Our story in 3 bullets:
- Crackerjack 3.0 (2019 – current): A UK-centric digital marketing agency based in SA
- Crackerjack 2.0 (2013 – 2018): South African digital marketing agency
- Crackerjack 1.0 (1998 – 2013): Advertising and design agency
Marketing is one of the most important things a business can do. It builds brand awareness, increases sales, engages customers and ultimately grows businesses. Without marketing, a business dies.
But without business, a marketing business also dies – here is the story of what led Crackerjack, a South African marketing business, to shift focus and become a successful digital marketing agency in the UK market with a unique value proposition.
A struggling local economy
In our area of Nelson Mandela Bay in South Africa, local newspapers and radio stations are fighting a losing battle against online platforms for their bread ‘n butter share of national advertising spend, while local business advertising on social media platforms is scarce.
This paints a grim picture of local traditional media struggling to keep up and adapt, and local businesses under serious financial strain and no longer able to afford marketing and advertising.
A difficult South African economic climate for independent white-owned businesses
The e-commerce space in South Africa has boomed during Covid-19, as it has globally, and is dominated by the big retailers that are crushing or buying up small and medium independent businesses. Independent retailers are struggling to compete against giant online operations that offer free delivery, a no-questions-asked returns policy, and products at keen prices.
For smaller, independent marketing agencies, this means a client base being swallowed-up by the large multinational agencies favoured by the large retail operators.
At the same time, South Africa’s black economic empowerment legislation shuts out small white-owned businesses from doing business with large corporates and the public sector, which still have generous marketing and advertising budgets.
Added to this, South Africa’s overall economic outlook is not looking good.
The impact of Covid-19
Up until 2020, Crackerjack derived almost 50% of its revenue from the local hospitality sector. The Covid-19 pandemic had a catastrophic impact on tourism and hospitality and so we had to look elsewhere to supplement our loss in revenue and continue operating without having to scale down and retrench staff.
Digital marketing knows no geographic borders and so, as seasoned digital marketers with over a decade of experience in the game, we found the solution to sustaining our business outside South Africa, with real benefits to our new clients.
Outsourced digital marketing in the UK
What we’ve learned
Backed up by our deep experience in digital marketing and operating in the UK since 2019, we’ve learned a lot about what works and fails in that market.
We focus on our strengths of doing things right technically, and we focus on working with small and medium independently-owned businesses and entrepreneurs. We don’t commit to unrealistic KPIs and make pie-in-the-sky promises, and we work closely with our clients to achieve success over time by ongoing testing, analysing, evaluating and adapting strategies.
What we have discovered is that if you are paying less than £3 000 per month you are probably working with a mediocre agency, and that every client that we have onboarded in the UK has poor technical setup and has wasted a lot of money on poorly executed pay-per-click (PPC) strategies.
Why do business with Crackerjack
For starters there’s our experience and expertise in digital marketing, and now our experience working with UK clients, coupled with the weak South African rand which enables Crackerjack to provide exceptional value-for-money to clients in the UK. We provide clients with excellent Full Stack Marketing at much less cost than their local agencies. For the cost of one employee doing one thing, our clients get a full service, out-of-the-box thinking and a digital marketing solution that delivers more bang for the buck.
Since 2019 we have provided digital marketing services to a wide range of established UK companies, via a white label arrangement with a UK-based digital marketing agency. We’ve learnt a lot about what works and fails, and how to best meet the needs of small to medium sized businesses in the UK.
Also read:
For 150 Years South Africa Helped Make Britain Great – We’re Back!