By using the internet as a marketing tool; and by using it properly, small businesses in Africa can gain valuable publicity and get ahead of the established market leaders.
You would expect the main challenges when running a search engine marketing (SEM) campaign in Africa to be fairly tactical things, such as communicating with small, fragmented markets; a variety of languages and cultures; poverty; bandwidth and infrastructure constraints; and the propensity for governments under threat to simply switch off the internet.
But according to a couple of Cape Town, South Africa-based SEM experts the education of businesses is still the number one challenge in the field; the result being that companies who do “get it” have an opportunity to get ahead of the established, traditional players.