Hi there! Today’s case-study is about the B2B marketing. I have done a campaign briefing with one of our client and found the summary of the campaign as following.
What is the Campaign Briefing?
The campaign briefing is really important and successful campaign can’t be made without this process. As an agency, we have to agree with the client regarding the objective, success criteria, and the approach.
How to build your tailored audience?
Once we agree regarding the budget, objective, and the flight period, we have to come up with the way to build our tailored audience. It is not easy process but we can make something like following in order to target the client’s preferred audience. In this case, we have to target the “marketing people” by utilizing the national job database.
Performance Simulation
A perfect performance simulation requires the historical data of similar campaigns but in most cases, we do not have very “similar campaign” provided that each client’s business is unique to some extent. However, we have to do this simulation otherwise we can’t have the success criteria. The following data is a real performance simulation of us.
Sorry it is partly based on Japanese but one of the important thing is pricing model. In case we use DSPs (demand-side platforms), it is typically based on the CPM (cost per each 1,000 impressions). Thus, the CPC varies depends on how much CTR you can get. The performance of the creative is also very important.
Optimize Your Campaigns towards the agreed Success Criteria
Once we set up the audience and also the ad-group, we launch the campaign and start optimizing. Typically, the objective is to lower the CPA (cost per acquisition), so there are two big strategy here.
One idea is that allow high-CPC and get “quality audience” on your landing page. Aim to get higher CVR (conversion rate) and then try to lower the CPA.
The other idea is that, keep very low CPC and collect as much users as possible on your landing page. This would sacrifice your CVR but the CPA can be lower than above strategy in case your CPC is indeed cheap.
Deliver the weekly performance report and explain next planned actions
Seems like this campaign design is well agreed with the client so the remaining actions is to keep optimization efforts and then deliver the report to them on each agreed timing. One thing you have to note is that this campaigns can be done even without the presence of your local legal entities provided that you have your trusted agency on the ground 🙂
One of our client was running the media like QUORA but that media was available only for the doctors. The intention here was to get a kind of aggregate intelligence, so the doctors can ask any technical question on that media so that he/she might be able to get answer from other doctors who have different expertise. Ultimately, the campaign objective was to make doctors subscribe that professional media.
Targeting Methodology
In Japan, we have some around 300,000 doctors at the moment. This number is obviously quite small compared to all internet user volume in Japan which is more than 100,000,000. Thus, we need following targeting method implemented on these campaigns.
We implemented an IP address based targeting and registered those address of major hospitals. This should cover the doctors working there but also includes nurse and other medical industry workers.
Selected job targeting over the profession database named “Eight” <https://8card.net>. Eight is largest job database in Japan therefore they know which cookie ID person is working on which job.
Job targeting on Facebook, but turned out to deliver a low performance..
A bit about the Observed Performance
For this kind of campaigns, it is know that offline activities such as some referral program is better than digital but we had a competitive performance (the cost per each subscriber acquisition) compared to those offline campaigns. The efforts of optimization is still on-going.
Hi there! ORANGE FOX K.K. was established because we had this project! Our advertiser was based in the U.S. but had local legal entity in Japan since nineteen-fifties. The industry landscape of the radio is quite different in Japan compared to the states regarding following points.
I heard the radio is quite “niche media” in the U.S. and there are hundreds or thousands of the radio stations there while in Japan we don’t have so many. In JP, the radio is still “big media” (of course depends on which station we work with, but anyways..) and therefore strictly regulated by the government.
Big station has very broad audience all over Japan. Thus, the small budget promotion does not work unless you work with small local station. Sizable budget is required for radio advertising.
Some stations have special “designated broadcaster license” granted by the government. This license can actually protect them from getting acquired by big companies. In return, those designated broadcasters (Nippon Broadcasting, etc) can’t do deals with any foreign entities. They can do deal with only Japanese entities who has the corporate registry in Japan.
Requirements from Japan’s radio stations
Under that environment described above, it really depends on which station you work with. In case you want to advertise over “designated broadcasters” like Nippon Broadcasting or TBS Radio, you have to submit the local corporate registry document (need the presence or local legal entities) and need to go through their advertiser screening.
In case you work with non-designated broadcasters like “Tokyo FM”, there should be no such a strict screening process for the advertisers so the process should go smoother.
Hi there! It is extremely hot in Tokyo now. They say it’s around 35 degree celsius but I can’t believe normal human can actively walk around the town under this burning air. Let’s start today’s lesson anyways!
A view from beautiful FARO office. It is located at the center of Kagurazka, Shinjuku Tokyo
Want to make your legal entity in JP? You have to make TEIKAN!
When I was working for British digital agency named “Essence Digital”, I experienced the launch of new legal entity. Believe the people in headquarter (UK) were using Deloitte globally to manage local entities of all over the globe, but using that kind of accounting/consulting firm is always quite expensive. They can especially charge the very expensive price when you want every report in English. The process to make legal entity is something like following.
Make TEIKAN of your legal entity
Get that TEIKAN document approved by the legal office
Submit that approved TEIKAN doc to the ministry of law (a.k.a. “Legal Bureau), and register the information of your directors, your capital amount, and headquarter address.
Ball-park cost of legal entity set-up
The whole process above takes some around 3-4 weeks. Asking a judicial scrivener to make a TEIKAN document is so expensive (typically, JPY 150,000) that you should avoid it. I got a copy of approved TEIKAN from my friend and then just modified it as needed. TEIKAN is basically something defines the way you handle your company’s stock and the operational rules of your company’s board meetings.
The fee for certification paid to a notary who approves your TEIKAN document is 50,000 yen.
In case you want to change your TEIKAN, you have to pay JPY25,000 for the updated approval.
Besides that, you have to submit the “registered stamp” to the notary. It might sound a bit weird but all Japanese people basically have their “registered stamp”. That registration is done in the each city office.
Ok.. can foreigners establish a legal entity in JP?
Japan’s law changed in 2017 and they finally started accepting the foreigner’s directorship over Japan’s legal entity but due to the troublesome work listed above, you probably need to get help from local agency when you want to set up a local legal entities.
Hi there! Thanks for reading this! My name is Tomo and I launched ORANGE FOX, this small agency in November 2018. I was working in big global organizations such as Skype, or Microsoft.. and just like many other people, I also noticed that I should run my own business 🙂
View from ARK Mori Bldg. Co-Work Space
In 2017, I spent most of my time at the beautiful co-work space located at the central area of Akasaka, Tokyo. In that space, there are lots of entrepreneurs working to grow their own businesses. I might have been influenced by them slightly. Some of those became my friend and kindly helped me to set up my own legal entity. (It’s quite complicated to work with Japan’s legal bureau. Lots of inconvenience)
It turned out that setting up my own legal entity and drive this business was totally exciting and inspiring experience for me. I have been working as employed for more than 13 years so definitely whole this experience was quite attractive and gave me something I can’t throw away any more. This was possible due to my valuable clients so I will write more about them in the next opportunity. Thanks for reading my blog indeed.
