As a business development manager at Tagtoo, I came across many Indonesian clients encountering similar difficulties and asking me how and what do to. Hence, I cherry-picked three feasible approaches, based on my previous consultation experience, for Indonesian brands to handle this hot potato.

First is to burgeon the power of branding, which is one of the most cost-efficient ways to increase traffic organically. Although it takes time to develop a reputation in the market, the word-of-mouth effect from customers enables brands to acquire a stable source of traffic.

For such a purpose, there should be a consistency between brands and products. A product itself is equivalent to a brand. Product development must proceed in parallel with brand positioning. The word-of- mouth effect will be amplified once the user experience of products is consistent with what a brand conveys. Otherwise, a negative image would emerge in customers’ mind and discourage them to have a further interaction with your brands.

A brand positioning is also important. In general, there are three recommended types of brand positioning for internet business — competitive type, unique selling proposition (UPS) type, and demand-created type.

A competitive type refers to competition-oriented positioning in a saturated market. This type targets the market leader’s brand positioning by emphasizing superior differentiation brands have. For example, a newly-born ride-hailing business could position themselves as a much safer ride than Grab or Go Jek.

USP type means emphasizing on the outstanding features of a product or service and convincing customers with their distinctiveness. For example, OPPO’s “5 minutes charge for 2 hours talk”. Meanwhile, the demand-created type describes the positioning of creating a new blue ocean market. This type takes the battlefield to a higher level where competitors cannot easily enter. Especially suitable for a brand-new product. For example, Xiaomi defined its new product line as Internet-based smart TV when entering the traditional TV industry.

The second approach is to apply viral marketing. As opposed to traditional outbound marketing, viral marketing focuses more on sharing. The expense occures after new customers are acquired. It has lower risks than paid traffic, which requires brands to pay upfront, and allows brands to gain a substantial result with every penny they spend.

Below are three defining factors for a successful viral marketing campaign. They include the acquisition of seed users, the provision of incentive and design of gaming environment.

Seed users aren’t necessarily the initial users. Instead, they are those loyal users who have a decent influence on others and are highly active to your products or services. They provide precious feedback for further product development or service optimization and are willing to introduce your brands to other people. The quality of seed users is far more important than quantity.

The provision of incentive is also important. A subsidy is the most common incentive. They could be free shipping, free samples, and a special discount. In addition to that, creative content and innovative scenario also play an important role as an incentive. For example, the ice bucket challenge became viral on social networks during July–August 2014. The intriguing campaign attracted participants from all over the world to join and called on others to take the challenge.

Meanwhile, the design of gaming environment is also needed. Point earning, badges collecting, and medal rankings are all the possible approaches to fuel and sustain the growth of incoming customers. These gaming designs provide another way to build up social status and help redevelop personal images. For example, Taiwan’s e-bike startup Gogoro initiate badge collection campaign. The more badges you are awarded, the more senior rider and the more eco-friendly you are.

The second approach is to turn to performance marketing. Performance marketing refers to an advanced pricing plan where advertisers pay only when there are measurable results. This new type of marketing takes paid traffic into another ground by guaranteeing the success and taking the risks of profit loss. There are three things a brand should delve into to make the ad performance even better and significantly lower the cost of customer acquisition. They include search engine optimization (SEO), search engine marketing and (SEM) and cost per acquisition model (CPA model).

While SEO has existed for so long, its long-standing importance remains the same. It is the foundation and the beginning of all digital marketing. If doing correctly, it can help save more effort but lead to better results.

SEO allows brands to acquire traffic for free by attracting internet users with strong interest. Brands should constantly optimize the entire website in a way that users find the content reverent and can easily navigate.

Despite the increasingly high cost, SEM is still one of the best investment to make in the paid traffic. It helps create more effective and targeted campaigns with keywords that brands don’t originally rank for. More importantly, SEO and SEM would become more powerful than either is working alone.

Menwhile CPA is a new pricing model where advertisers pay for a specified acquisition, such as a sale, form submit, or app installs. While protecting advertisers’ interest and benefit, the proposed cost of CPA by digital agencies will be unacceptably expensive if brands hastily run into.

With the ongoing effort on SEO and SEM, brands can expect to see the significant decrease in CPA. As the website quality improves, the barrier of entry for users to complete conversions become much easier, ultimately saving a huge amount of marketing budget for the ridiculously high paid traffic.

When traffic becomes hard and costly to get, rather than spending more on that, brands should turn around and look at the brand itself, figuring out if they have done all the things right. After all, paid traffic is not essentially the only way to grow a company and a website.

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The writer is the business development manager of Tagtoo, an ad-tech company.

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