If there’s one thing South African consumers are almost uncannily good at, it’s sniffing out authenticity in online marketing, and when they feel an internet marketing message is pandering to them. An advert that strikes a decidedly false tone with customers is a one-way ticket to being noticed for the wrong reasons. If you take a look at most of the so-called ‘Brand Fails’ that are shared on local social media, you’re more likely to see companies being pilloried for being fake than for lying or making spelling mistakes. There’s even a Twitter count dedicated to making an example of brands that do this. It’s called ‘Brands Saying Bae’ and it mocks brands that try to be cool by using youth lingo such as ‘bae’ and ‘on fleek’.

At Globital South Africa, we realise that when you’re marketing online for your clients, their brand’s voice should be reflective of its customers and this voice should carry across all SEO marketing and website copywriting. This takes more than hiring a freelance copywriter to jot out a few random sentences here and there to save you time. It requires strategically using marketing tools such as keywords and target market research to make sure that their brand voice is consistent and resonates with its intended market.

SEO Resellers SA is a digital marketing reseller, which means that we offer you the opportunity to outsource your copywriting, SEO, white label AdWords Campaigns and more. We’ve noticed that while many agencies consult us to get a great web design and to take care of social media marketing/advertising needs to make sure they tweet often enough, they pay less attention to their clients’ actual brand copy. This can cause long-lasting negative effects on a brand – as Bic South Africa discovered last year.

On Women’s Day of 2015, Bic South Africa celebrated South African women with an inspirational image that instructed the reader to “Look like a girl, act like a lady, think like a man, and work like a boss.”
The backlash was swift and soon went international. Bic’s response was that they had taken the quote from a blog about women in business and that no offense was meant. Yet investigations from intrepid readers found that the blog source was filled with questionable content, giving off the impression that Bic had googled a random quote and picked the first one that came up in its search results. The result is that since then Bic South Africa has seen a significant drop in engagement on their social media pages – specifically from women.

A brand’s voice is often communicated online through its copywriting, and South African companies should think carefully about how authentically they communicate that voice in their copy to prevent being the next Bic – or worse. Globital South Africa are specialists who can help you with this, as we offer all aspects of white label digital marketing, included white label SEO, AdWords, SEM, web design and copywriting.