In emerging markets, go-to-market is navigation, not a channel plan

The most useful lesson of that period is not in those two numbers, though. It is in a third one, far less flattering, which I give further down.

Segment on need, not on geography

The imported reflex is to cut audiences by country, then by city, then by age bracket. In Ghana, segmenting on energy need rather than geography took cost per lead from 0.48 to 0.24 dollars between May 2023 and May 2024.

Geography describes where people live. Need describes why they buy. In a market where demographic data is incomplete and consumption habits are still forming, the second holds and the first breaks.

Creative that does not load does not exist

A visual that takes eight seconds to appear on a 2G connection does not have a creativity problem, it has an existence problem. We rebuilt the creative so it would load on the weakest connections, and the journeys so they would survive a limited data budget.

That is the part of the job no slide template contains, and it is the part that decides the result across half the continent.

The far less flattering number

On another file, an identical digital sales channel was deployed across three markets at the same time. Same system, same method, same central teams. The conversion rates achieved: 6.24 %, 5.51 %, and 0.12 %.

Fifty times between best and worst, on a rigorously identical system. And the point that makes the gap interesting: cost per lead was fine everywhere, between 0.85 and 2.36 dollars, including in the failing market.

In other words, media had delivered. The local organisation did not convert. Assigned sales barely materialised.

I wrote the full account, put it in the same table as the two other markets, and recommended stopping rather than renewing. The market was relaunched a year later, after a rebuild, with cost per lead halved.

What that gap proves

That an emerging-market go-to-market does not transpose by copy. The same mechanics deliver 6 % here and 0.12 % there, not because the marketing is worse, but because the chain that follows the click does not have the same strength.

A channel plan assumes that downstream is stable. In emerging markets, downstream is the variable. Stock, the call-centre agent, the field agent, product availability, delivery time, the ability to call a lead back within the hour: that is where the difference sits between two markets receiving the same campaign.

Count the full cost, not the media cost

The discipline that served me most is accounting before it is creative. For each market I rebuilt the entire account: media buying fees carried by the group, automation tools, call-centre agent time, actual media spend, per-call centre charges, agent commissions.

Full cost per sale comes out of that calculation, and it looks nothing like media cost per sale. It is the only number that says whether a channel is genuinely the cheapest, or merely the most visible.

Tighten the geography rather than the budget

In the middle market I cut the campaign in two zones and relaunched it on the single city whose metrics held. The budget was halved and conversion rose.

The lever was not money, it was scope. That is true almost everywhere, and it is almost always the last thing tried.

What holds after ten years

Staying close to the ground, literally. The decisions that worked across those ten markets came out of visits, conversations with agents and shop managers, not out of a dashboard read from another time zone.

And accepting to write the failure into the same table as the wins. One market in three that does not convert is information, provided it circulates. Hidden, it repeats the following year on a fourth market.