CASE: Paid Media, PPC, Social Media Marketing in Japan

The advantage of paying customers is that you pay more and get results faster. For example, it often takes at least a few weeks if you want your site to rank higher for SEO measures.

By spending money on advertising, you can get the customers you want from your site in as little as one day. This is not different in Japanese digital marketing practices.

In this article, we will explain the case that we worked with one of the English Language School that just start a business in Japan.

Here we have utilized major paid advertisements platform in Japan; PPC (Google, Yahoo), Social Media (Facebook, Instagram, Twitter) and Display / Retargeting.

Challenge

The client is a British based English Language School that just opened multiple schools in Japan. They already have rent the office in heavy traffic locations in Tokyo, already built and publish beautiful websites, and hired enough teachers to start a business right away.

The already started getting some sign-ups from the physical advertisement board in front of schools, but the number is not enough to generate revenues from their investments.

Their priority for them was to drive “right” people into their website and have them sign-up to their English courses. 

Solutions

Since they already have a great website to sign-up and need to generate conversion as soon as possible before the season end, we decided to start online paid advertisements.

Framework / Funnel

One of the most common uses when planning marketing is the concept of a “funnel”. Specifically, we will classify prospective customers into layers, such as awareness, interest, and “decision”, and approach them as much as possible to pursue the purchase. 

We have closed effective advertisement platform touchpoints according to the customer’s psychology and interest level at each level like below.

Social Media Advertisement

One of the features of social media advertising is “high targeting accuracy”.Users who use social media have registered their profile (region, gender, occupation, hobbies, etc.), so they can perform detailed targeting based on that information. As a result, it is possible to increase awareness or interest of potential customers at the target information collection stage.

Each social media service has its own features. Therefore, it is necessary to select an SNS that will place ads according to the audience you want to approach. Here are the points for each of the 3 main social media ads in Japan.

Facebook

Facebook ads have better targeting accuracy than other social ads. Facebook, where real-name registration is required, registers detailed information from personal information such as age and address to content that interests you and your profession.

In Japan, it is mainly used by older people and business people, so it is the best platform for advertising B2B services and English conversations like this time.

We have mainly focused on Facebook advertisement since our targeted audience would be someone who is already working or having needs to study English at work.

Instagram

Instagram in Japan, which has an overwhelmingly high proportion of women compared to other SNS, is suitable for advertising products and services for women.

Most users are women in their teens and twenties. Therefore, it is effective for young people interested in apparel, beauty, and travel-related marketing activities.

We certain percentage of budgets on Instagram to attract young working women or mothers who want their kids to learn English.

Twitter

Twitter has 321 million monthly active users worldwide, of which 45 million are in Japan. This is the second-largest in the world after the United States, and Japanese users tend to be active on Twitter.

Twitter: Q1 2019 Earnings Report

Compared to other social media, there are more students in their teens and 20s, which is effective for approaching young people, thus we have spent very little of budgets this time.

PPC / Listing Advertisement

In Japan, listing ads are mainly “GoogleAdwords” and “Yahoo! Promotional Ads”. Both have two menus, search ads, and display ads, and are used by many advertisers.

Google search has the largest search engine share in Japan, accounting for about 70% in Japan. On the other hand, Yahoo! Search accounts for about 25% of Japan, and these two major search engines cover more than 90% of Japan. If you want to attract the Japanese audience, it’s probably not a problem to keep listing ads on these two search engines.

Google & Yahoo Listing

We spent mainly on Google Listing advertisement and conduct optimization there like below, for the Yahoo! Listing, we have simply copied what is working best in Google Listing.

• Campaign optimization
  • Daily budget/bidding strategy optimization
  • Device optimization
• Keyword optimization
  • Conduct keyword research
  • Keyword mapping by the audience and ad text
  • Monitoring and optimization
• Ad text optimization
  • Set ad text for each keyword
  • Dynamic ad text optimization
• Link destination optimization
  • Change link destination for each ad group

Retargeting Display Ads

You can target people who have visited your site, people who are interested in a particular area, etc., so you can reach the most likely potential audience.

In the Japanese apparel industry, it has been said that the CVR for “keywords other than nominations” (such as “coats” and “boots”) was 1.44% while remarketing Has a CVR of 3.39%, a result of 2.35 times.

Display ads might be beneficial for visual ads such as apparel, but not too much for like English school, in this case, thus we have spent minimal budgets on retargeting this time.

Result

With constant updates of the advertisement, we have started seeing an increase in the number of sign-up conversions.

Also, we have succeeded to keep your CPA or CPC rate within the agreed rates as well.