Beginner’s Guide to Digital Marketing for Southeast Asia

Let’s first look at two fundamental classification of online marketing channels:

• acquisition vs. retention channels
• organic vs. paid channels

Acquisition channels allow a company to ‘ acquire’a user for the first time. Retention channels are marketing channels used to push existing customers to make additional transactions. Email marketing and App Notifications are among the most popular retention channels.

Organic channels are channels which don't require a company to pay per each additional visit generated on its App or Website. When you click on a link in an Email sent by a company and land on their Website, the company doesn't have to pay for each click or visit they obtain. Paid channels are easier to grow initially and require a bigger initial investment in terms of manpower.

We suggest to look at each channel on the basis of the following three criteria:‌

• Scalability
• Targeting
• Cost (CAC )‌

The bigger and more Scalable the Channel is, the better, as you can keep using it as your company and sales grow. If a channel has limited scale, you will be able to leverage it just up until a certain Point/Size. This is far from ideal as you will need to find another channel to use once you reach the point of saturation.

Let’s go through the two main types of online targeting:‌

• Behavioural targeting
• Demographic targeting

With Behavioural targeting you are targeting people based on their intent to buy a certain product or service. Your ads could show up every time a user performs a search with a Keywords relevant for the product you sell.

Demographic targeting is available on platforms such as Facebook and Instagram. The advantage of demographic vs. Behavioural targeting is that you can reach your target of users immediately without them having to perform any action. The downside of it is that your target will progressively get used to your ads and click on them less and less often.

The marketing cost a company incur in acquiring a new customer to purchase its products or services for the first time is called Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC).

An overview of the major organic channels

• SEO
• Social Media Organic
• Email Marketing

Seo stands for Search Engine Optimization and is the practice of increasing the visibility of a Website in the organic search engine results.

When you shouldn’t invest in SEO

• if you need immediate results: SEO needs some time to start producing results, so you therefore need to have a long-term horizon
• If your product or service is so new or innovative that people don’t Google it: you will need to invest in demographic based targeting channels and not intent based targeting such as Google/ Seo.

There is a lot of content about SEO on the internet which is far from trustable and could therefore teach you the wrong approach to it. The best resource on the web to learn the basics about SEO is “The Beginner’s Guide to SEO ” by Moz. We suggest you to read the first chapter, SEO 101 , which will give you a good overview on what SEO is and why it is so important for any online company.

Every content published on a social media platform is considered part of a company social media marketing. In Indonesia specifically, social media are a very big deal, with more than 130M active social media users, corresponding to 50% of the total Indonesian population. For social media as well, it’s important to distinguish between organic social media posts vs. (paid) social media ads.

Organic social media can be very effective for increasing a company ‘ s brand awareness or to provide customer service to its customers. But when it comes to driving traffic or to generate leads or sales, organic social media has limited impact. If your company publishes a post on either Facebook or Instagram, only a few people will be able to see it.

We recommend you the below guide from Hubspot, which also links to several additional reading materials to further explore the topic:

Newsletter are emails which are regularly sent to the a company’s subscribers list including typically informational content which the customer can scroll through and read.

There are two fundamental types of email marketing:‌

• Email newsletters.
• Email drip campaigns‌.

An overview of the major paid channels

• Paid Search
• Social Media Paid
• Ad Networks

Paid search allows you to show your ads every time a user makes a search using a specific Keyword that you decide to bid on. Google ads operates on a Pay-Per-Click (PPC) model.

• If your product or service is so new or innovative that people don’t Google it, you will need to invest in demographic based targeting type and not intent based targeting such as Google ads.
• Google ads are becoming more and more expensive on a Cost-Per-Click basis. Shift your Online marketing strategy more towards organic traffic and Seo.

Being the most established and popular form of paid acquisition there are countless comprehensive guides on Google Ads and Paid search, including from Google itself.

Social Media Paid or Social Media Ads refer to the advertising available on Social Media platforms such as Facebook or Instagram (the two biggest ones). 

Social Media paid is another key acquisition channel which every company should experiment investing in, given its potential and scalability.

Here again, plenty of good guides to get you started. The following guide by Shopify is one of the simplest to follow and to understand more how the Facebook Ads platform works.

Typically companies with broad audiences, companies that have already saturated other online marketing channels and companies that are looking to build awareness rather than generate direct conversions / sales.

The ability to measure the return on investment (roi) of each Online marketing channel and each dollars spent on is possible in the Online world. Much harder to do it in the Offline world. Over the years, one Digital Analytics tool has been increasingly adopted by businesses of all sizes to track every type of users interactions on their Website.

We found over the years that many digital marketers, even the ones with years of experience, don’t always fully understand how Google Analytics (GA) truly works. That is, what does it mean to ‘track a website’.

There are 4 main types of reports in Google Analytics. Understanding the meaning of each of them and why they are different (more than just memorizing their interface), will go a long way in giving you solid foundations to understanding the analytics of most websites and apps.

The acquisition reports are probably the most important and actionable reports in Ga. they provide you with the necessary information about the sources (Ie. Marketing channels) that brought users to your Website.

Once a user lands on your website, via any acquisition channel, what do they do? How do they interact with your website/app? 

By default, no conversion is automatically tracked by Google Analytics. You will first need to define what are the conversions which make sense to track for your specific business. In order to start tracking a conversion you will need to set up a ‘ goal’. It’s the only way for your business to measure the roi of each of your acquisition channels, and ultimately each of your marketing activities.

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