Session1 日本市場で競合よりも、正しく、早く、スマートに成長する ( Or Offer, Similarweb CEO )

Hello everyone. All right, very nice to see you all here. So, and thank you for coming. I hope you liked the movie we prepared for you about these crazy times we're living in. So my name is Or Offer and I'm the CEO and the founder of SimilarWeb. And I'm very excited to be here with you today on stage, coming to Japan after almost three years. I was not able to come here because of the pandemic. And indeed, it's crazy times we are living in. And I prepared this nice deck to talk about the one thing that every leader in every organization in the world right now struggles with: the same question, how can we drive growth for my or every business? And when the world continues to become more and more turbulent, it's really crazy times going on. Why? Because there's many different elements moving, elements that are happening at the same time. On one hand, we have this global conflict happening in Europe right now between Russia and Ukraine. We don't know what the implications will be. We don't know if there are going to be more areas that will go into conflict, like China and Taiwan, or what the implications will be on other economies. There is the inflation that is hurting all of us. There are the interest rates that go up and growing. Your business in these new times, where the market is unstable and new rules apply, one, we need to be much more efficient. Two, we need to be much more effective. Three, we need to be more measured. And fourth, we need to be more profitable. Basically, we need to do more with less resources. And I like to call it smart growth, because after all, we still need to grow and make our business more successful, but we need to do it smartly. And I want to talk with you today about how we as businesses can find opportunities for smart growth in such volatile markets. And I want to come here on stage and tell you that in my mind, the answer lies in the data. Okay, I know that here in Japan, people love data and data-driven insights. And when you look on your own data in times like this, you know the business changes. You always want to see, okay, what is my growth rate? What is my conversion rate? How is my engagement? Are my marketing budgets efficient? It's very good to look on your own data, but that doesn't mean anything if you don't have benchmarks, if you don't understand where I stand compared to my competition. So, is my competitor able to drive more growth? Are they positioned better than me to go through those times? And what about my industry, my sector? Are they getting hit? What's going on with my customers? Are they having a hard time as I have? Etc. So this is what we call market data. The market data around you is critical to drive digital growth. And being digital first is what I will say is the key to smart growth. Digital is much more efficient. We can do more testing. The trials and errors are faster. You don't need to spend a lot of money to understand what works and what doesn't work. And after all, even though COVID and the pandemic is behind us, digital is here to stay and it's going to still continue to grow. And even when we look on the Japan market here with our SimilarWeb data, we still see that digital continues to grow, and it's growing almost 10 percent in only the last year. So consumption on digital is still here and still growing. And when you try to look who are the top 100 growing websites here in the Japan market, it was nice to see that content consumption is still king. So people still consume a lot of content around food and drink, games, news, and media. This is something that is still growing. And I decided to talk with you about how to take advantage of or increase digital activity to create smart growth, and to show you that being digital first is the way to be successful in this world. And I asked the team here in Japan to find a nice case study about two companies that operate in the market and show you the examples. And they came up with those two very nice examples, two really great brands: Forever 21, that is a retail-first brand, versus Shein, that is a digital-first brand. And let me show you how it looks when you are a digital-first business. So we start by looking on Forever 21. They are retail-first. So when they try to penetrate the Japanese market, they do what they know: they come and they open stores. So they tried three times already to penetrate the Japanese market. They opened the first store in the year 2001. One year after, they closed it. They opened again in 2008, a little bit more successful, but then closed it in 2019. And then again, they're going to open another store next year. But while they're putting all those efforts opening stores, closing stores in the offline world, what they did was neglect the online activity, their digital presence, because their focus was on the offline, putting all those resources, money. And then you see here with our data, when I look on their websites over the past, I think there's two or three years here, you see the huge drop because they put all the money and efforts trying to penetrate the offline system and then didn't have capacity or money for the digital. While you look on a different brand that is digital-first, you see a whole different approach. So let's talk about Shein. Shein is a newer brand. So when it started its life, it was already digital-first. It started in 2008. In 2012, they already started operating in Europe. And this year, they started to penetrate the Japanese market. And because they are digital-first, they have a playbook. First of all, they're testing the market. Okay, there's a lot of opportunity to test the market if you're a digital company. You can use a multi-channel approach to try different testing. You need to understand what works and what doesn't work. You can create brand awareness and brand reputation. You can adapt yourself to the local market, understand what's going on. And there's many marketing channels you can try to understand what's working. And of course, they came in and look how amazing their success is. So look between the years 2021 to 2022. Look on this amazing growth: from 4 million visitors, they already grew to 40 million visitors this year, and massive growth of 850 percent. And we try to compare those growth rates to other traditional brands. Look how it looks: them versus H&M, Zara, Uniqlo. Amazing penetration through the digital. And they use what we call the multi-channel strategy. Okay, basically, there's many different channels: themselves, paid, affiliates, display advertising, and you can see all of them are growing. And I decided to show with you today on stage and to drill down in each one of the channels to show you what strategy they took. And I thought there was a lot of insights because we're sitting on the data of the digital world. We can come and really understand what was more successful and what was less successful. So the things that we saw: So Shein, when they came in, they said, okay, let's come in and spend big on paid search. And you can see this nice graph, okay, that when we compare the amount of keywords and traffic that Shein is capturing, in the blue circle, it's almost the same size as Zozo and Uniqlo that are much bigger brands here. So they come seriously and they put a lot of efforts on the paid search. And when we try to look deeply in the paid search strategy, you see that not only were they bidding on their own brand, it is only 10 percent of the ads. 90 percent of the spend was going on trying to capture all the different products that they're offering in the Japanese market. So most of the efforts was to capture this new audience and tell them, okay, we are here, we are also offering this service. And when you do such an aggressive paid campaign on all those products, something really nice happens. What happens? Your organic search is going up. And not only the organic search, the branded searches in the organic search are going up. And what you're seeing here that is really amazing is that if we look on basically November to March 2022, in the beginning of the year, we're able to see 2,000 variations of how people search the word Shein. And if you look from April to August, not too long ago, this number already grew to 9,300. Look how much more people search their brand and how much variation. And the funny thing we saw was that it seems like the Japanese audience finds it a little bit difficult to spell Shein. You see, there's many variations of how you spell it in English and Japanese. So it was very nice insights for us to see. So, double down on paid causing the organic to grow. Organic is free, so this is a very nice smart growth move. The second smart growth move they did is to partner with affiliate programs. Affiliate is when you come to another partner, another website that has a big audience, and you tell them, come advertise, put a link to my website, and if your audience will come to my store and will buy, we will share. So it means that the traffic they're getting is free and they only pay if there was a transaction. And you can see here a very strong strategy using affiliates: all kinds of coupon websites, news websites, fashion websites to drive traffic. A very successful move. And another thing we looked at is their display advertising strategy. And the nice thing was to see how they adapt their campaigns, their creative, to the local market. And you can see on the left is the creative in the US market, and now the same campaign looks in the Chinese market, very tailored to the audience. And while we were doing our study, we also found something, a nice tip for Shein that they kind of forgot. So apparently, as you know, there's a few big marketplaces that operate in Japan: Amazon and Rakuten. And a lot of the audience is buying fashion there. So Shein recognized that and went to Amazon Japan and opened their own store. So if the audience wants to buy their stuff through the marketplace, they have their own branded store. But they kind of forgot to do the same thing in Rakuten. So what happened? A lot of audience started going also to Rakuten search, and some private people started to offer Shein products there. And Shein just a little bit forgot about it. So this was a smart tip we saw. I want to show you here on the deck. So I thought this nice example will show you that digital is now defining retail's in-person shopping strategy. So basically, what Shein did, they came all into Japan, they penetrated the market first through the digital, where they can do trial and error, build a brand, build a community, build a big audience of loyal customers, and then opening retail stores. Okay? And then you see here now Shein starts opening first pop-up stores and then a store in Osaka, and so on and so on. So, are you ready for a digital-first world? And my prediction is that most of the companies now, even when they try to grow, they will take a digital-first approach. And when you have a digital-first strategy, the opportunity for smart growth is endless. There's so many ways to be smarter and get traffic for free in the digital world by being more effective and more measured and driving smart growth. And for me, the answer is very clear: if you want to drive smart growth in the digital world, SimilarWeb is your answer. This is our strength. This is what we do better than anyone else: it's the ability to understand how the digital world behaves. We give you full visibility for your data versus competition, versus the market, exactly like I showed you in the screen, the example of Shein, of Forever 21, without getting access to the data, only by using SimilarWeb. We have the one platform that gives you the full view from the different channels to the performance, from app to web. And what I like to say is, we are the engine that will turbocharge smart growth in this new digital economy that is growing. So this is what I have to share with you today. I'm very excited. I'm very happy that you all came. We have our amazing team here. It's already 40 people strong. We have a lot of demonstrations that you can go now today, put your competitor, put any website, apps, and see their data and think about your next smart growth strategies to grow your own business. So good luck for all of us. And thank you.