Background

SITUATION Fukuoka is the birthplace of Tonkotsu ramen and small businesses rely heavily on tourism to generate growth but traditional shops like Najima-tei tend to have non-English speaking staff; Japanese paper menus and no digital presence, making it difficult for businesses to capitalise on tourism. OBJECTIVE Traveling without your mobile phone these days is akin to losing your passport. Our objective was to leverage the power of mobile to enable tourists to find and interact with local Japanese businesses inexperienced in servicing foreign customers.

Describe the creative idea

IDEA The mobile-first ramen experience We transformed an offline journey of finding and ordering ramen into an online one by tailoring a mobile-first ramen experience for tourists. Starting from when foreign tourists first set foot into Fukuoka to the the time they sit down for their bowl of ramen, we served engaging content around Ramen legend, Osamu Kido. We enticed foreign tourists to taste a bit of pork noodle soup heaven and to understand what drove Kido-san to perfect this dish to become the Ramen Master he is today.

Describe the strategy

DATA GATHERING 1. Proprietary Instagram data helped identify #ramen as topic tourists in Japan most engage with 2. Went to Fukuoka to map out pain points foreigners experience at shops. 3. Interviewed ramen shop owner Osamu Kido to understand his motivation to making the perfect bowl of ramen, which served as creative inspiration TARGET AUDIENCE Tourists traveling to Fukuoka. Using Facebook's sizing data, we identified Chinese and English-speaking tourists as our largest audiences. APPROACH Leveraging an all-digital, all-mobile platform, we were able to capture all performance data to then feed back into the campaign for optimization. CALL-TO-ACTION - Mouthwatering ads that link to store map - QR at storefront to help with ordering and to further enhance the ramen experience

Describe the execution

IMPLEMENTATION & PLACEMENT GO HAND-IN-HAND IN OUR CUSTOMER JOURNEY 1. Geo-targeted Instagram Stories and Facebook Feed ads sparked curiosity. 2. These direct response ads provided an Instant Experience - a full screen, native post click page - that guided visitors to find the menu alongside a trailer for the documentary about Kido-San, the ramen master. 3. Directional maps integrated into Facebook's Instant Experience guided them to the ramen shop 4. Posters and tablemats with QR codes guided tourists to English/Chinese menus built on Instagram, where they could simply point at a picture to order. 5. While waiting for their noodles, they could also watch the full ramen master documentary on IGTV, generating a deeper appreciation for ramen. TIMELINE As an always-on campaign, there was no need for a phased approach SCALE Rather than scaling and going broad, we went narrow and targeted

List the results

REACH We leveraged Facebook/Instagram's reach & frequency settings to reach the maximum number of tourists on the platform who had entered the Fukuoka area ENGAGEMENT AND THE MELTING OF HEARTS Our ads prompted people to click, with a CTR of up to 7x more than the industry average and a cost of driving people to the shop's map that was 42% less. And did we engage tourists enough to convert them into ambassadors of ramen love? The comments left by tourists indicate that we did. "Now I’m hungry." "Feel like we have to try this now" "I love Nagahama Ramen 😆💕 " "Beautiful soul❤️" BUSINESS TARGETS/SALES But for small businesses, there's no other metric that's golden than sales. As we optimized the campaign, we managed to attract 250% more tourists to Najimatei than before the campaign.