Case Study 3: Trend Micro SouthEast Asia

Case Study 3: Trend Micro SouthEast Asia

My personal thought on Trend Micro SouthEast Asia online marketing strategy (Dated 1 Oct 2010)

When I received a call that I “might” need to work with Trend Micro, I decided to conduct a quick study on their products range and online marketing they currently applying on SouthEast Asia region.

First of all, I have to admit I was rather surprise that Trend Micro worldwide market share is less than 1% (based on June report from OESIS.OK). Look at the bright side, this also measn the room of improvement is huge 🙂

I can still recall in my old days, Virus Buster(Trend Micro), Norton AV, McAfee and Symantec are the big players. But accordingly to this report, the top 4 AV are all free version of AV from Avira, AVG, Avast and Microsoft.

Trend Micro(TM) does has a free version of AV, which I think they aren’t pushing strong enough for this product. In fact, I notice TM actually has quite a few useful tools given free to public such as Smart Surfing for iPhone and eMail ID.

So the opportunity is here, market the free tool and provide free download in exchange of customers email subscription.

Secondly, the regional website need some serious helps.

Since I’m from Malaysia, when I tried to reach trendmicro.com, I’ll be redirected to trendmicro.com.my which I’m getting “Directory Listing Denied, This Virtual Directory does not allow contents to be listed.”. (I believe this is just a temporary error, but let’s counted as (1))

For asia pacific, TM has a website with URL http://apac.trendmicro.com/apac/home/. This website is exactly similar to trendmicro.com.my so I’m confuse with the purpose of having 2 websites with the exactly same content. (2)

The URLs for products could have done better. There are 3 products from this link: http://apac.trendmicro.com/apac/home/home-user/. If I click on the product’s picture I’ll be shown USD while clicking on the “Buy Now” button I’ll see SGD but I’m not from US nor Singapore, I’m from Malaysia. (3)

Next we’ll look at the search engine optimization (SEO) of TM regional site.

The search for “antivirus” at Google.com.my gives me Avira, AVG and Avast as top 3 followed by Kaspersky, Comodo, McAfee, and Symantec. Trend Micro rank the last of 1st page and the website is US Trend Micro. It could have convert better sales if the ranked website is the localize website or an international website.

For other popular keywords like “anti virus”, “antivirus free download”, TM doesn’t ranked well as well.
The good news is TM HouseCall ranked top for keyword “online virus scan”.

The strategy for SEO is pretty straight forward. The more keywords you ranked well, the more potential customers will reach your website.

On top of all kind of available online marketing strategy, advertise on search engines is the simplest and cost efficient method. Since TM website doesn’t ranked well in most keywords, advertise on search engines can straight away pump your website to the top of the search engines’ result.

Barracuda Networks, McAfee, Kaspersky, Norton all running search engine advertising campaign, why not TM?

Affiliate program is another great method to boost sales.

From my understand TM has an affiliate campaign partnering with Commission Junction (CJ), excellent!
Since CJ is US based, does the affiliate program applicable to SouthEast Asia sales? Do local publishers know about this campaign? These are some questions to be asked when you run an affiliate campaign because CJ simply doesn’t care. They have tens of thousands campaigns under their profile.

Lowyat.net is the TOP community site in Malaysia that talks about tech.
We can see Digi, Dell, top corporate featuring their company logo at this community website. (I used to see Intel too)

This is a great method to build your company reputation. By using the proper approach, you can achieve BIG by using minimum resources.

That’s all my quick study for Trent Micro SouthEast Asia online marketing strategy. There are much can be done and its always easier to say it than do it. Just make sure you get the right person to work on the right task.

* This is just my personal thought. If you are the company/website owner and wish me to remove the content, please let me know.