Digital Marketing in Malaysia
Digital marketing is a very interesting tool, and not many people use this in Asia. That’s why a lot of American companies have been investing for the last 2 years. This article is about how the internet is today, why it’s really interesting to invest, and who the customers are in Malaysia.
First of all, we need to be interested in the internet in general, to understand who our customers are and what their relationship is with this tool, as they come from all over the world, and are themselves internet users.
Internet use
In 2016, 3 billion people use the internet, representing almost 40% of the world’s population, of which 2/3 are from developing countries. With only 974 million Internet users in 2009, this figure has tripled in almost 7 years.
The supports used
Today, to go on the Internet people use most of the time their computer which accounts for 56% of traffic, but in recent years it has decreased to the profit of smartphone. In one year, the smartphone has seen its use explode, to represent 39% of the media used.
Traffic sources
Search engines and direct visits are the two main sources of traffic. Then comes referral sites, social networks, emailing and finally the display (online advertising).
This figure compares different ways to find a website (here for example shopping category):
Direct: Viewers who visited the site by typing the URL directly into their browser. ‘Direct’ can also refer to the visitors who clicked on the links from their bookmarks/favorites, untagged links within emails, or links from documents that don’t include tracking variables
Referrals: Visitors referred by links on other websites,
Organic: Visitors referred by an unpaid search engine listing, as a Google search.
The Market in Malaysia
According to the latest PQ Media study, the product marketing market was 28 billion dollars in 2016, and is expected to grow to 32 billion dollars in 2017.
Last year the most dynamic segments of content marketing were branded mobile content, digital videos, branded games and social media content.
We are a digital marketing company, so to evaluate the market we try to answer to this question with our customers “why and how could we reach a Malaysian consumer?”
Email Marketing
First of all, we decided to position ourselves on this market by proposing solutions of email marketing with databases, to open American and European companies a door towards Asia.
As you can see, online ad spending in Asia-Pacific represent only one-quarter of investment in the world for more than 4,3 billion people. So that means, if you want a place for your ad on internet, it will be cheapest to invest in Asia than in Europe or USA, and you will be able to reach more people for a better price. That’s why lot of western brands invest in online ad in Malaysia, the rate of investment/people reached is more interesting.
Malaysia’s population is around 30 million, according to the most recent estimates. Even though the country’s official language is Malay, Malaysia’s English proficiency is on par with the best, according to the EF English Proficiency Index. In practice, English is spoken by most people in the country every day so for Western brands with English-speaking marketers, language should not be a problem.
Moreover, it is estimated that in 2017, 96% of population have a phone, 3.2 billion people have an email address, 90% of them open it every day and that an email has 3 times more impact than a Facebook post This is why we are evaluating a profitability of 440% during an emailing campaign.
Then, it’s important to propose a SEO solution for browsers such as Google, Bing by Microsoft or Safari of Apple. We decide to focus on Google’s browser because it’s the most popular in Malaysia. Malaysian consumers use the same search engine as most do elsewhere, Google.
Google’s market share in Malaysia is, by most estimates, over 90%. And according to Wordstream, the cost-per-click is 75% less than it is in the USA for Google Adword.
Facebook is, by far, the most popular social media platform in Malaysia and the third most popular site, below Google and YouTube.
According to estimates from Facebook’s own Audience Tool, there are around 17.5m Malaysians on the platform.
And, according to the Twitter Ad Tool, there are between 1.3m and 1.9m Malaysian Twitter users in the country, that’s why we only focus on Facebook.
If you would like to learn how Wave Evolution can help you understand what is digital marketing in Malaysia, please email info@waveevo.com or visit https://www.waveevo.com/