I had better luck targeting local traffic by using country-specific hashtags on social media and posting at times when people in that region are most active. Ran a few local giveaways too.
I ran into the same issue when I was promoting my site in a specific country. What really helped was focusing on local keywords and building links from country-specific websites. I also tested different domain structures like ccTLD versus subfolders. If you're still figuring things out, I used startup seo to handle most of the heavy lifting, and they really got the job done without overcomplicating it.