Promotional activities for Esthetika’s ecocamp site were limited to her network of friends and relatives when the campsite, called Sekar Gemati Agroventure, was opened in 2017.

“We tried to share information through social media, but it did not reach [our intended market] because our reach was limited to the people around us,” she said.

Motivated to introduce the campsite to more people, Esthetika learned how to maximize the use of the internet to do business by joining a free class held by Google Indonesia.

It was in that class that she learned how to utilize various tools provided by the search engine, such as Google My Business, Google Maps and search engine optimization to increase her campsite’s online presence.

“In the past, people who came to the campsite were people I invited. But now, people who I do not even know, people who find information about Sekar Gemati just by using the search engine, also come to my place,” she said.

Since July, online traffic and visits to her place increased threefold after she became more digitally literate and used more Google tools for her business.

According to a study by Deloitte and Google Indonesia in 2015, business revenue can increase by up to 80 percent if supported by an online presence as opposed to conventional ways of doing business that rely on offline marketing and strategy.

Google Indonesia head of marketing, Veronica Utami, at the Indonesian Women’s Forum 2018 held on Thursday, urged women entrepreneurs and small and medium enterprises (SME) to go online to support their businesses.

She, however, noted that going online is not only about accessing the internet and using social media, but rather how to maximize the many tools available online.

“Going digital is not just about updating social media, but rather how to be […] more productive,” said Veronica.

According to a report by the International Finance Corporation (IFC) in 2016, 47 percent of women entrepreneurs in Indonesia rarely utilized technology and the internet to develop their businesses.

Going digital is believed to boost the contribution of SMEs — especially those led by women — to the country’s GDP.

According to the IFC report, there were 61 million SMEs in Indonesia in 2016, 43 percent of which are owned by women. However, women-driven SMEs only contributed 9.1 percent to GDP compared to SMEs’ total contribution at 60 percent.

“If women are equipped with technology to run their businesses, they can optimize their businesses and have a bigger impact,” said Veronica.

National Council for Handicrafts (Dekranas) general secretary Euis Saedah said at the same event that going digital was not enough to boost women-driven SMEs.

She said women-driven SMEs in Indonesia still had many significant problems in the upstream of the supply chain, such as difficulty in finding materials and meeting larger demand, as seen in the handicraft industry.

“We need to consider the upstream as well, the whole value chain. Producing an excellent and marketable product needs the finest materials — from the farm to production, through research and development — and this still needs much improvement,” she said.

Euis said going digital could indeed lead to higher demand, but what often happened was that the SMEs themselves were not ready to meet such higher demand.

“Our kitchen is often not ready. Many people order, but the production side is a mess when trying to keep up. So we have to first prepare our production kitchen, the raw materials. Only then can we sell with confidence,” she said.

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