create lasting momentum.
• Customer understanding, retention and measurement matter far more than chasing vanity metrics.
• The best-performing consumer apps are built on strong growth systems, not isolated marketing tactics.

There’s no shortage of advice for startup founders. Open LinkedIn for five minutes and everyone is telling you to invest in influencers, build a referral programme, dominate TikTok, optimise for virality, launch a podcast, improve SEO, experiment with AI, create a community and publish more content. Individually, none of those ideas is bad. In fact, many of them work.

The challenge is that early-stage companies don’t have unlimited money, unlimited time or unlimited people. Every decision comes with an opportunity cost.

Read More: Building a Strong Marketing Tech Stack: How to Choose the Right Tools

The Big Question – What can we afford not to focus on yet?”

If I were building a consumer app today, I wouldn’t be asking, “What else should we do?”,  I’d be asking, “What can we afford not to focus on yet?”

That question comes from years of driving growth and marketing in different contexts, from leading digital acquisition in enterprise banking, to helping grow a youth-focused digital banking product, working inside a global digital bank, and advising startups. I have found that the companies that grow consistently are not necessarily the ones doing the most. They are the ones that know what matters now, and what can wait.

1. I Wouldn’t Obsess Over Download Numbers

One lesson that has become increasingly clear to me over the years is that acquisition is only the beginning of the story. Downloads make for great board slides, but they don’t necessarily make for a great business. It is easy to celebrate a spike in installs after a successful campaign, but it’s much harder to explain why a large percentage of those users never come back.

During my time as content manager at Xapo Bank, for instance, the internal conversations about growth never stopped at traffic or acquisition. The focus quickly shifted to what happened next. Were people finding value? Were they engaging with the product? Were lifecycle communications helping members build confidence and use more of what the platform offered? Were users renewing their annual membership?

That’s a much healthier way to think about growth. The best consumer apps don’t just acquire users. They create reasons for people to return.

2. I Wouldn’t Try to Win Every Marketing Channel

Founders often feel pressure to be everywhere. Instagram. TikTok. LinkedIn. YouTube. Podcasts. PR. Influencers. Partnerships. SEO… the list keeps growing.

I have been part of teams managing multiple channels across different markets, and one thing has remained true regardless of company size: every channel creates work. It’s not just about publishing content. Every channel needs planning, creative, measurement, optimisation and ongoing attention. Spreading a small team too thin usually creates average results everywhere instead of exceptional results somewhere.

I would rather dominate one or two channels where I know my audience spends time than chase visibility everywhere. Because when it comes right down to it, focus compounds and delivers way more value over time than a “everywhere at once” strategy when there are no resources to support.
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3. I Wouldn’t Scale Paid Acquisition Before Understanding Retention

One of the easiest ways to burn marketing budget is to pour more people into a product before understanding why existing users are not staying. I have seen organisations become incredibly good at acquiring customers while paying far less attention to what happened after the first interaction.

That’s not only backwards, it’s expensively dangerous.

Every pound or dollar spent on acquisition becomes more valuable when customers stay longer, engage more deeply and recommend the product to others. This is one reason I’ve always enjoyed working across marketing, product and customer experience rather than treating them as separate conversations. Growth is not created by acquisition alone. It’s shaped by everything that happens after someone signs up.

4. I Wouldn’t Build My Strategy Around Going Viral

I have seen social media role descriptions where the primary KPI is to create viral content consistently. While every founder may dream about the post, video or campaign that suddenly takes off, the truth is that sometimes it happens and most times, it doesn’t.

I have worked on campaigns that significantly outperformed expectations. I have also worked on carefully planned campaigns that delivered solid, predictable results without attracting much attention outside the business and core target. Guess which ones I would rather build a company around? 

While virality can be really exciting, without repeatability, it would be very challenging to scale at the right cost. The businesses I have seen grow consistently did not depend on one breakthrough moment. Rather, they built systems that helped them learn faster, improve continuously and make better decisions with every campaign.

5. I Wouldn’t Chase More Data Before Using the Data I Already Have

I could teach an entire masterclass on this one. 

Whenever I work with businesses looking to accelerate growth, there’s often an assumption that better decisions require more data. In reality, many organisations already have more information than they are acting on.

The challenge isn’t collecting customer data, it is connecting the dots and using the data to inform better business decisions. Do you know where customers drop off during onboarding? Can you identify which lifecycle messages actually influence activation? Do you know which acquisition channels bring your highest-value users rather than simply the cheapest ones?

Those questions usually generate better conversations than adding yet another dashboard. The companies I have enjoyed working with most weren’t necessarily the ones with the most sophisticated technology stack, but those that turned customer insight into action, tracked the results on a consistent basis and applied learnings to further improve outcomes.

So, What Would I Prioritise Instead?

If I had to grow a consumer app today, my priorities would be quite simple: 

• I’d spend time talking to customers and understanding why they came in the first place, and where they came from.
• I’d invest heavily in onboarding because first impressions have a habit of becoming lasting impressions.
• I’d build measurement before scaling spend, so decisions were driven by evidence rather than instinct.
• I’d make retention everyone’s responsibility instead of treating it as something that belonged exclusively to Product or CRM.
• And I’d build operating rhythms that helped the team learn quickly, rather than chasing every new growth trend that appeared on social media.

These are the foundations that make everything else work better. One of the biggest lessons I have learned in my career is that growth isn’t usually held back because businesses don’t know enough tactics, it’s usually because they are trying to do too many things before they have mastered the few that matter most.

Need a Fresh Perspective on Your Growth Strategy?

If you are building a consumer product and trying to turn growth into a repeatable system rather than a series of campaigns, I would be happy to help you identify where your biggest opportunities really are.

“See, Lola, management is not interested in impressions or clicks, they just want to see the number of new app users we are adding each month. It’s the only number we care about”. 

That’s what the Head of Mobile Apps for one of my clients told me last year. I had just been signed up to help the marketing team address major gaps in their digital acquisition and growth marketing strategy, and I was holding cross-functional stakeholder engagements as part of my initial audit. 

His words confirmed what their Head of Digital Marketing had told me from the start – they just couldn’t seem to get anyone senior interested enough in top-of-funnel metrics that were the starting point of their conversion journey.

Read More: ‘Set It and Forget It’ Might Be the Worst Thing for Your Marketing

Presenting TOFU Metrics: It’s Not What, It’s How

This challenge is a crucial one faced by marketing teams in different markets and industries around the world. My experience, however, has been that most people don’t get shut down when they present top-of-funnel metrics because executives “don’t care about marketing.” They get shut down because of how the metrics are presented.

I’ve sat in enough rooms to know the pattern – a member of the marketing team puts up a slide with reach, impressions, engagement, maybe a nice green arrow pointing up… and you can immediately feel the entire energy and mood change.

Someone clears their throat; or someone asks about downloads; or someone else says, “This is interesting, but what’s the impact?”. And just like that, the conversation is over, before it even gets a chance to start.

Let’s talk about how to avoid that.
 

Start with their problem, not your metrics

The fastest way to lose the room is to lead with numbers they didn’t ask for. The Head of Mobile Apps was right in saying all management cares about is how many new users signed up on the apps. Executives don’t wake up wondering what happened to reach last week. They wake up worrying about growth slowing, CAC rising, or targets slipping.

So start there.

Instead of saying “Our reach increased by 38% month-on-month…”, try saying “We are seeing early signs that demand is softening in one of our key segments, and our reach is where it’s showing up first.”

With this slight change in wording and perspective, you immediately demonstrate that your TOFU metrics have a job. They are no longer decoration, they are evidence.

Never present TOFU metrics alone – always pair them

Top-of-funnel metrics should almost never stand on their own slide, because they hardly tell the right story to non-marketers. They tend to make sense in relationship to something else.

For example, try to make the following pairings:

• Reach next to qualified traffic
• Engagement next to mid-funnel movement
• Awareness next to assisted conversions

When you do this, you are showing a system and just a scoreboard. This simple pairing changes the conversation from “Why should I care?” to “What’s driving that?”. 

Translate metrics into plain business language

One mistake I see often is assuming everyone in the room speaks “marketing”, when they actually don’t. So, rather than saying “CTR dropped by 0.6%”,consider saying “Fewer people who see us are curious enough to click, which usually shows up as lower conversions a few weeks later.”

Don’t say “Frequency is declining”, instead you may want to say “We’re showing up less often to the same audience, which makes us easier to forget.”

This isn’t dumbing things down. It’s doing the work of interpretation, which is literally your job as a marketer.

Frame TOFU metrics as early indicators, not performance claims

One line that I find works surprising well is saying “This isn’t the result yet, it’s the signal before the result.”

That one sentence immediately resets expectations, and makes it clear that you are not claiming success, rather, you are showing foresight. Executives understand early warning systems, what they don’t like is being sold optimism without evidence that anything will actually change

Be explicit about what decisions the metrics inform

If your slide doesn’t answer “So what do we do?”, it most likely will get ignored. Every TOFU discussion should clearly point to one of three things:

• Scale (this is working, we should do more)
• Fix (something’s breaking upstream)
• Hold (don’t overreact yet)

When leaders see that TOFU metrics help them make better decisions, resistance drops fast.

Final Note: Credibility Matters Before Dashboards

Yes, you read that right.

From my experience, the people who get away with talking about TOFU metrics are usually the ones who have proven they understand the whole funnel. Once leaders trust that you care about outcomes and the bottomline as much as they do, they stop dismissing upstream signals as fluff.

So don’t defend TOFU metrics emotionally, instead, tie them to hard business outcomes and demonstrate that you understand that any conversation that ends at TOFU is bound to get dismissed.  

From fintechs to ecommerce, startups to enterprises, I have helped companies drive more growth and get more value from their marketing budgets. If you would like to explore what that might look like for your company, do reach out to me for a discussion. 

After my recent piece on top-of-funnel, often mis-termed “vanity” metrics, I had a few folks reach out to me asking variations of the same question.

• “We hear you. But how do we actually use these metrics without getting distracted?”
• “How do we know which top-of-funnel numbers are telling us something useful?”
• “How do we connect all this to real business outcomes?”

Those questions are still coming through, so I figured I would write this follow-up post on how to use top-of-funnel metrics the right way. 

Read More: 5 Big Threats To Your Business Success — And None Is External

1. Stop treating top-of-funnel metrics as targets

This is where things usually start to go wrong. 

Metrics like impressions, reach, views, and awareness should rarely be goals on their own. The moment you turn them into targets, people start gaming them, and the numbers lose meaning. 

Instead, treat them like sensors that exist to give you important insights:

• Is demand building or fading?
• Are we getting in front of the right people?
• Is something changing before revenue does?

Because if your awareness doubles but nothing downstream moves, that’s not success, it’s a clue that needs to be followed.

2. Use them to spot momentum, not “success”

Top-of-funnel metrics are best read over time, not in isolation. Just as a bad week doesn’t mean a bad strategy, when it comes to top-of-funnel metrics, a single spike means very little. A consistent trend, however, can mean a lot.

Trends and patterns tell you where to focus and not whether you should celebrate. Keeping a keen eye on them can make a big difference in how you modify your strategy to improve bottom-of-funnel conversion.

Examples of some patterns to look out for include:

• Rising reach paired with improving mid-funnel engagement
• Stable awareness but falling consideration (message problem)
• Growing traffic with flat conversions (intent mismatch)

 3. Tie every top-of-funnel metric to a downstream question

A simple rule that works surprisingly well is that if you can’t answer “so what”, then the metric probably doesn’t matter. You don’t always need perfect attribution, just directional clarity. 

For example:

• Reach – “Is it reaching people who later convert?”
• Engagement – “Does this audience move deeper into the funnel?”
• Traffic → Does this traffic behave differently from other sources?

4. Use the top of the funnel to decide when to scale

I could teach an entire masterclass on this point. This is one of the most practical uses of top-of-funnel metrics, and one that’s often missed.

Top-of-funnel signals help you decide whether the engine is ready, and not just how hard to press the accelerator. If awareness is growing but engagement is weak, scaling spend just magnifies inefficiency.

Before you pour more money into acquisition, top-of-funnel metrics should tell you:

• The message is resonating
• The audience is responding consistently
• The system can handle more volume

5. Watch for early warning signs, not just growth signals

These metrics aren’t only for expansion, they’re for protection.

A drop in awareness today often shows up as a revenue problem tomorrow, in the same way a shift in engagement quality can signal fatigue before conversions drop.

Used properly, top-of-funnel metrics buy you time. They give you a chance to adjust before leadership starts asking uncomfortable questions.

6. Better judgement not more data 

This is the part that matters most.

Top-of-funnel metrics don’t replace outcomes, they support decision-making. Used correctly, they help you ask better questions, move earlier, and scale more confidently.

The mistake isn’t paying attention to them, rather paying attention without context, intent, or discipline.

Conclusion

My first post was about reclaiming the so-called “vanity” metrics from the trash bin, but this one is about putting them back where they belong as tools, not trophies.

Used well, they help you scale with confidence. Conversely, if you ignore them, they can leave you blind at the worst possible moment (and no one wants to explain that slide in a top management or board meeting!).

Remember, if you need help building your growth engine for scale, I’m just one contact away. 

Key Takeaways

• Customer loyalty is often built through attentiveness, not expensive technology.
• Customers are more likely to stay when they feel heard, remembered, and understood.
• Small, consistent actions often create more value than grand marketing initiatives.

For more than five years now, I’ve bought meats from a butcher named Mr. Akeem. Like clockwork, I would send Mr. Akeem an SMS detailing what meat parts I wanted, and he delivered them to my doorstep within a few hours or, at most, the next day.  

Yesterday morning, he sent me an SMS checking that the new year was going great (he already wished me a happy new year on January 1st). Nothing elaborate or fancy, no grand terms, just a short, simple message wishing me well for the year ahead and extending regards to my family. But the moment I saw it, I immediately understood the true message behind it – I hadn’t placed an order in nearly a month and this was Mr. Akeem’s way of reminding me that it was time to do so. 

Read More: 5 Big Threats To Your Business Success — And None Is External

This is one of the things that actually struck me early on about Mr. Akeem – he always noticed when there was any sort of gap, and always took proactive action by reaching out. In nearly five years, that hasn’t changed. 

Here are the 3 important customer value lessons to learn from this butcher. 

1. Pay Attention to Customers: That’s How You Keep Them  

Over the years, I’ve realized Mr. Akeem has his own unique system for keeping track of his customers. He is semi-literate and doesn’t know how to use any software, spreadsheets or CRM, but through attentiveness, he has mapped a cadence for every customer. 

In my case, he knows I place an order every 2-3 weeks, except I’m out of the country. And every single time I skip that pattern, he checks in. It’s usually a short message, never aggressive or pushy, but just enough to remind you that the relationship still exists.

What makes this even more interesting is that Mr. Akeem has no formal education, much less any marketing training or knowledge of fancy customer retention framework. Yet, in many ways, he understands customer value more deeply than some businesses with entire marketing departments. He pays close attention and monitors patterns of his existing customers in the way that businesses must do to drive long-term customer value, and reduce churn.

2. Customers Remember Effort More Than Perfection

One of the things that has kept me returning to Mr. Akeem has been how he listens to feedback and acts on it. If you ever complain about something, he apologises with so much sincerity and the issue is corrected by the next delivery.

It was clear from the start that he was listening properly. Not the kind of listening where someone is already preparing excuses in their head while you speak, but one with genuine interest in making improvement.

If the cuts were too small the last time, he remembers.
If you prefer leaner pieces, he adjusts.
If you mention wanting softer meat for a particular meal, he takes note.

The interesting part is that he never announces any of this as “great customer service.” He simply behaves that way consistently. And I think many businesses underestimate how powerful consistency is. Customers don’t always remember the fanciest brand or the most sophisticated campaign. Most times, they remember how easy you are to deal with and how many times they had to repeat something before you got it right.

3. Loyalty Is Built from Many Small Acts

Over time, I’ve realized that customer value is usually built through small moments repeated consistently over time.

A follow-up message.
A remembered preference.
A corrected mistake.
A sense that somebody is paying attention.

The funny thing is that many businesses today are chasing customer loyalty through technology while overlooking the human behaviours that create loyalty in the first place.

Tools help, absolutely. Automation helps, no doubt. But neither replaces attentiveness. The technology you adopt should help you know your customer better, and personalize the service you render to them. 

Conclusion: Never Lose Sight of the Fundamentals 

Sometimes we overcomplicate business growth so much that we forget the fundamentals. We chase new customers aggressively while neglecting existing ones who are gradually slipping away. We obsess over marketing campaigns while ignoring consistency in service.

Mr. Akeem may be a semi-literate butcher who never uses terms like “customer retention,” “lifetime value,” or “relationship management,” but he practices all three naturally. That’s not because he has read any fancy business books, but because he understands something simple – when customers feel seen and heard, they stay.

If your company has a customer churn problem to tackle or simply wants to see if there’s room to improve customer lifetime value, do let’s have a conversation on how I might be able to help. 

I recently attended a strategy session for one of my clients, a financial services company looking to scale business growth via digital acquisitions. In engagements before now, they had echoed some of the sentiments I hear a lot of when talking to those just starting their growth marketing journey:

• “The bottom line is that X people downloaded the app.”
• “What matters is how many accounts were opened.”
• “Let’s focus on real outcomes.”

I’ll be honest, that’s a reasonable position to hold. Who cares about “vanity metrics” like impressions and clicks? Afterall, revenue is what pays salaries. KPIs like downloads, accounts opened etc are what keep management and the board calm. Actual conversions are easy to point at and say, “This worked”. 

However, a key point I made to them during the strategy session – if you are responsible for growth, rather than just reporting numbers at the end of the month, thinking that way can get you into serious trouble, fast. Why? Because the bottom of the funnel does not exist in isolation. Let’s take a closer look.

Read More: The Data Trap: Why a Bad Week Doesn’t Mean a Bad Strategy
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What factors affect the bottom of the funnel?

People don’t just wake up one day and download an app they’ve never heard of. They don’t open accounts with brands they don’t recognise or trust. Every “real” outcome has a backstory. Someone saw you, then they saw you again. Then they started paying attention, and, then they acted eventually (hopefully😅).

See? This means that when you only care about the bottom of the funnel, you’re basically saying, “I don’t care how we got here, just show me the result.” That might work, but trust me, only for a while.

Growth isn’t a moment; it’s a flow

One of the hardest parts of managing growth is that the results lag the work. 

By the time downloads slow down, the real problem usually happened weeks earlier: maybe awareness dropped, maybe targeting drifted, maybe messaging stopped resonating. That’s why “set it and forget it” is a recipe for marketing disaster. You’ve got to constantly check what’s going on with your growth funnel.

Top- and mid-funnel metrics are how you catch those things early. They’re not the goal, but they’re the signals that tell you whether the system is healthy. Ignoring them is like refusing to look at your fuel gauge because you only care about arriving.

Are “vanity metrics” really useless in growth marketing? 

Nope, they are just misunderstood. 

It’s true that impressions on their own don’t mean much. Yes, reach doesn’t pay rent. Engagement definitely won’t show up as revenue in your bank account. However, those numbers answer important questions:

• Are we reaching the right people at all?
• Is our message landing or being ignored?
• Is awareness growing or shrinking?
• Are we warming up demand or letting it go cold?

There’s no magic to it. If the top of your funnel is weak, the bottom will eventually feel it. You can optimise conversion rates all you want, but you can’t convert people who were never there in the first place.

The real issue isn’t vanity, it’s laziness

Not all metrics deserve attention, because some of them are genuinely fluff. The main work is knowing which ones matter — which channels drive conversion, which audiences show real intent over time, and signals consistently show up before growth spikes or drops.

That’s not vanity. That’s doing the job properly. 

This means as a growth marketer, you’ve got to not only know which metrics matter and which don’t, but you have to actually put in the work to make sense of them and leverage them in making smarter decisions.

So yes, colour me vain

If being “vain” means paying attention to awareness, consideration, and intent before they magically turn into revenue, then fine. I’ll own it. You should, too, as a growth marketer.

Because sustainable growth doesn’t come from staring at the bottom of the funnel and hoping for the best. It comes from making sure there’s always something flowing into it, and that you’re paying attention before it runs dry.

If you need support making sense of the different metrics along your entire growth funnel, I’d be happy to help. Just drop me a note, and let’s catch up.

Key Takeaways

• Not every growth problem requires AI; many businesses simply need clearer processes and automation.
• AI works best when your foundation (workflows, data, team readiness) is already solid.
• Knowing what problem you’re trying to solve makes choosing the right solution far easier.

Everywhere you turn, someone is talking about AI. There are so many new tools, new breakthroughs, new promises. AI is all around us, and changing how we work, think and build. 

In my interactions with business owners, however, I observe that in the middle of all that excitement, something important keeps getting missed: AI isn’t automatically the answer to every growth problem. In fact, for many businesses, AI isn’t even the first answer. What they need very urgently is automation.

Read More: 7 Ways You’re Leaving Food on the Table with Your Marketing

Automation: How Well Do You Know What You Need?

The surprising part in all of this is that most leaders already feel the need for automations, they just can’t articulate it. Teams are stretched thin, processes feel heavier than they should, and everyone senses that growth is within reach, but something in the engine always feels like it needs to be tweaked and tuned. 

Before chasing the next AI upgrade, it’s worth pausing to ask a simple but powerful question:
“Are our operations actually stable enough to benefit from AI?” This is a crucial question, because without the right structure, AI doesn’t fix inefficiency. Rather, it amplifies it.

Automation vs. AI: Why the Sequence Matters

Think of automation as the solid flooring of your business, and think of AI as the high-end furniture, the beautiful art, the smart upgrades that make the space come alive.

You need the flooring first. Automation gives you consistency, and AI gives you intelligence. If you don’t have consistency, then that intelligence simply becomes noise.  

5 Signs You Need Automation Before AI

Here are five easy-to-spot signals that your organisation needs to automate the basics before introducing more sophisticated AI layers:

1. Your team is drowning in repetitive, manual tasks

If your best people spend their mornings copying, sending, nudging or reconciling instead of creating value, automation is what will unlock their capacity.

2. Your data lives everywhere—and nowhere

When you have multiple dashboards, scattered spreadsheets, and dashboards no one fully trusts, AI won’t fix the confusion. Automation creates a single point of truth that AI can build on.

3. Your workflows depend on “the one person who knows how it’s done”

If your operations crumble when someone is off-duty, automation helps you institutionalise process knowledge instead of relying on memory.

4. Small tasks require big coordination

If something as simple as approvals, follow-ups, or updates requires meetings or long Slack threads, automation helps streamline the entire chain.

5. You can’t scale without hiring more people

This is one of the clearest signs. If growth equals more headcount, you likely need automated systems, not necessarily an expensive AI pivot.

So, Where Does AI Fit In?

Once your processes are clean, your systems talk to each other, and your team isn’t stretched, then AI becomes a powerful accelerator. Businesses that sequence Automation and AI correctly don’t just grow, but do so efficiently, with clarity and momentum.

AI is incredible, and Automation is essential. However, when you understand what your business needs right now, you unlock growth without guesswork or impulse decisions. If you’re exploring how to strike the right balance between both or you’re unsure which one your business is truly ready for, I’m always happy to offer perspective. Be sure to contact me, and let’s discuss this more.