Lead Generation and Internet Marketing in Malaysia

Malaysia and the Internet

Asia has an incredibly huge internet audience and is the excellent place for any lead generation campaign to run. Knowing the trends and habits of the online community into which one is entering is the key to a successful internet marketing drive. Malaysia is a federal constitutional monarchy located in Southeast Asia, covering an area of 127,350 square miles. Malaysia has land borders with Thailand, Indonesia and Brunei, and maritime borders with Vietnam, Singapore and the Philippines. There are more than 16.9 million internet users in Malaysia and recent reports show that 54% of Malaysian internet users are from Central Region, which includes Kuala Lumpur, Selangor and Negeri Sembilan. Malaysia’s economy was heavily dependent on exported goods, mainly natural and agricultural resources with the most valuable being petroleum. In an attempt to diversify the economy a great effort was made in the tourism sector and tourism remains Malaysia’s third largest income from foreign exchange. Lead generation for travel and tourism could be a good in road for internet marketers who can help to promote Malaysia as a top tourist destination whilst earning healthy profits from doing so. Search engine market share in Malaysia is as follows: Google 82.06%, Yahoo 13.62%, Bing 3.72%, Ask Jeeves 0.38% and Baidu 0.13%.

Regional Internet Trends

It appears that internet users in Malaysia exhibit trends peculiar to their geographical location. It is reported that internet users from the Sabah and Sarawak regions are more interested in travel, online games and gambling than the rest of the country whilst being the least interested in newspapers. Internet users from the East Coast region tend to show a greater interest in newspapers, online games and retail whilst all regions showed a relatively similar interest in social networking. These figures are extremely helpful to those internet marketers creating lead generation websites in Malaysia and can inform them on where geographically to associate content. Lead generation article titles such as “The Best Newspapers in Malaysia” could be strategically positioned using media most viewed in East Coast for maximum results. The possibilities are limitless and gaining access to this type of information can be the difference between a successful internet marketing campaign and a flop.

Social Media in Malaysia

Facebook is the top site visited in Malaysia with 14 billion page views each month and a 73.9% reach in terms of unique visitors as a percentage of the internet population. The Malaysian Facebook audience appears to have varied interests geared towards leisure rather than education with popular interest categories being beauty, fitness, food, drink, people, society, music, arts, entertainment and video sharing. Twitter has only 1.6 million unique visitors and 26 million page views but figures would suggest a completely different segment of Malaysian internet users. Twitter in Malaysia is dominated by those involved in search engine optimization and related resources such as blogging. Blogspot.com receives more unique visitors than Twitter with 170 million page views per month and a 42.1% reach.

Social Media Potential

Massage therapy, Poetry and Vehicle Parts & Accessories are amongst the top interest categories on Blogspot and combined with the data from Twitter, it is likely that informational websites are being used for link building exercises to attract visitors and advertisers. It appears that Blogspot has become popular amongst internet marketers in Malaysia because the sites can be monetized using Nuffnang, a Google Adsense alternative for Asian blogs. A good lead generation campaign that uses blogs, social bookmarking sites and Twitter connectivity has a more than an average chance of succeeding in Malaysia. A lead generation campaign should be kept unique as most of the sites visited whilst researching appear to be fairly unoriginal with little proper use of advanced lead generation methods. It appears that internet marketing in Malaysia is in its infancy and could be better exploited by captivating the educated Malaysian internet users. In addition the average Facebook CPC is relatively low in Malaysia at $0.24, which would be more than affordable for western internet marketers wishing to gain a revenue share of the Malaysian web using Facebook.

Mobile Internet

There are more mobile phones in Malaysia than there are people and the number of people accessing the internet from their mobiles in April is reported to have increased by 42% from the previous month (March 2011). It is reported that more than 5 million Malaysians access the internet from their mobile phones which would suggest that Twitter and Facebook are also receiving their share of mobile users as these are probably the most mobile user friendly sites. Internet marketers should be sure that their websites are mobile browser friendly so that shared content can be easily accessed.