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2018.7.9 Interview

4 Things I Learned at Dropbox to Effectively Grow as a Marketer

Dropbox Japan, Inc. / Growth & Monetization, Head of International Strategy, Mr. Shoe-g Ueyama

Dropbox is used by over 500 million users around the world. Even in Japan, the number of users is steadily growing as the cloud storage service evolves into a collaboration platform. At the Dropbox office in Japan, Mr. Shoe-g Ueyama heads the marketing team. A numbers nerd and a lingua franca of English and numbers, logic, and passion,” Mr. Ueyama discusses with Bigbeat’s CEO, Mr. Yutaka Hamaguchi about the marketing philosophy he holds dear and the important things he learned at Dropbox. 

A culture of “Your success is our success” at Dropbox

Hamaguchi: As a talented marketer working at a foreign company in Japan with the lingua franca of “English and numbers, logic, and passion” you are quite famous. I would love if you could speak about the things you value as a marketer at this year’s Bigbeat LIVE on August 1st.

Mr. Ueyama: Thank you! I am looking forward to it.

Hamaguchi: First of all, before the event, I’d like to introduce you on the Bigbeat blog, so could you tell me about the contents of your work?

Mr. Ueyama: At Dropbox, I work as a Growth Marketer. It has been 11 years since Dropbox’s establishment. It started out as a cloud storage service as its mainstay, but recently has been evolving into a collaboration platform and the entire company as a whole is working hard to achieve that goal. There are 500 million users worldwide and upwards of 300,000 teams utilizing Dropbox in their businesses and organizations. We are very lucky that so many people are using Dropbox and we are a very happy company.

There are 12 offices in the world in development. The Japan office was established 4 years ago and I started here 3 years ago as the first marketer at the Japan office. The company culture is very, very unique. The best characteristic is the mentality of helping those around you. Immediately after I joined the company, I took a business trip to San Francisco for 3 weeks and since I was the first marketer at the Japan office, everyone had great expectations for me and helped me out significantly. I had one-on-one meetings with 30 staff members and each person asked me one after the other, “What can I do for you?”

“We all want you to succeed. Your success is our success, so become more open so we can see how we can help you. Do you understand?” my boss had told me with a serious look on his face. It was a bit of a strange feeling (haha).

 

Hamaguchi: That’s a very open and bright company culture (haha). What was your exact mission?

Mr. Ueyama: My mission was to grow our online sales market other than the U.S., so I have my eye on not only Japan and Asia but various other markets too. To put it simply, I’m the online shop manager. I deal with the online, fee-based Dropbox aimed at individuals and businesses, so it’s my job to make sure this grows.

Dropbox began as an English service, so as expected business from the English-speaking world makes up a large part of it. Japan has the second largest population of internet users in the world and other non-English speaking countries are still growing. From the perspective of a Growth Marketer, I want to make the international market grow.

Hamaguchi: Your boss doesn’t normally come to Japan right? How do you communicate?

Mr. Ueyama: We have a 30-minute one-on-one meeting every week. Our common language consists of the four: English and numbers, logic, and passion.” My boss is American, so the Japanese style of harmony doesn’t get across and the culture is different, so not only do I have to say “In Japan, it’s like this” but I also need to show things in a way that is easily comprehensible such as through quantitative analysis and qualitative surveys.

For instance, the other day I launched the official blog for the Japan office, and in order to do so I needed to explain “this amount of investment is necessary.” I explained, “by launching this blog, if we can increase this kind of result, after 3 years we will have this amount of ROI. For a pretty low estimation, even this amount of result will occur.”

But still, humans won’t be moved by logic and numbers alone. For that reason, what’s needed is enthusiasm — something that gets across to anyone in the world.  Even if the numbers and logic are right on the mark and your English gets through, if your partner can’t feel any passion in what you are talking about, you won’t be able to move them. Enthusiasm is a very important element.

Mobilizing people and growing the business with content and numbers

Hamaguchi: Specifically, in what ways are you making the business grow?


Mr. Ueyama: The first step is understanding the company’s current situation. I look at my beloved numbers and I try to get an understanding of the company overall. The department that I’m in is called Growth & Monetization, and we are responsible for the online sales revenue, so we talk about numbers a lot.

I look at the numbers to grasp the current situation, from a general framework to the finer details, as well as invite users to do qualitative surveys. The other day, we did user interviews to draw out issues and build a hypothesis. Using the hypothesis as a base, we construct A/B testing specifications, implement them, and analyze how much sales are affected. With one test, it takes between 1 to 3 months, but there have been tests that take half a year to one year.

For example, the project last year took half a year. We separated the domestic, free users into several segments and used the score created by a data scientist on one axis to determine whether or not a free user will upgrade to a paid user. We carefully built landing pages with specific messages and scenarios for the differentiated users and showed educational content so that Dropbox could be even more pleasant to use. Sales improved as a result. We had actually previously used the same targets and built even more complex segments, but because the segments were too complex it didn’t go so well. By leveraging that experience, we simplified it by separated the targets into 2 segments or so this time around, which improved conversion by 125%.

Hamaguchi: That’s amazing. How is the blog being utilized?

Mr. Ueyama: Currently, the Japanese blog has 850,000 page views and is being used magnificently as a lead generation platform! It is also bringing in profit.

For me, I love content and I love numbers, and I also try to write the articles myself as much as possible. As I’ve talked about earlier, just having numbers won’t move people. I think there are two things: a change in attitude after persuading people with numbers and data, and a change in emotion by using content that appeals to them. There aren’t really many people like me who enjoy and are good at both numbers and content, so that’s become my weapon.

4 Things I Learned at Dropbox

Hamaguchi: You’ve mentioned before that there were 4 things you’ve learned as a Dropbox marketer. Specifically, what are they?

Mr. Ueyama: Prioritize&Focus, Announce, Evangelize, and Scale. This was the path to how I grew after joining Dropbox. 

At the time, I was the first marketer in Japan when I joined so there was a mountain of work. There were measures that had been decided way before, so just to break these down took all my might and there weren’t any results. My boss also understood the situation, but he said to me, “No matter how excellent you are, you’re decentralized so you haven’t produced any results.”

I thought, “What??” I was shocked to be honest. Because that landing page was something decided by the previous person and it truly wasn’t good. It was the decision of the person before me and I just took over. I wanted to explain that to my boss, but for my boss, I was the one responsible for it now. He said, “Dive deep and think about what can be done.” While I was feeling uncertain, I thought of the reason it failed. And just then, I found several ways to improve that I didn’t realize before until then. For example, I made the Japanese expressions easy to understand. I made use of what was being done on the blog and with a language specialist rewrote the Japanese. From that, conversion increased by 10%. This was my first experience of success. With this as the start, I asked another person to handle the events as I focused on online sales.

 

The following year, when I was having my employee performance review that occurs once every six months with my boss, our conversation went something like, “You’ve succeeded, haven’t you.” “Well, you could say that.” (haha) He advised, “Alright, let’s announce what you’ve done. Try to write a newsletter every quarter.” It wasn’t to brag, but “We’re succeeding in these ways on the other side of the world!” became encouragement from headquarters. I want to help in our successes with everyone. So as I started writing newsletters every quarter, I started to get replies from the headquarters’ COO. In any case, the COO who has very clever responses says to me, “Japan’s succeeding, huh! What will you do to succeed even further?” excessively raising the hurdle (haha).

Hamaguchi: Ah, I see. So that’s Prioritize&Focus and Announce, right?

Mr. Ueyama: That’s right. I began to write the newsletters and at my next employee performance review, my boss said, “You're succeeding, but the Europe office isn’t succeeding as much. So let’s Evangelize!”

So, I decided to have one-on-one meetings to talk with my colleagues in Europe using the analysis table I made when I first joined that helped me focus on my mission and what I should do, the successful AB test and tests I was thinking about, etc.

Then, one year ago, while I was having a coffee chat with my boss at the time, he advised me, “I’m happy about the successes in Japan, but if you Scale those, I will be more happy for the company. So, with those successes, think of a plan to develop in even more locations.” This is one of the four things I learned at Dropbox: “Scale.” And now, this is the phase I’m currently putting into practice.

 

Hamaguchi: Could you please elaborate? 

Mr. Ueyama: This year going forward, I was given the mission of how to make other countries besides Japan grow. Based on the Japanese A/B test copy that was successful in Japan in relation to account upgrades, we translated it into Chinese, Korean, and English. When we did A/B testing in the Asia region using that, conversion increased in the same way. In Japan, it increased by 10, but if we expand it to other countries, it can be 100 or even 120. I am thinking of implementing this going forward. After that is how to expand the success of the Japanese blog to other countries, and soon I plan to go to the headquarters to talk about my idea.

Because I know the data and numbers, I know what area I should focus on

Hamaguchi: I think it’s a fairly relentless, moreover difficult mission but hearing you talk about it, it seems quite fun.

Mr. Ueyama: It is fun! My theme in life is, “Independently, proactively.” I create quarterly goals and mid-range goals, reflect on the previous period and examine the highlights, and decide specifically what focus I should take on next. I compare it to America, figure out where the problem is in the funnel, and see if there are regional differences and bring that to light with data. In doing so, I can see what points I should prioritize.

Hamaguchi: Because one understands numbers, data, and logic, one is able to focus, like you.

Mr. Ueyama: By nature, I am the type that actively comes up with plans. Dropbox has that culture of “What can I do in order for you to succeed?” so it’s a very fitting place. 

It’s good if the boss decides exactly what your focus is, but, if that isn’t the case, then you need to decide for yourself.  Work between the headquarters and the Japanese market for marketers in foreign companies are only increasing and the amount of people changing jobs are numerous, however, I hope I can provide something for those attending Bigbeat LIVE this time to take home, something that can be of use for setting goals and changing their future work-styles.

Hamaguchi: Thank you very much. I am looking forward to it!

 

About Dropbox Japan, Inc.

Dropbox is a collaboration platform that is leading the world. From small-scale companies to large corporations, Dropbox is bringing about work-style reformation in organizations of all sizes. Currently, there are more than 500,000 million users from over 180 countries across the world that use Dropbox. Dropbox is headquartered in San Francisco, California, USA with 12 offices set-up around the world.

 


Bigbeat LIVE, a live event aimed at marketers in the B2B industry, will be held this year on August 1st, 2018! This year’s LIVE is aimed at marketers fighting on the front lines in the marketing industry, and we will introduce specific examples of changes and the raw voices of those putting it into action.

We believe that marketing is the keyword to change management and create a better future.” 

 

We are providing a place where many of those marketers, creators, and business people can meet, learn, see one’s views and talk about the future.

If you have a chance, please join us! We hope to see you there.