South Africa: Is Internet Marketing a Waste of Money? - AllAfrica.com

[Adam Dicker]

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South Africa: Is Internet Marketing a Waste of Money?
AllAfrica.com, Washington - 4 hours ago
It seems that South Africans are so focused on conventional marketing that they are dumping their Internet investment in the water. ...


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[tractor]

I would imagine that anywhere in the world, the bulk of marketing and adspend is in traditional advertising, TV, mags etc and many SA businesses just don't put any effort into their sites, so in some respects he may be right.

An example of my own experience is with a large office automation business that I do some lead generation for. Their site is a typical brochure site so I offered to generate leads off my own site for a comm and in the first month did close to R1 million in sales.
Needless to say they are now waking up and currently in redevelopment with a strong domain strategy in place.

Sure there are many challenges in SA but internet usage is growing, co.za domain registrations are at close to 400 000 now, dropping domains are very few and there are companies like 24.com who are very active in their online development and acquisitions in SA.

Connectivity and bandwidth costs are still very high but there are some major developments underway which will bring those costs way down and the infrastructure developments to cater for the media requirements of the world cup in 2010 should leave a lot of excess bandwidth in its wake.

I am a great believer in SA, have had some success online and will continue to pick up good co.za domains and South africa related domains in the future.