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We live in the golden age of marketing. Why you may ask?
To date, the global population is at 7.676 Billion people, of which 67% are unique mobile users while 57% are Internet users.
Now let’s not forget that there are easily 3.484 active social media users.
I’m not sure about you, but those numbers are staggering to us. Even if we are able to capture just 1% of the market, you are set for life.
However, before we set our eyes on the international market, let’s go a little bit closer to home – Southeast Asia.
Our home region has 63% internet penetration rate of which 61% are active on social media.
With such staggering numbers, you can be sure that we have quite a young audience in the region.
Sure enough, the majority of social media users in Southeast Asia range between 18 – 44 years old.
All this is great, but not everyone is primed for an international market, so let’s set our sights on our homeland – Malaysia instead.
As they say, you’ve got to start from home before venturing out into the wild.
Below we’ll take a look at 21 statistics of the digital landscape in Malaysia which you cannot ignore and what it actually means for you as a business owner:
This shows the rapid growth and amount of mobile usage is overwhelming. As a business owner, you would be wise to make every attempt to ensure that your online presence is well established, and that your website is mobile responsive.
This is a sure sign that your business needs to be online, be it a corporate site, social media accounts or even just email. Businesses who are still unwilling to set aside a budget for developing their online presence are all but doomed to slowly fade into non-existence in the next 5 years or less.
Social media is all the rage right now, it is a spectacular source of traffic with the potential for a well written and well-timed piece of content to go viral.
This clearly shows that more and more Malaysians are going online, meaning that the audience for your marketing message is growing bigger year by year. This also means the you are able to capture even more leads online; in time every Malaysian will be online.
Having a large audience is good but having a large audience with buying power is even better. Thirty-year olds are at the prime of their career and earning power is growing. This gives them the buying power to purchase the products and services you have to offer.
Even more reason to ensure your business website is responsive. First impressions count and you need to make sure your visitors receive a first-rate experience with a major touch-point of your business’ online presence.
The popularity of Social media makes it the perfect marketing channel for your business.
Social media are perfect vehicles for businesses to reach out to the communities in their niche and drive traffic back to their business websites.
They're also good for capturing and building new leads and attaining new customers.
This shows that social media is more than just a leisure platform and that I t can be used for business purposes as well.
Marketers may use social media to reach out to their niche market, customer service may use social media to reach out to existing customers and provide support, feedback as well as build relationships with them.
As we mentioned above, almost every Malaysian has a Facebook account, and there are 24 million active Malaysians on the social network!
Distribution between male and female users is almost half, which means there’s more than enough prospects no matter your product caters to males or females.
Make the best of Facebook while you can, before some regulation changes render it unsuitable for business purposes.
We briefly mentioned above that video is the most popular media format today and you should start creating and posting video content.
Text is generally boring, so always try to match it with an attractive image or the best would be to have a video post!
Instagram, mostly popular among the younger demographic, and highly relevant in today’s marketing mix.
We see slightly higher female user base here, but male oriented products still sell.
Make sure the posts you make here is of higher quality, as a picture is worth a thousand words, and a sucky image on Instagram will get buried under thousands of other posts.
If you find it difficult to write long-form content, then perhaps Twitter would be suitable for you with its micro-blogging format.
Posts on Twitter used to be the length of an SMS, not more than 120 characters. They have since doubled the character limit to 280 characters to keep up with the times.
You can’t go wrong by reaching out to 2.63 million active Malaysian Twitter users, so get tweeting today and build your brand equity.
The defacto standard for professional social networks today, Linkedin was not the most popular social network as it was boring and serious.
Past versions of Linkedin had little to no media besides text.
The platform has since grown and updated itself and now it’s a great platform for professional networking with a growing collection of content from industry experts.
If you’re a B2B then your best bet is to grow your Linkedin network.
What more can we say, it’s a mobile first world we live in today. As what we have been preaching all this while, your website needs to be mobile responsive!
But that’s a bit irrelevant in this case.
The future of social interaction is not on social networks, but rather peer to peer messaging. Whatsapp, WeChat, Facebook Messenger should be on your marketing mix in one way or another.
It can be used as an outreach channel, a customer service channel, you can even automate it with A.I. messenger bots!
Talk to us about it, we have just the solution for you.
Yet again, more statistics to prove that social media and messaging apps are staple marketing channels today.
If you’re still relying on traditional channels, consider re-allocating some budget for digital channels, we assure you won’t be disappointed.
Now, don’t take our word for it, don’t even take the data for it, ask yourself this, “Do I research a product/service/company online before committing to something?”
We’re pretty sure the answer to that is a resounding YES. So what makes you think your prospects, customers are not researching about your product/service/company online?
What do you think they will think if they find a dated website that’s not mobile responsive, gasps, what if your website is still Flash based?
The worst case would be you don’t even have a website for your business, and are fully relying on free social media profiles/pages.
Now ask yourself one more question, “What’s my impression of a brand/business if I could not find a professional looking website for it?”. We’d wager the impression is not good.
So if you would have a bad impression of other businesses without a professional online presence, what would others think of your business if you do not even have a website?
We understand the concerns of budget when setting up a professional web presence, but is the small cost of building a professional website going to be more compared to the loss of trust on first impression from millions of prospects?
Think about it, you have the answer yourself.
Business owners who worry about the acceptance level of Malaysians towards buying online can now rest assure that yes, Malaysians are very much comfortable to make purchases online.
From the studies we see that laptops are still a popular platform for Malaysians to shop online, only losing out to mobile by 14%.
The best course of action is to make sure your online store is accessible on all platforms.
We can deduce that Malaysians really love to travel, online purchases for travel beats all categories by a long shot, $2.759 billion compared to just millions for all the other categories.
Travel agencies, airlines, hotels should really get their act together and build wonderful online UI/UX for the market.
Competition will be stiff, so whoever provides the best impression will gain brand recognition, give people the best experience and you gain word of mouth promotion.
If you can provide a combination of best impression and best experience then you would have gained a loyal following of repeat customers.
Don’t skimp on your online presence, it’s exactly why we see gorgeous product packaging, because humans are very visual creatures that are attracted to pretty things.
That is, however, a separate topic worth an in-depth discussion for another time.
Still running a brick and mortar store? Seeing foot-traffic dropping like flies? Not meeting sales targets?
Guess where all your customers may have gone. Online, that’s where! The convenience of shopping online saves people time to travel, look for a car park, and the actual shopping itself.
Especially if you’re living in a traffic congested city like Kuala Lumpur, Jakarta, or you don’t own your own vehicle, then shopping for groceries online makes it very convenient.
Seriously, if you’re still not doing some form of eCommerce then you are many steps behind your competitors today.
Don’t wait anymore, take the first step and get your products online today!
It can be via your own eCommerce website or through a Marketplace like Lazada, Amazon, Shoppee and many more.
We hope you found these 21 statistics of the digital landscape in Malaysia useful.
If it has enlightened you to take the next step in bringing your business online then we congratulate you and wish you success.
If instead, you are filled with even more questions or maybe you need some help in building your online presence then don’t hesitate to get in touch with us, just chat with our virtual assistant and set-up your FREE consultation session with us.
*Statistics and data referenced from Digital 2019 - Malaysia report compiled by Hootsuite & We Are Social
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