A Guide to Effective Types of Digital Marketing

Pre-2020, the growth of digital marketing in Malaysia is slow but steady.

After the infamous COVID-19 pandemic hits us in March 2020, and the implementation of MCO (Movement Control Order) nationwide,  the trend of digital marketing has skyrocketed, and it has no sign of slowing down.

This is the ultimate guide for you, if you’re a new start-up owner or SMEs, new digital marketer or even experienced business owners who want to go online, digitalize your business, and succeed in digital marketing, you must read until the end.

About the author

Hi, my name is Sanz Teoh, I started my online business back in 2014. Since the day I start, I’ve only used digital marketing techniques to grow my business. I’ve never sent a single direct physical mail, never printed a brochure, never walk-in to any shop or office door-to-door, never attended any roadshows, or paid to exhibit an event. 

Nonetheless, I was able to grow my business from less than RM20,000 revenue per year to more than RM1,000,000 revenue per year in less than 3 years of operation. These are all made possible by using different tactics of digital marketing in Malaysia, combined with efforts and time commitment of course.

But you’re not here to hear about me and my achievements, you are here to possibly get a detailed blueprint, or should I say, a quick shortcut to learn all the secrets of digital marketing in Malaysia, where most marketers or online entrepreneurs have already mastered or been through.

In this comprehensive guide that I’ve put together for your convenience, I’m going to reveal the many secrets that I’ve used since I started back in 2014.

What are the types of digital marketing in Malaysia?

You will discover what are the types of digital marketing in Malaysia, as well as the channels that are used by the top players of digital marketing in Malaysia.

In this guide you’ll find 8 different digital marketing strategies and the step-by-step plan that I’ve personally used to execute the strategies. 

The strategies comprise of writing, voice, and video format, so there’s something for everyone. At the end of each strategy, I’ve also included my own evaluation of the cost required, the time needed, and the overall return on investment (ROI). This allows you to evaluate each strategy and decide which one you’d want to learn and go for it.

This guide is useful even if you are introverted, have zero talent or no experience.

Everybody starts somewhere, and I’ve been there at the start.

Now, let’s hop right into it.

1. SEO (Search Engine Optimization)

The first time I went on Google, I wasn’t amused by the simple look of it. I was on Yahoo! search for many years, until one day I noticed my friend is using this thing called ‘Google’. So I went on to try it a few times, and the rest is history.

It was 1996 when Larry Page and Sergey Brin started working on their first search engine called BackRub. At that point of time, the world of the internet was just starting, and there are other popular search engines like Yahoo! And Excite.

Larry and Sergey had an epiphany and they found a better way to display search results, that is by looking at the number of links coming back to a page (backlink). So that became the first-ever Google algorithm to rank websites on their search engine.

Then came SEO, the activity and effort to rank your website higher in search engines.

This is my favorite tactic and that’s why it’s on the top of my list. This is also why you’re reading this right now, it’s because of my SEO effort that brings you here and reading this right now.

The best advantage of doing SEO is that it’s FREE and it LASTS LONG.

Sounds too good to be true? But it does, my SEO effort back in 2014 is still working and bringing traffic to my website until this day.

It was probably the only digital marketing in Malaysia that I can afford to do back then.

I think SEO is the best thing to happen to underdogs and entrepreneurs who have no budget, as that was exactly how I get started, with no capital, no funding to back me up, and no network to leverage.

If you do not know what SEO means, in short it’s a set of activities to rank your website high in search engines. 

When someone types in a keyword like ‘iPhone’ in Google, and Apple Inc. website is going to appear on the first page. That is the result of SEO.

How to get started on SEO?

There’s plenty of SEO guidelines out there, but it can be intimidating for starters.

Those guides are meant for more advanced users who have basic knowledge of web design and the whole WWW infrastructure.

I’m going to make this simple for you.

Here’s the step-by-step checklist, don’t fall out:

1. Research keywords that you want your website to rank for. If you sell laptops, you might want to get rank for ‘buy laptop’, ‘best laptop in Malaysia’, ‘cheap laptop for students’ and etc.
2. To know how many people actually search for those keywords, login to your Google account, and go to Keyword Planner. Type in those keywords and check the ‘Search Volume’.
3. If it’s good enough (more than 1,000 per month is good enough for me), then you can add them to your shortlist.
4. Once you’ve decided the keywords you want to rank for, stick to it for some time.
5. Now you’ll want to go to your website homepage or the page that you want to ‘sell’, start writing up content around the keywords that you’ve shortlisted.
6. What this means is that, if you are selling a laptop, and you want to rank for “cheap laptop for students”, then write your content within this context.
7. For example, you can introduce 10 different cheap laptops that are suitable for students, why they have been chosen, how much do they cost, and how the reader can purchase them (probably from you).
8. Once you’ve done with the content, you want to make sure the page loads fast, have a good design layout, easy to view and read, pleasing to the eyes, and simple to navigate around sections and pages.
9. You’re mostly done with the “On-Page SEO” by completing the first 8 steps.
10. Now, you need to generate “backlinks” to this page or website. To put it simply, you need to get other websites to link to this page.
11. There are several ways to do this. If you find a blog that is in your niche or industry, try to contact the author or website owner and see whether they are willing to link back to your website. 
12. Since you’re asking people to do it for free, expect 98% of the people who will turn you down, especially if your content is not good enough.
13. The other way is that you can purchase “links” from them. Ask for the price if they were to link back to your website.
14. Last but not least, the best way is to earn a link organically. If you could get The Star, Malaysiakini, or any other Malaysia media or high traffic websites to link back to you, these links would mean a bunch and they are very powerful links and can help your website to rank rather quickly. 
15. So, from now on, it’s just a continuous link building process, and keep creating new content to earn those links.

Investment in SEO

Cost: Free / Very costly if outsource
Time Needed: Long
ROI: Worth it

2. Pay Per Click

Have you ever been to an auction house? Whether it’s a property auction, art auction, jewelry auction, or fashion auction. It’s a place where people can bid their own price in order to buy a product there. In the same room, you’re going to compete with other bidders who might outbid you and take the product away. 

This is the analogy of Pay Per Click of digital marketing in Malaysia.

Similar to the process of auction, you’re bidding against other competitors on the same platform, and in order to outbid them, you want to raise your bid to win customers over.

This is my method of ‘buy my way in’ for doing digital marketing in Malaysia. 

When I want to get my message or promote my products quickly on a platform or a website, I will use a pay per click method to buy my way in.

Budget is obviously a big part of concern in Pay Per Click (I will use the short form PPC from here on).

You need to determine how much you are capable of spending in PPC to drive people to your website.

PPC ads are used when you want to get a direct response from your ads. Meaning that, when you run PPC ads, you want people to click on your ad, go to your website or landing page, and then make a purchase or take an action.

As the name suggests, you need to pay for each click that you get. 

The most popular platform to run PPC ads is Google Ads, particularly the Search campaign.

A search campaign is when you “bid” keywords to let your ads display in Google Search Result.

This is a Search ad that I run in Google Ads for the keyword ‘ecommerce penang’.

Notice the bolded ‘Ad’ text beside my website URL? That is the difference between a Google PPC ad vs a SEO search result.

The way Google displays PPC ad results has changed gradually over the years. Back then it was a whole block of a yellow color text box, then it became a small label with red color ‘Ad’ text beside your website URL, and now it’s just black and bolded color of ‘Ad’ text.

Nonetheless, the position that Google will display a PPC ad will always be above, and more visible and dominant than the rest of the SEO results. This is just the way it is and always will be. Google needs to pay their bills too.

While PPC ads are not limited to only Google, there are some other platforms where you can find do PPC ads in. Just try to google ‘PPC ad network’, you’ll get a bunch of options. I’ve always stuck with Google.

No matter which platform you go for, the strategy will always be the same.

Let me share with you the digital marketing formula that I’ve used for PPC ads.

1. Create a set of landing pages, the tonality of the write-up needs to be catered to people who’ve never heard of your brand and products.
2. Install tracking tools like Google Analytics and Facebook pixels onto the page.
3. Make sure the page is mobile responsive, loads fast, and structured correctly.
4. Start doing keyword research, you can use Keyword Planner, try to have a mix of High, Medium, and Low Competition keywords. Make sure the bid price is not super high as it will consume up all your budget.
5. Avoid overly general keywords like “phone”, “insurance”. Use Phrase Match instead of Broad.
6. Write up your ads. Keep it short, simple, and straight to the point. Match your write-up with the keywords you bid for. Include the keywords in the title if possible.
7. Use a daily budget that you’re comfortable with. You do not need to outbid the competition, you just need to use more targeted keywords with a compelling write-up, together with a landing page that provides a good experience to the visitors.
8. Monitor the results daily and make one minor tweak at a time.

The game of PPC as digital marketing in Malaysia is like this: As long as you can put RM1 in and get RM2 out at the end of the day, you can invest as much money as you want.

Before you can achieve that, you’ll need to figure out your sales funnel, your sales process, and most importantly, your numbers.

Investment in Pay Per Click

Cost: Medium
Time Needed: Short
ROI: Massive when you do it right

3. Content Marketing

Content Marketing has become so much more important as digital marketing in Malaysia these days. With the increase in the adoption of digital marketing in Malaysia, the online world is crowded with ads, noises, messages, and videos. 

When I mention content, it can be in the form of text, voice or video.

If it’s text, I’m mostly talking about blog article, email content, direct message eg. (WhatsApp message, Messenger), or the landing page write-up.

If it’s a voice, it’s a podcast or FM radio.

If it’s a video, it’d be on a lot of places, your website, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube etc.

The channel that you want to publish your content is important, but the deal breaker here, is the content itself.

Now, take note of these three key points that I use when I do content marketing

Value, Sincere and Interesting.

It doesn’t matter if you’re writing a blog, producing a selfie video, shooting photos or etc. What it matters, is that the people who are consuming your content can get some valuable information from it.

Be sincere when you are producing content. Don’t create for the sake of creating. People can feel it through the work you put out.

Lastly, as the internet is overloaded with information, you’d want to make your content interesting so that your audience will stay and finish up your content before they go on and scroll to the next interesting thing to see.

Although the process of creating a text, voice and video content is largely different, I’ll share with you the thought process and the checklist that I go through before producing any form of content. 

Here it is:

1. Conduct deep research about the topic you want to create your content around.
2. Spend most of your time thinking for a catchy headline (catchy, not clickbaity).
3. The headline needs to tell what the audience can expect to see/hear, but maintain a sense of curiosity to attract them to click in and see the rest of it. Don’t reveal the whole story on the headline.
4. Start by writing a draft copy, the language level, grammar, sentence structure don’t matter, you want to have something to work on first.
5. If it’s a video, you would also want to write out the scripts, plan out the scenes, and determine the locations that you want to shoot in.
6. Start placing the important keywords in (if it’s text), and place the important key points in (if it’s a voice or video).
7. Slowly connect the dots and eventually, you’ll have the full write-up or video ready.
8. Proofread the article, preferably by someone who’s never seen it or never been involved in the creation process. If it’s a video, show it to someone else.
9. If the person you show it to finds it interesting, then it’s a good video/article. You’d want to show it to someone who has at least a tiny bit of knowledge about the message you’re trying to deliver. You don’t want to show it to someone who is a complete stranger to this type of content, else you’ll be pretty disappointed, or you’ll get an answer that is not helpful.
10. It will never be perfect. Once it’s done and you’ve improved upon others’ reviews, it’s time to publish it!
11. You can then use other digital marketing in Malaysia methods to promote the content. 

Investment in Content Marketing

Cost: It can be free, like an article that you can write on your own, up to very costly video production.
Time Needed: Long
ROI: Good, but you’ll need patience, not every piece of content will go viral, you’ll need to be consistent 

4. Social Media Marketing

The world paradigm shifted when Mark Zuckerberg created Facebook.

Sounds exaggerating? Look at what Facebook owns now: Instagram, WhatsApp, Oculus VR, and some other not so popular companies that the end-users know.

Mark Zuckerberg is often described as Thanos of Marvel Comics in digital marketing in Malaysia. 

When Mark changes it’s platform algorithm, half of the marketers will be wiped out.

The social media marketing game, as digital marketing in Malaysia, has changed a lot for the last few years, and it’s ever-changing. 

As platforms change their algorithm, and new platforms coming up every few years, it’s getting tricky to score a goal in social media marketing.

With so many social media platforms out there, I’ve always liked to compare them to traditional marketing media so people would understand better.

Direct Mail to your post box >> Email
Newspaper >> Blogs
Directory >> Google
Talk Show >> Facebook
Reality TV >> Instagram
Sitcom >> YouTube
Radio >> Podcast

Although omnipresence is important and can be beneficial to reach a big number audience, you’d want to focus on only 1 if you’re just starting out. 

Once you’ve mastered one platform and start to get good results from it, then you expand out to other platforms.

Remember, you want to become a producer on any of these platforms, and not a consumer.

I can not cover every strategy I use for every single platform in this article, as it will definitely become a few hundred pages of a book when I’m done.

Know this, social media platforms come and go. Before this, we have Friendster, MySpace, Multiply and etc. We do not know which platform is going to last forever, but the big idea would remain the same.

You’d want to treat social media as a place to work and buy your traffic, and then eventually convert them into traffic you own.

When someone sees your posts on Facebook, they still remain on Facebook and it’s a traffic that Facebook owns.

When someone sees your posts on Facebook, and then they find your content interesting. If the content is so good, and they decide to provide you with their email address so that you can send more interesting stuff to them in the future, this is when it becomes traffic you own.

No matter which platform you want to invest in, you must work on a strategy to convert all these traffic into the traffic you own. Get them into your email list, contact list or member list.

Now I’m going to share with you my digital marketing strategy when it comes to social media marketing in Malaysia, regardless of platform:

1. Study the platform for a week, start by being a ‘consumer’ and ‘student’ first.
2. Follow the official account of your industry leaders (only those who’ve gotten results), and study their content, posting schedule, and consistency.
3. You’d want to pay attention to what kind of content generates more results, the obvious metrics are ‘shares’ and ‘comments’.
4. Do your homework and save down those posts in your own memo. 
5. Create your brand’s official account, and start pushing out content.
6. For more strategy on creating content, refer to Point 3 – Content Marketing.
7. Connect with influencers in the platform, share your content with them and see if they are interested in the post, most of them will reject but don’t give up.
8. Buy your way in, if the platform provides paid ads options, like Facebook and Instagram, you can spend on ads to expand the reach of your content.
9. The more frequent and engaging your content is, the more the platform would want to feature it. In simple terms, if your post gets a lot of shares and comments, it will reach out to more people, for free.
10. Of all the followers you generated through these social media platforms, convert them into your own list by capturing their email address or phone number. I can’t stress enough how important this is. Don’t make all your effort go to waste when the platform loses its shine.

The steps you take in every social media will be the same.

Work your way in – connect with top influencers in this platform, study what they do, model it and produce your content

Buy your way in – eventually, our posts are going to reach lesser people when the social media platform grows, and they will open up advertising options. Invest in it.

Convert them into traffic you own – if the users remain on the platform, you don’t own those data and traffic. So try to capture your ideal audience, and bring them into your own website/funnel. This is the time when it became your own traffic.

Investment in Social Media Marketing

Cost: High (as it’s either monetary or sweat equity)
Time Needed: Long
ROI: Good

5. Video Marketing

Why is video so effective as a way of digital marketing in Malaysia?

Video is the combination of sound, text, visual and animation in one medium.

It’s the most interactive and most engaging piece of content you can put out in digital marketing in Malaysia (let’s not dive into virtual reality and augmented reality first for now).

When I tell someone to do video marketing, they will get intimidated by it.

Most of them thought that they would need expensive equipment and a big professional production team behind them to do video.

The truth is, you require only a smartphone with a video camera and yourself.

The easiest way to start is to film yourself talking and doing your thing.

If you’re a coach, this should come naturally. Treat the camera lens as your student, and start talking right in front of it like you are coaching him.

Selling clothes? No problem! Push the “LIVE” button on the Facebook app and start selling your clothes, just like how you would do that in actual person.

Providing business services? Why not record a video on how you can help businesses to achieve their goals, or perform better, by sharing your own tips and tricks of doing it.

You see, the days of “video must be high quality” are long gone now. Video marketing is more about delivering values, entertain, or inspire.

When people are scrolling through their Facebook and Instagram feeds, they might not stop for a well-polished video. They will only stop if something catches their attention.

The first 3 seconds of your video must be an attention grabber. Use shocking, contrasting, surprise, or controversial elements as an intro.

People who watched more than 50% of your video would then become your warm audience. By 50% I mean if your video is 5 minutes in length, 50% means they’ve watched at least 2 minutes and 30 seconds.

I don’t have a fixed formula in doing video marketing, but here’s some points you need to take note:

1. Remember you don’t need expensive equipment! But that doesn’t mean that your video should be blurry. Make sure your video is clear (at least 720p) and voices and sounds are audible. 
2. If there’s a speech, try your best to do captions or subtitles. If you speak in English, you can do this easily by uploading your video to YouTube, and YouTube will do the auto-captioning for you, which saves a lot of time. Many viewers watch videos without sound, so it’s important to have a caption.
3. Convert and resize your video into the format that is native to the platform you are posting your video. Instagram TV has a 9:16 vertical format, YouTube video works best in 16:9 format, while you might have better visibility doing a 2:3 format on Facebook. This ratio is only valid as of this point of writing and they might change at any time.
4. If your video is too long (more than 15 minutes), consider cutting it into a few shorter videos. A video that is less than 3 minutes works better on social media. You can encourage them to watch the full video at the end of the 3 minutes mark.
5. Go easy on video effects and filters, you want to use them to ‘enhance’ the video, not distract the viewer from your point you want them to focus on.
6. Design a thumbnail that can hook your viewers’ attention. Refer to videos on YouTube’s homepage that get high amounts of views, they are mostly crushing it with great thumbnails.
7. If you’ve given values in your video, remember to add a ‘Call to Action’ at the end of your video. It can be asking the viewer to subscribe to your YouTube channel, follow your Instagram page, like your Facebook page, or go to a link and buy your product.

Investment in Video Marketing

Cost: Low to High
Time Needed: Long
ROI: Great

6. Affiliate Marketing

The movie “300”, where it depicts the spartan warrior, King Leonidas, leading an army of 300 against a massive enemy of 300,000 soldiers. Although King Leonidas and his army eventually fail due to the imbalance in numbers, the 300 spartan warriors fought so well that they stand to fight until the last man standing drops.

Imagine if you could have your own 300 spartan warriors to fight alongside you in your business, and the best part is, you do not need to pay them like your full-time employees, how great would that be?

Now, some marketers might call affiliate marketing an ancient way of doing digital marketing in Malaysia. But know this, with a strong affiliate army, you do not need to run your own promotion anymore as your affiliate will constantly run it for you.

For those of you who are new to affiliate marketing, it’s a method where you recruit other people to promote your product/service for you, and when a sale is made, you pay them a certain % of the sales as commission.

The amount of leverage you get when you build your own affiliate program and just relying on the effort of other people is huge. It’s like a free salesperson on a commission basis!

To start building your own affiliate army, the prerequisite is that you must have a good product or service. You yourself must know how to sell it and understand your selling points. So that only you can communicate this to your affiliate and then only they can ride on top of your pitch and sell it in their own way.

There are a few tools out there that let you build automated affiliate programs. The tool will generate a unique link where your affiliate can use it to promote on their own platform. When a customer clicks on the link and purchases, the sales will be tracked and the commission will be calculated automatically.

The steps to start doing affiliate marketing as a way of digital marketing in Malaysia are:

1. Find and source for your potential army of affiliates
2. Make them your affiliates
3. Give them a compelling reason to promote your product and service
4. Train your affiliates to become super affiliates who are active
5. Compensate your affiliates

Let me break down the steps for you.

1. First, find and source for potential army of affiliates

You could dive into forums, Facebook groups and blogs to see who are the main contributors or influencers in these places. 

These are the people who can create a big impact if they decide to become your affiliate. Build your relationship with these people.

2. Make them your affiliates

When you have a list of people who you would want them to become your affiliate, start slowly by building a relationship with them. Once they’ve become your friends, ask them if they‘d like to join your affiliate program, which you pay a whopping 30-50% commission when a sale is made.

3. Give them a compelling reason to promote your product and service 

Sign them up to your affiliate system. Prepare them with text write-up and banners in different sizes so they can download them and put them on their blog and website. Make it easy for them to promote for you.

Other than giving out a huge chunk of % as commission, you’d also want to let them know the purpose of your brand and product, make them feel like they are part of a big course.

4. Train your affiliates to become super affiliates who are active

If your affiliate army just promotes you whenever they want or just for once or twice, you’re going to be in trouble.

Train them to become super affiliates. 

Super affiliates are able to close a ton of deals consistently every month.

Get them to be active by having consistent product launches. 

Update them with different ways to promote your products.

5. Compensate your affiliates

I’ve heard about some of the affiliate programs where you need to accumulate a certain amount of money before you can cash out, or wait for a long period of time to validate the sales before the withdrawal.

Don’t do this!

This demotivates your affiliates. Make sure you pay out fast, pay out accurately.

Investment in Affiliate Marketing

Cost: Low
Time Needed: Very Long
ROI: Excellent

7. Email Marketing

Have you ever gone to a party, you found someone nice to talk to. After about 30 minutes, you find the other person friendly, kind, and seems like your best soulmate.

A few drinks and hours later, the party is over, you thank the other person for the companionship and valuable time spent together. You said you look forward to the next meeting and wave goodbye. 

When you went back home, you noticed you have not asked for the contact number of the person you’ve just met. It’s basically near impossible to contact that person again…ouch!

How does this story relate to email marketing or even any digital marketing in Malaysia?

Well, if you’ve been advertising on social media and you’ve not converted those traffic into traffic that you own, you’re going to become the bad luck party person like above.

To collect the email of your audience is just like collecting a phone number from a person you like at a party. It’s because you want to contact them again, to bring the relationship further, and eventually, get married (make a sale)!

Keeping a relationship going through email marketing is not much different from how you grow a relationship through text messages. You send the other party a message, consistently, and in each message, you try to make them remember about you more and more.

Collecting the email address is just the first part of the whole plan, let’s walk you through the whole process.

1. You want to post content on social media, run ads, or whichever method you used from the digital marketing in Malaysia methods listed above.
2. The purpose of that content is to capture the email address of the audience. We call this a “lead magnet”. For example, if you’re a chiropractor, you can upload a PDF file that teaches the correct posture of sitting on an office chair. To download the PDF, they will need to submit their email, then only they can download the file.
3. Once you’ve captured the email address, and hopefully the person’s name too, you can start to build the relationship.
4. From this point, I like to automate the process. When someone opts into my mailing list, they will receive 10 emails from me, which span over the course of about 16-20 days.
   
5. In these 10 emails, I’m trying to let them understand more about me and my brand. I’m not looking to make a sale at this moment, yet. Though I’ll include a short P/S message and ask them to check out the services that I offer, it was never forceful or hard selling.
6. Let’s take the chiropractor PDF as a sample scenario here. Once they’ve downloaded the correct posture of sitting on an office chair, you might want to tell them posture is just one of the reasons that cause you back pain. The chair that you sit on is also another reason, and here’s why…Then in the next email, you can tell them a few exercises they can do while sitting on an office chair, or what to do during a short break.
7. Are you still following? Up to this point, I‘ve not sold them the chiropractic session service yet. I’m slowly building a relationship with them by giving them values.
8. If the person didn’t unsubscribe after they’ve received 10 emails from you, you can then move them into another list, which you can label as “Interested subscribers” or “Warm Leads”.
9. Think about this, if the person has read 10 of your emails and have not unsubscribed yet, chances are they are somehow interested in your service or product, or at the very least, interested in your message.
10. This group of people is who you can send them promotional emails or product launch email. The chance to convert warm leads is much higher than a cold audience.

Remember, always use a proper email marketing software to do any sort of mass mailing.

You don’t want to get your server IP blacklisted, and don’t use the CC or BCC method, it looks bad and you will expose your recipient’s email address to others.

Never send spam and never buy a database. Build one.

To start free, you can use MailChimp or SendInBlue.

Investment in Email Marketing

Cost: Low
Time Needed: Medium
ROI: Decent

8. Podcast 

Podcast is relatively new as a method of digital marketing in Malaysia, but not so much in the U.S.

Podcasts have an increasing popularity in the online world, especially for the more upmarket audience with a busy lifestyle.

Imagine having someone to talk to you, or to teach you, guide you and inspire you while you can still carry on with your tasks on hand, taking a bath, running on the street, or cooking. Yes, this is the advantage of podcasts as a marketing tool.

While I believe voice marketing will be big in the next 5-10 years, investing in Podcasts right now is like investing for the future. As compared to the above methods of digital marketing in Malaysia, podcasts in comparison have a much smaller market.

But this does not mean it’s bad or not worth looking.

If you look at the podcast listening graph above, podcast listeners have steadily grown in number since 2006, although this is a stat for the U.S, the same goes for Malaysia, albeit a smaller population than we have.

I’m personally on a lot of podcast platforms, one of my podcast shows is called ‘After 5 At Jumix’, where I share entrepreneurship, business, and marketing tips to my listeners, and occasionally, I interview other entrepreneurs and CEOs out there to pick their brain and get them to share their inspiring stories. 

While I’m distributing my podcast content to a lot of platforms, I can tell you that Apple Podcast and Spotify are the two top platforms that you want to get into, closely followed by Google Podcast.

The good thing about podcasts is that, since it’s mostly voice, the distributing process can be easily managed. You can use a tool like Anchor.fm, as I do.

It will host and distribute your podcast for you to multiple platforms like Apple Podcast, Spotify, Google Podcast, TuneIn, and many more.

Podcasts are also particularly helpful for people who are shy to the camera (like me) to share their content. As you do not need to appear in a video for a podcast to carry out, you might feel more comfortable creating content this way. It can be done fast as there are literally less set-up and less equipment needed, as compared to video production.

For some video interviews that you’ve done, you can also convert them into a podcast, this would save you time instead of creating a podcast episode individually and separately. However, take note that your audience can’t see what you are doing in a podcast, so you will have to explain it in words.

Now, let me share the step-by-step process on how I create, publish and distribute my podcast:

1. Buy a decent microphone. For starters, if you have a quiet room, you can use a condenser microphone. I recommend Audio Technica ATR2100X (which is about RM400+), which comes with both USB and XLR input. If you don’t know what is XLR input, that’s okay for now, but it will come in handy later on. 
2. If you don’t have a quiet room (like me), use a dynamic microphone, like a Behringer XM8500 (I personally use them), it’s cheap and works well, but it only comes with an XLR input.
3. The difference between a condenser microphone vs dynamic microphone is that you will have to lean very close to the dynamic microphone to be able to capture your voice. As dynamic microphones are usually unidirectional and very good in noise-canceling, you don’t need to invest in noise-canceling foams and etc. The only tradeoff of using a dynamic microphone is that your mouth needs to be very close to the microphone.
4. If you are using USB, you can connect to your PC and use a recording software to do it. If you are using XLR (like me), you will need either a mixer or a converter, I’m using Zoom H6 to do the job. I like it because it’s portable, has 4 inputs and relatively easy to use.
5. I don’t want to get too technical because I think there’s a lot of better guides out there, let’s get down to the podcast content creation process.
6. Before you start a new show, you’d want to determine the category your show wants to be in. To know what are the categories available, you can head over to Apple Podcast category page here to have a look and decide which one you want to be in.
7. You’d want to be careful over the category. Find the one you can best suit, as this will affect your future ranking as well.
8. Once you’ve chosen your category, now think of the name of your show! This is tough, I know.
9. Put on a description of your show, and upload a cover art of 1024×1024 (pixels), your show is ready, time to put up your first episode!
10. With the equipment that you have, you’d want to record an ‘intro’ episode first. Keep it below 5 minutes if you can. Introduce yourself, your story, and why you are doing this podcast show.
11. Once you’ve done with the intro episode, you can now start your first episode, be it an interview, your own solo talk show, or your first training course.
12. I’ll recommend editing your audio afterward. Increase the vocal volume, reduce background noises, cut off long pauses. 
13. If you’re a beginner and don’t want too much fuss on the technical stuff, just use Anchor.fm to do everything, from record, post-editing to publish and distribute. The best part is, it’s free!
14. At the end of every episode, including a call to action like asking the listener to follow your show at Apple Podcast, visit your website, or follow your social media account.
15. Then from there, it’s all about being consistent in producing new episodes as per your schedule.

Investment in Podcast

Cost: Low
Time Needed: Short
ROI: Not bad

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So there you have it, these are the methods and strategies of digital marketing in Malaysia that I’ve personally used and achieved results from doing it. 

Over the years I’ve done it over and over again not only for my own business, but I was able to replicate similar results for my clients as well with my digital marketing agency in Malaysia.

Just remember there’s no overnight success, every method requires consistent commitment in time and effort.

Have a question? Let me know in the comment box down below, I’ll reply to every single one of them.

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Sanz Teoh

Sanz Teoh is the founder and CEO of Jumix. With more than 10 years of experience in digital marketing, he has helped countless of businesses on their branding, digital marketing and web designing needs.

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