How Australian Businesses are Tapping into the Indonesian Digital Economy

Although reports say that trade relations between Australia and Indonesia are relatively stagnant, some Australian online business are starting to look at Indonesia as a potential market and to invest more in order to grow in Indonesia.

Take the example of Jora, an employment website with the mission to help people find jobs for free, which has its headquarters in Australia.

Jora sees the rapid development of Indonesia’s digital economy as presenting numerous opportunities to engage with the country’s large consumer base.

With a population of 260 million, Indonesians are spending increasing amounts of time on mobile internet, fuelled by an increase in smartphone penetration and an emerging middle class with larger disposable income.

Furthermore, the mapping of social media use shows that Indonesia is one of the world’s biggest hot-spots.

In order to succeed in capturing this large Indonesian audience, Jora understands that having an online presence or a digital offering is crucial.

Thus, localisation plays an important role. This includes ensuring the correctness of language, to make the Jora website appear as local and natural as possible for the Indonesian market, with the goal of achieving user trust.

It is essential to ensure all marketing messages are localised and researched thoroughly, taking into account any cultural and language nuances.

The company also invests in a Facebook page to communicate its message and to get feedback.

Capturing the attention of users means having research, data and infographics available, and these need to be relevant to the audience’s problems.

Listen to what the audience would like to talk about or would like to know. It is important to engage with the right content.

Other strategies to capture the large Indonesian audience include utilising Google Adwords and developing free download apps in both iOS and Android.

All this is to ensure that we can share job information and people can access the information easily.

We understand that in Indonesia, finding job information online is getting easier, but one thing we need to be aware of is the fraudulent content (spam) that many are circulating on the internet. So it is very crucial to verify available jobs and avoid displaying fraudulent jobs.

Jora operates in 37 countries and Jora Indonesia was launched in 2016. Indonesia  is now Jora’s 3^rd largest traffic contributor with a year-on-year (yoy) website traffic growth of 209%.

For Australian businesses thinking of entering Indonesia’s digital market, understanding the trends, the country’s culture and the local economy is vital.

It is not difficult to enter Indonesian digital industries and it is time for Indonesia to be seen as a new destination, rather than merely focusing on Europe or the US.

Rizka Tsalasi is the Country Manager Indonesia for Jora.