Photo by Oleg Laptev on Unsplash
Marketers in Southeast Asia have a problem: It’s hard to scale website traffic across such a fragmented region.
This challenge isn’t limited to content marketing and SEO. Back when I wrote for Tech In Asia, the founders and VCs I interviewed echoed this sentiment. Often, the size of their home market limited growth. But scaling across the region requires deep local specialization.
A one-size-fits-all approach just doesn’t work here.
And here lies the dilemma for content marketers: they don’t have the support or resources to scale regionally but are expected to produce organic traffic results that transcend their market’s limits.
We offer 4 ways to tackle this challenge:
1. Use the Pain Intensity framework to expand your organic reach
At the root of effective SEO is understanding your target audience’s problem and the language they use to express it.
But a common mistake is to focus solely on two types of keywords: 1) top-of-the-funnel pain points and 2) product-centric terms. This limits the range of content you produce, and consequently, your content’s potential reach.
Plus, in the grand scheme of things, B2B pain points and products are niche — especially those aimed at enterprises. Combine this fact with the size of individual markets in Southeast Asia, and you end up with a relatively low ceiling for keyword search volume.
Consider this: on average, there are 2,100 searches for “milk tea” in Singapore every month, based on search volumes calculated by Ahrefs. That’s not a lot for such a commonplace product.
“ERP software” gets 800 searches.
A niche term like “innovation consulting” gets 20.
(Of course, what niche and enterprise products lack in search volume, they more than make up for with the value of sales deals — more on that later.)
Overcome this limitation with the Pain Intensity framework, which helps you identify problems across three levels of customer pain — and leads you to discover a much broader range of keywords:
- Practical issues. Surface-level problems you can easily identify because they are obvious or occur frequently.
- Professional impact. Consequential effects of surface-level problems that threaten business success.
- Personal implications. Adverse personal implications that may threaten your status quo or cause you to lose something precious.
Learn more about this framework in a previous Rise edition: Where Pleasure Meets Pain (It’s Not What you Think).
You can also target keywords in adjacent market segments, where customers are searching for solutions your product can potentially solve. We talk about capturing adjacent markets in Why Aspirational Content Deserves a Place in your Marketing Strategy.
2. Localize your content or repurpose it for specific contexts
Research by Ahrefs shows that content localization is a major driver of organic traffic growth. In fact, localization has been the top driver of organic traffic growth this year for massive brands like Asana.
We’ve seen this among local websites too — websites with country-specific pages tend to have much more overall traffic compared to competitor websites that don’t.
Check out, for instance, these competitors in the B2B fintech space. They’re both based in Singapore but target Southeast Asia. One (blue line) has an “.sg” domain and no localized pages, while the other (orange line) has subdomains for Singapore, Indonesia, and Southeast Asia.
Small wonder that we’re seeing more businesses invest in creating localized pages as they grow across Southeast Asia. But it’s a large investment that requires money, technical know-how, and time.
If you don’t have the resources to create localized pages, opt for geographically contextualized content instead. This means repurposing your existing content to address challenges specific to each target market, without translating it into the local language. In our own research, we’ve found that contextualization is a powerful but underutilized SEO technique.
3. Diversify your distribution channels to include your sales and account teams
Reach more people with your content by distributing it beyond SEO. Make sure your sales team is aware of every new piece of content you produce — not just sales enablement pieces but other content assets across the funnel. They can link to these assets when they reach out to leads.
Daniel, With Content’s founder, shares how he did this while working at Intellect, a startup:
Account managers can also use your content to advise existing customers and share best practices and use cases.
Aside from your team, think of industry publications and small online communities where you can share your ideas and build a platform.
4. Consider KPIs beyond traditional organic metrics
Consumer products attract high volumes of customers, but the value of each B2C sale is much lower than that of a B2B deal. That means too much focus on organic traffic numbers can be deceiving.
Instead, consider KPIs like:
- Month-on-month growth — Instead of aiming for an arbitrary absolute number, focus on consistent monthly growth for organic metrics like traffic, keyword ranking, and impressions.
- Lead quality — A single website visitor can represent a deal value worth five to seven figures. Measure the quality of the leads you get from different channels (website, social media, online communities, email). Identify the topics and interactions that tend to lead to higher-quality leads.
- Share of voice — Share of voice (SOV) can be complicated to measure, but it’s the one marketing metric that’s been shown to consistently correlate with share of market (SOM).
