- To drive the execution of Brand and Marketing (B&M) strategies at the regional and segment level, translating central strategic direction into localized, impactful initiatives.
- While the centre focuses on strategy development, brand governance, and national campaigns, this role ensures the effective implementation, customization, and operationalization of these strategies within the regions.
- The role is accountable for delivering Go-To-Market (GTM) execution for B2C (prepaid, postpaid, residential, youth, fintech) and B2B (enterprise) segments, enabling market share growth, customer engagement, and revenue generation. Additionally, the role provides hands-on leadership across trade marketing, sponsorships, events, media planning, PR, and digital marketing, ensuring all activities align with central direction while meeting unique regional needs and market dynamics.
- By bridging the gap between the central B&M function and regional execution, this role ensures regional marketing initiatives are locally relevant, operationally agile, and deliver measurable business impact.
Responsibilities
Strategy Development and Execution
- Act as the architect of the Regional marketing strategy for the region to grow market share, product adoption, customer loyalty and continuously improve NPS and Brand Health in the region. This includes working with central team, regional head, and BU leadership
to adapt and execute GTM strategies based on local market conditions. - Develop and implement regional B&M strategies that align with segment and central strategic goals.
- Deliver end-to-end Go-To-Market (GTM) plans for products and services in B2C (prepaid, postpaid, residential, fintech, youth) and B2B segments.
- Work closely with central B&M, business unit leaders (Consumer, Enterprise, Residential, Fintech), and regional leadership to ensure successful strategy execution.
- Drive the regional media planning and buying strategy, sponsorships and events in line with centre
- Drive the digital marketing and social media strategies within the region in line with centre
- Formulates plans and strategies to continuously improve NPS in the region based on the understanding of the key drivers of NPS
- Ensure regional alignment and brand governance, compliance, and consistency across all regional marketing initiatives.
Regional Marketing Delivery Leadership
- Analyses marketing data and the marketing metrics achieved such as brand health and NPS.
- Lead a team to effectively execute on GTM plans and Channel and Trade Marketing initiatives. The team is responsible to deliver comprehensive marketing support to consumer, enterprise, residential and FinTech business units, aiding operations through initiatives such as trade marketing, sponsorships & events, media planning and buying, corporate affairs & PR etc. to achieveBrand Health, market share, product adoption, and customer loyalty in the Region.
- Continue to drive trade marketing initiatives to support regional operations and increase product visibility against measurable KPI’s such revenue, market share, customer acquisition, retention, churn, NPS, Brand Health, etc.
- Lead the planning and execution of regional sponsorships, events, and corporate affairs/PR efforts to improve brand affinity and community engagement in the Region. Collaborate with internal teams, channels, and external partners to deliver high-impact activations.
- Collaborate with cross-functional teams to deliver integrated and aligned marketing solutions. This includes maintaining strong interlocks with CX team to identify customer preferences in order to build marketing plans and solutions around these.
- Develop and maintain media & PR relationships and corporate affairs within the region
- Drive awareness and visibility for MTN’s local CSI initiatives in the region
- Define and track KPIs for all regional B&M initiatives, ensuring alignment with central targets.
- Report on the effectiveness of campaigns, events, and trade marketing initiatives, identifying areas for improvement.
Financial Management and Cost Control
- Ensures proper and efficient utilisation of marketing budgets allocated to the Region.
- Develop and manage project initiative budgets in line with business objectives
- Manage and optimise and communicate the budget, expense report, ensuring that all expenditure is in line with the budget.
- Monitor costs and determine initiatives to optimize resources. Ensure cost effectiveness by maximising cost/benefit ratios.
- Identify opportunities to generate additional revenue.
- Oversee media planning and buying for regional campaigns, optimizing reach and ROI.
- Base annual budgets on the identification of trends and patterns within the current operations and extrapolate these over the next planning cycle, taking any known changes in new products or services into consideration
Governance, Policies and Procedures
- Ensure effective implementation of (and compliance towards) all company policies, processes, and procedures. Put effective methods and standards in place in alignment with aforementioned.
- Ensure brand governance, compliance, and consistency across all regional marketing initiatives.
- As part of a governance forum/ interlock, introduce regular alignment meetings or collaborative platforms to share insights between central and regional teams. Review regional adaptations to ensure consistency with national strategies.
- Empower regional marketing team to execute GTM activities but ensure they align with central branding and strategic guidelines (e.g. Central Team provides a toolkit, Regional Teams use the toolkit to create localized variations).
- Manage and provide solutions to escalations that have multiple processes / functions impact on critical path of service delivery
- Continuously review key risks, issues and dependencies and set mitigation actions. Proactively flag and escalate issues and manage impacts on resources, cost and productivity
Continuous Improvement
- Study the competitor initiatives and leverages data insights to formulate strategies in terms of promotion and adoption
- Drive best practice, continuous improvement and innovation at process and procedure level within Regions Marketing Operations.
- Ensure that the relevant analysis of market knowledge, trends and competitive information is gathered and assimilated.
- Ensure competitors benchmarking and gap analysis is performed as appropriate and incorporated into business operations.
- Initiate change to continually improve all aspects of service delivery and drive continuous improvement as an important element of service delivery.
People Leadership and Management
- Lead, mentor, and manage multifunctional segment teams providing coaching, guidance, and performance evaluations.
- Develop and maintain a high-performance team that consistently meets or exceeds targets. Review the team’s performance against agreed KPIs and drive plans for improvement.
- Foster a culture of collaboration, continuous improvement, and customer-centricity within the team.
- Set integrated goals and objectives for the team in order to achieve a future-focused, future-fit high-performing organisation.
- Provide technical, procedural and policy guidance to staff, colleagues , partners and vendors.
- Attract, develop and retain appropriate talent. Build talent by identifying and developing new leaders for the respective environment
- Set KPIs and provide regular performance feedback through a well-defined and implemented performance review programme.
- Develop and implement a training plan to build and develop skills within the team.
- Enable and model healthy employee relations and collaborative teamwork.
- Manage diversity, develop, and embed an Employment Equity plan for the business area.
- Contribute to building a culture of continuous evaluation and improvement. Drive a culture of high performance, accountability and consequence management
- Act as an ambassador for the team by living the values and vital behaviours and changing and influencing employees’ behaviour
Qualifications
Education
- 4-year tertiary qualification in relevant or related field
- MBA / Masters Advantageous
Experience
- Min 7 years of experience in Brand and Marketing, with at least 3-5 years in a leadership role.
- Proven experience in executing Go-To- Market (GTM) strategies for B2C and B2B segments.
- Experience managing trade marketing, sponsorships, events, and digital marketing initiatives.
- Demonstrated ability to manage regional marketing operations and align activities to central strategies.
- Industry experience in telecommunications or a related sector is preferred.
- Worked across diverse cultures and geographies advantageous
Skills
- Interlock Management and Cross-Functional Governance
- Analytics and Interpretation
- Marketing Strategy Development
- GTM Planning and Execution
- Media Planning and Buying Platforms
- Trade Marketing and Channel Strategy
- Event Management and Sponsorship Coordination