In my nine years of digital marketing experience I’ve had the pleasure of working in several different markets (albeit sometimes remotely). Several of those years were in the heart of London. However, I’ve recently returned to my native South Africa to take the reigns at Wonga South Africa’s digital marketing helm.

Despite living in an age where technology provides unparalleled global connectivity, there’s still quite a lot that changed across those 10,000 kilometres.

While my insight is derived from a UK to South Africa transition I believe these observations can be usefully applied in the broader sense to many of common challenges marketers face when dealing with transition in general; be that marketing to a new audience, launching a new product or dealing with a new client or work force.

I have highlighted some of the issues faced and how I dealt with them and hope that you find some value in it.

You need to get your hands dirty ASAP

One of the biggest and most successful adjustments I made to my marketing techniques involved the outreach methodology we were using to network and interact with the influencers in the South African marketplace.

Having come from a background where my target audiences and big brand influencers were all focused on the .co.uk and .com Google search engines, I found that my impressive black book of contacts wasn’t really worth much.

"In South Africa there are 11 official languages, each tied to very different culture, traditions and purchasing behaviour"

Worse still, many of the channels and outreach strategies I’d had great success with in London were producing mediocre engagement rates. It wasn’t until I took a step back, and employed the original tactics I had implemented back in my early London days, that I began to see progress in this new space.

By ‘original tactics’ I simply mean testing. I muted my ‘tried and tested’ outreach emails, process documents, report structures and even my general organic management methodology that had been maturing for years.

That’s not to say I forgot all that I had learned, but I actively tried not to infer anything from my previous experiences. Clinging to these (still valid, but misplaced) strategies and processes was hurting my progress.

It sounds naive but is in fact incredibly easy for a seasoned marketer to not realise the necessity to revisit fundamentals when exploring new territory, to test the water and ground your observations and directions from fresh data.

Cape Town South Africa: a different kettle of fish to marketing in Blighty

Once I adopted a testing mentality it changed the whole project structure. There was suddenly space for exploration, mini tests on everything from social engagement metrics to landing page performance and subject header open rates.

This process didn’t need to run for more than about a 3-4 weeks before I gained massive insights into what was and wasn’t working, and a whole new level of audience understanding and segmentation that you struggle to get from other methods.

In the South African scene for example, the market segmentation market is significantly more diverse. From working in London (one of the most ethnically diverse capitals in the world) the typical unifier was the English language.

In South Africa there are 11 official languages to be aware of; English, Afrikaans, Ndebele, Northern Sotho, Southern Sotho, Swazi, Tsongo, Tswana, Venda, Xhosa and Zulu. Each of these languages is tied to a very different culture, traditions and purchasing behaviour.

lt’s also common practice for written materials to be provided in both English and Afrikaans. Sounds like a headache right? In some ways it is, but it’s taught me to look beyond the canvas and appreciate the diversity as an opportunity and the potential to help enhance basically all the elements of your marketing strategy at a far more natural granular level.

This is segmentation by a predefined culture, language and in many cases, geographical location. You can’t push the same message in the largely Afrikaans speaking Western Cape and expect to see the same results in the largely Zulu speaking province of KwaZulu Natal.

Even though much of the South Africa population can communicate comfortably in English, internet penetration rates among Africans in South Africa are increasing rapidly as well as the emergence of the black middle class. This means that digital marketers here will need to take a multi-language, multi-cultural approach when planning campaigns.

Another, more positive aspect of the South African digital scene, is that it is still in its infancy when compared to Europe or North America. Not a technological infancy, but more from a customer, influencer and end user viewpoint. This means that digital platforms have not yet been overexposed to high frequency, low quality content marketing, retargeting and other general bad digital practices that is seen in Europe and North America.

An international brand doesn’t have much clout with a new audience

A brand’s influence in other locations doesn’t count for as much as you’d think. It makes perfect sense when you consider it from a local resident’s perspective. There’s little to be gained by bragging about the millions of customers you’ve served in the other hemisphere.

Put your efforts into replicating those results at the foundation level of your business. In other words don’t try to convince them you’re awesome with what you’ve done in the past, show people with what you’re doing now.

This means essentially rebuilding your brand status and earning audience trust all over again, of course you can can adapt and mould the original processes and strategies that earned you respect and trust in another location to fast track the path to success and trust building more rapidly, but as I mentioned above, a boilerplate strategic approach will often do more harm than good if you don’t get your hands dirty first.

This lack of clout also applies to search engine marketing. Some of you may have heard that ‘Google favours big brands’, I don’t believe this is the case for brands spanning across multiple geographic demographics, in fact, even the largest of international brands are showing evidence of that they’re not safe from algorithm changes.

Data analyst giants ‘Searchmetrics’ crawled thousands of SERPS from across the globe after a February 2015 Google update, revealing that big brands were actually losing some search visibility in favour of smaller competitors.

I can safely say that the international brand swagger and engorged backlink profiles of your regional websites has a very limited, if any, impact on your geo-specific search in a fresh market. Cracking google.co.za required a lot of consistent work; countless optimisation, next-level content production, social and influencer networking and more.

We’re seeing big wins for key performance metrics and search rankings but we’re still fighting an arduous battle against many smaller, weaker competitors. Google doesn’t play favourites, you have to constantly work hard to stay relevant regardless of size and accomplishments.