A sit-down with Daniel Hagmeijer
We sat down with Daniel Hagmeijer to discuss making marketing accountable, using Share of Search as a KPI correlated to future sales, and how they discovered a product distribution issue using MyTelescope.
Map Active is Southeast Asia's number 1 premium retail group, covering 40+ of the world's most recognisable sports, kids, and footwear brands, including Foot Locker, Converse, New Balance, Sketchers, Hoka, Reebok, Lego, ALDO, and more. Daniel highlights this by saying, "Map Active takes global brands and helps them grow in local markets through distributorship, retail, and wholesale."
Before asking specifics, who are you, and what led you to work at MAP Active?
After spending time at the agency side, followed by The Body Shop Indonesia, I joined MAP Active nine months ago, and I am responsible for marketing in seven markets across Southeast Asia. I am supported by a marketing team of over 120 people across the region. What got me excited about working at MAP Active was the opportunity to be the local marketing arm for the world’s best-known brands.
My approach is to infuse data in a way that solves marketing problems. Brand marketers often hide behind vague "brand-building" concepts, without being able to explain the real impact of their communications work to the C-suite.
When a company trusts you with millions of dollars, marketers have to be accountable for driving business growth using those funds. "Oh, but it's brand-building." you can't put a KPI against that, right? Nonsense! So, for me, it's about holding
people accountable for their spending. And also saying that, “Hey, look what you did, you spent half a million dollars on something that drove zero interest!”
But also the other way around, “Hey, you spent half a million dollars on something that drove 4x interest and sales for the brand”.
If we look at communications, and, let's say, you run a reach campaign. One of the things that hurts my brain is if people share with me that we've got $5 million in media value. And I'm like, who even determines the value of that? It’s very arbitrary. Personally, what matters to me is that I want to see what effect we're having and if we bring any uplift in-store, online, and general interest.
Of course, we do market research, market segmentation, and brand health across all our brands, which gives me a lot of interesting data. These are all things that can help me set my strategy, but like many CMOs, I don't have limitless funds to do this every week, so I can not get all the market research data for the markets we operate in or all the products we sell monthly. And that's where I like the solution that MyTelescope provides.
The Journey to Share of Search as a Metric
My objective is to infuse data into our approach to marketing problems. I want us, and when I say us, I mean myself and my team to be accountable for the effects of our investments of time and money in marketing. With that, I looked for a metric that could show an objective number that shows the impact.
With the number of campaigns we run and the short-term impact we work with, doing only classic big sample market research wasn't realistic. So we looked for alternatives.
Finding prominent marketing influencers like Les Binet, Peter Field, Mark Ritson, and your friends at the IPA, all talk about a new way of measuring advertising effects using Share of Search attracted my attention.
Of course, you can determine Share of Search manually, but at the scale that I need it, and with the skillsets available in-house, it just takes too much time and resources. So, I looked for a tool that could help me. That's how I ended up with you guys.
Why MyTelescope Stood Out
I looked at Google Keyword Planner and other tools, but they were not optimised to deliver the desired results. If you knew what you were doing, you could get the same results, but it would take a lot of manual work.
Frankly, my team does not have the time and needed a solution optimised for Share of Search, and that's why we chose MyTelescope.
How have you found using MyTelescope, and have you discovered any other benefits?
First, we use MyTelescope to align Search as a KPI for our organisation and now implement it to optimise budgets.
Using MyTelescope, we see that the volume of searches correlates with the sales volume. Therefore, increasing store-related searches from 2,000 to 4,000 within the year would theoretically double the sales, and that's why the tracking capability becomes interesting. Then, I can start looking at how much budget we actually spend and create a budget optimisation. What we've done for this year's budgeting is we've created funnels utilising MyTelescope. We have divided searches into funnels to see how many people are interested at the different stages in the purchase journey. Based on this, we can look at conversions between the stages, if our brand is underperforming versus competitors in terms of where a store is, different products, etc.
An example of how we used this in practice is for one brand. We saw an uptake in search interest, and when we overlaid this with revenue, we noticed that in most months, there was alignment. So, increase in Search, increase in revenue. Except for one month at the end of the year, when we had a specific campaign. As it turned out, the reason for this is that although the team did an excellent job driving interest, there was some issue with products in-store. Meaning it didn't generate sales. So again, we did what we were supposed to do for the marketing side, but a product supply issue prevented that interest from being converted into sales. So, it was very helpful for us to understand the impact that the marketing team was having, despite not converting into sales.
A Guide based on Daniel's interview how to build your funnel:
We looked at:
Overall category search as a whole. Say, running shoes as an example
How many searches are there for the brand, let's say Hoka?
How many searches are there for the different Hoka products?
And finally, we looked at how many searches there are for Hoka stores, or
where I can buy Hoka, price, deal, cost, and sale.