Q. Please tell me your responsibilities.
At Home's main business is to facilitate the distribution of real estate property information among its approximately 55,000 affiliated stores, and within that, the Marketing Communications Department is responsible for both BtoC and BtoB marketing. The areas of responsibility are diverse, including BtoC promotion, BtoB promotion, and corporate PR.
The Consumer Communications Group that we belong to within the department is mainly in charge of promotions aimed at consumers, and we optimize communication by combining mass, digital, OOH and other media. We handle everything from promotion strategy planning to media buying and PDCA operations. In the sense that we send potential customers to our affiliated stores through our real estate information site for consumers, we also indirectly play a BtoB role (supporting the business of our affiliated stores).
Our team tracks brand awareness and number of named searches as KPIs, with an eye on reach and customer acquisition that contribute to final conversions (property inquiries).
Q. What challenges have you faced in marketing so far?
Approximately 550 million people move to other areas of the prefecture each year. Upon graduating from high school, they begin living alone and then move on to buying a home. We target people in their 20s and 30s, clearly dividing the roles of each media, and efficiently communicating with our target audience.
Traditionally, when talking about efficiency, the main approach of PDCA was to maximize the performance of each individual medium. To verify the effectiveness of the overall measures implemented, the trend of brand KPIs was measured at fixed points using so-called quantitative research. This method was limited to grasping the trend of numbers as a result of various efforts, and was not sufficient to obtain internal evaluation because it could not show the return on investment of promotional costs, such as which measures were effective for which KPIs and to what extent, and it was also naturally difficult to implement PDCA based on theory.
We introduced MAGELLAN in the face of such challenges, and by introducing MAGELLAN, we were able to understand the correlation between the effect and impact of each measure on KPIs, visualize the return on investment of the measures, and view promotion (advertising and publicity) expenses as an "investment" rather than a "cost." Also, by implementing evaluations using common indicators, I think we were able to have a common understanding of what we should invest in.
Break away from agency dependency and realize marketing that can be analyzed and improved by yourself
The reason is that we are moving away from activities. When you want to reach a target, you would normally leave the planning to an agency. We also leave the budget allocation optimization plan, i.e. how much to spend on which media, to the agency. However, even if we implement the measures as proposed, the actual effect is sometimes hard to see. For example, various questions have arisen, such as "Are we really getting results that are worth the budget with this much budget spent on TV commercials?" and "Are we really reaching the target young demographic?" That's why we decided to introduce MAGELLAN, accumulate facts with our own hands, and operate the PDCA cycle with trial and error with our own hands.
We started using MAGELLAN last year, initially by collecting and analyzing data, and recently we've been able to optimize budget allocation based on the effectiveness of each media, which I think is very convincing. We plan to use MAGELLAN to plan future promotions as well.
Q. Please tell us your impressions about the analysis results of MAGELLAN.
It's really great to be able to grasp the degree of contribution of each measure to the goal. It's difficult to quantify, and up until now we've had to rely partly on intuition. Now we know the contribution of each measure in numerical terms, which makes it easier to optimize the budget. In addition, I like the speed of PDCA. In the past, we had to plan, execute, and verify each campaign until we got results, but by using MAGELLAN, we can do that more frequently.
In addition, we started including MAGELLAN reports in the documents shared within the department when reviewing measures, and we also provided feedback on the results of MAGELLAN to our agents so that they could use them in their planning. And since this kind of analysis requires numbers - data generated by the implementation of measures - it seems that another positive effect of introducing MAGELLAN is that our in-house staff have naturally become more aware of numbers.
Utilizing data to create consumer-oriented marketing
Q. Lastly, please tell us about your goal in marketing.
I think it's true that the effectiveness of mass advertising is changing due to changes in the media that consumers come into contact with. Even if awareness is increased, the effect is limited in the latter half of the funnel closer to conversion, so I feel that we need to take an approach that is more tailored to each individual consumer.
In the future, we will need to more accurately capture the moment when consumers move, and conduct marketing that will help them learn about and understand At Home by getting close to our target demographic before the change occurs. To achieve this, we plan to use MAGELLAN to utilize various data to improve the precision of our marketing.