If you are to get started with a business in Malaysia, you would be best served by getting to know the most effective digital marketing strategies for startups. The idea is to illustrate what digital marketing is, the growth of digital marketing in Malaysia, its importance, and how digital marketing can help startups. This would serve as one of the quality guidelines for your success in digital marketing.
What is a Digital Marketing Strategy?
Digital marketing strategies are integrated plans to support the digital transformation of your business and eventually will lead to business growth, through effective lead generation.
Digital marketing strategies provide real data, increase ROI, and help strengthen your relationships with the audience. With well-defined goals and effective research, digital marketing strategies can be developed.
Growth of Digital Marketing in Malaysia
Being one of the most urbanized countries with high internet penetration rates, Malaysia is again in the continuous process of increasing it. Business leaders are significantly growing their teams and strategic positions to remain ahead of the competition.
The growth of any business in Malaysia has increased due to relatively low levels of corporate income tax, and high levels of educational qualification for everyone – so putting up a talented team has got simple, foreign investors, and a highly developed infrastructure. Through this, it’s clear that Malaysia has a conducive environment for digital marketing too.
The country’s average time spent on the internet every day is 7 hours and 57 minutes in which most of the time is used on social media. So it’s more than enough for you to make them aware of your brand and the growth of digitalisation and digital marketing in Malaysia.
Importance of Digital Marketing Strategies for Startups
For a startup to grow sustainably in this competitive market and to bring yourself one step closer to the target audience, on-point digital marketing strategies are a must.
Digital marketing can supercharge your marketing efforts at a lower cost. Startups can reach new clients and develop relationships more effectively.
Digital marketing strategies deliver an omnichannel customer experience that processes, personalizes, and coordinates actions. It provides a better understanding of your customer’s interests by analyzing and interpreting their buying behaviours.
With an effective online marketing strategy by following the digital marketing trends in the market, a startup can build new client acquisitions, brand visibility, and impactful revenue-generating opportunities with a limited budget. Most importantly, opens up the potential reach to an audience of millions, worldwide.
Best 10 Digital Marketing Strategies for Startups in Malaysia
#1. Search Engine Optimization for Your Web Property
SEO is the process of improving your website and more specifically the landing pages to make sure your company is on the top list of SERP (Search Engine Results Page.)
Looking ahead of the game and outranking competitors in major search engines like Google and Bing is the best way to get noticed. This is because the primary method of navigation through the internet for most internet users in search engines.
Therefore, higher SERP listing, for keywords related to your business, will ensure greater traffic to your website. If you are ranked on the last page of the search results, nobody would ever come across your website. Search engine optimization keeps the search results fair and
reduces the ability to manipulate results.
Organic search is the primary source of website traffic and a critical component of the buyer funnel and getting users to complete a conversion or engagement.
SEO builds trust and credibility with a clean and effective user experience and impacts the buying cycle.
When customers find your brand on top on SERP, that instantly makes them think of a worthy connection and head on to you.
With quality backlink profiles, positive user behavior, machine learning signals, and optimized on-page content, authority is established over time.
Effective SEO requires you to be proactive and monitor major algorithm changes which is always a benefit for your brand, by keeping your site and its content fresh.
#2. Social Media Marketing to Reach Niche Audience
Social media is a technological tool opportunity for companies to accurately reach their potential customers and increase and continue to grow their business via experience sharing by customers.
New businesses used to struggle for visibility due to inadequate capital in the beginning stages of their business, for large scale advertising.
Social media marketing has given an equal voice to businesses of all sizes by helping them build a strong base with a conservative budget. It reinforces customers’ trust and loyalty and helps to connect with other businesses.
Certain strategies like optimizing your social media posts, and constantly posting on feed and stories when your audience is active are valuable. This can be done by using memes, sharing visual content, running social media contests, researching your competitors thoroughly, and participating in social groups that can activate your social media platforms and seek to gain customer attention.
Social media marketing delivers improved customer service as it is a more casual, yet targeted channel to connect with your customer base and address their concerns right away. One can do this while booking very proactive in the eyes of the general public.
Also Read: Top 7 Benefits of Social Media Marketing for Every Business
3. Influencer Marketing for Targeted Customer Reach
Influencer marketing can be a useful ‘add-on’ to your online campaigns by leveraging the power of digital word-of-mouth. Influencers who have a good following can give credibility, and flair, frame the brand and product perceptions for your startup.
When you partner with influencers on social media, you are partnering with a community of like-minded consumers through which influencer marketing occurs.
Important benefits of Influencer Marketing
● Precise targeting
● Boosted audience engagement
● Improved conversion rates
● Increased trust and credibility
● Enhanced brand awareness
Startups, with their limited marketing budget, would most benefit by engaging nano-influencers. They are socially established personalities who have followers between 2000 and 10,000. They have more time for interactions with their followers and build close relationships; and most importantly, charge less than more established personalities.
Live interviews, recorded video conversations, and written Q/A’s with your chosen influencer can make the engagement more authentic, personal, and closer to the consumers who view it, and that builds trust.
#4. Video Marketing to Boost User Engagement
Video marketing is a great way to explain your product and spread brand awareness by publishing videos on either youtube or any other social network. It is now the most attractive method of marketing effectively and offers a good return on investment.
It has found that engaging videos about products are more memorable than static image advertising. Helps to turn a group of the audience into valuable customers with high-precision audience targeting.
Video marketing allows you to market your startup energy and freshness, without breaking the bank. Since need not be a high-end production, sticking to your available gadgets could get it done.
Some of the relevant advantages of video marketing are, that it gives an easy understanding of the complex descriptions of your company’s product and background, and presents the vision of your product even before releasing it.
Video marketing gains early feedback, ensuring marketability, changing the focus of the product, and even re-prioritizing product features can be done within no time for startups.
Some of the effective video content ideas are,
- Product demos – showing your customer what it’s like to use your product
- Customer testimonials – Asking your previous customers to share their experience after using your product
- Interviews – Interviews with industry experts and celebrities to promote brand
- Live streams – Streaming makes everyone to attend the event
- Face-to-Face interactions – Make your team meet your customers virtually to build genuine, trusting relationships with them.
Also Read: How to make your restaurant business top on the search
#5. Content Marketing for Authority and Reputation
Content marketing is one of the most effective digital marketing strategies to seek the attention of both primary and secondary target audiences. Blogs, white papers, social media posts, newsletters, opt-in email marketing campaigns, videos, and images come under this category.
Content marketing builds your business reputation online being the heart of every single digital marketing strategy. It is a long-term strategy to build a strong relationship with the audience, capture their attention and improve engagement. Content marketing stands as a profitable investment with more leads as an outcome when compared to traditional marketing.
#6. Online Advertising for Targeted Customer Reach and Leads
Online advertising is a key factor for accomplishing a desired aim in any business and its overall success. Expansion of your business on a large scale just by reaching your target audience virtually is an important benefit of online advertising.
Major benefits of online advertising are,
- ● Wider audience coverage
- ● Affordable budget
- ● Increased engagement
- ● Brand credibility
- ● Builds trust
People are no longer relying on TV commercials or radio ads, all they want is available on the internet, and it’s essential that you create a space for yourself in it. Online marketing creates consistent branding by displaying the logo, name, and slogan of your brand after every scroll.
#7. Innovation Marketing for Business Development
Audiences are always attracted to trying out new innovations of any company, either of an existing one or a startup by which more market attention is gained.
Innovations introduce the solution to a problem that has not been recognized or not yet solved and develop a new class of customers. By trying to build deep expertise in different markets and blending into local surroundings, you get the knowledge of something that people need to effectively solve which is unrecognized or unsolved. Investing substantial time immersing yourself into it, is a necessity of this marketing.
#8. Podcasting to Build New Audience
Podcasting is one of those latest technologies which enables you to talk about your brand and build an audience. Communicate your knowledge and expertise through a podcast, and that guarantees the credibility and trust of your customer.
Podcasts can stand as a major tool for effective education of your product or service by which marketing is done instantly. It’s an informal way to reach your customers and create deep and genuine relationships. Since podcasts are more feasible to follow than a blog, more people opt for this.
By bringing industrial experts, business partners, potential partners, current customers or clients, and interviewing them, you can gain an invaluable networking opportunity. Podcasts show your enthusiasm and speaking skills by which authority is added to the information produced.
#9. Personal Branding to Influence Masses
Investing in personal branding can be a key factor for your overall brand recognition, building trust and credibility. Personal branding defines your online reputation as a founder by showcasing your skills, experience, and personality to customers.
Promote yourself, your expertise and traits for people to follow you willingly and gain more traffic to your website. Creating, building and maintaining a strong relationship with them must be followed right away.
Creating and distributing valuable content on any of the effective platforms and getting your story straight is the first step towards personal branding.
Effective public speaking is an important aspect of personal branding. Having a strategy to talk about along with participation in social activities, award ceremonies, publishing books, documentaries, and supporting social causes can have an impact on your marketing under personal branding.
#10. Sponsor an Online Event for Targeted Visibility
Sponsoring an event is one of the most prominent ways to gain popularity across the target market. When you sponsor an event, your poster and brand visuals are put alongside other reputed companies in front of a large audience. The bigger the event, the bigger the visibility and that builds a positive image.
Customers are driven by an intuition that your brand is highly reliable and reputable to sponsor such big events. By connecting with the event holder on social media, you can gain access to their audience too. This social media promotion highlights your involvement and is an integral part of your success. Driving sales goes hand-in-hand with sponsorship. It is a way that gives confidence to customers and makes the purchase.
Tips to Implement Best Digital Marketing Strategies
High-quality social media presence
Maintaining a high-quality social media presence is the first step toward implementing all the above-mentioned digital marketing strategies. It’s important to post engaging content regularly and be a helpful source of information for your customers.
Open communications with team and customers
To maintain track of your process towards your goal, you must have open communications with your team and the customers which is the second step. Analyse the results of your outlined strategy for a better understanding of what you have achieved and decide on future tactics.
Implement the Strategies and Boost Your Startup Business
Following all the above-mentioned digital marketing strategies, startups in Malaysia can enable you to achieve a place in the world of business. By assuring the greatest glory of having a successful business online, we wish your startup a good go.
