Is Japanese market too difficult to enter?

If you’ve seen the article, you might be afraid of coming to Japanese market. Tech Asia: Why Y Combinator startup Strikingly skipped China, Japan and headed for Southeast Asia Even Y Combinator avoid to coming to those markets? Don’t worry about it! Simply those markets require “local people”. That’s the main and simple reason. It’s hard to try only by non-Chinese and non-Japanese because they’re too unique. I’ve seen many US and European companies came to Japan and left. Most of the case, they did not change their way to enter the new markets. Again, they’re very unique markets. To get appropriate customers and attention from local people, Ask local

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Can you manage PPC campaigns in other languages?

I can say YES confidently. If I don’t speak Chinese or Russian, I could manage the Adwords campaigns well. Why? Definitely I need someone who are the native speaker because I cannot create the campaigns from scratch. That’s very true. Only native/very fluent language speakers can create the campaign from scracth. The reason is simple. Your potential customers will be a perfect native speaker. They live their own country and see TV programs, magazines and internet on their own language. Language is alive. There is a certain trend in language. If you left your country at least 1-2 years, you would notice there were some words you cannnot perfectly understand.

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English allergy?

If you knew something about Japanese market, you might have heard Japanese have an allergy for English. That’s true and false. The truth is that only small percentage of people speak English fluently. We have to study English for 6 years at least from 13 to 18 years old which is mandatory and no excuse. However we cannot speak and use English fluently. We have a big discussion about it. I personally think we have less opportunity to use English and we can get a great job and enough salary without English so far. The situation may change in a few years, but so far we don’t need to use

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Ad copies in Japanese

When I worked for an international company, we did a comparison among big 10 countries. How is the difference in terms of ad copies? American like ‘Cheap’ term and British prefer ‘discount’ etc… It was the very interesting comparison. There must be some difference which ad copies are effective to your target customers. Also it depends on your products and services. If you have ever used ‘Ryan air’, you should have seen their advertisement on the seat. ‘FLY CHEAPER’ That’s their ad copy because their target customers are people who want to use cheaper flights. Picture reference: the gurdian ASA bans ‘sexist’ Ryanair ad Then how about in Japanese? The

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Yahoo Japan does not use Bing

Yahoo is different from Google. Google has almost same platform, rules and strategy all over the world. Hence it’s so easy to manage them. If I were not able to speak the language, I could manage any account just based on the numbers. I experienced the advantage that I could share my experiences or issues with other SEM specialist all over the world. Since we were using same platform, we could solve one problem each other without local language skill. That’s the amazing aspect for Google platform. However Yahoo does not do like Google. Even though they have same brand name ‘Yahoo’, each country has different types of Yahoo. A

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Japanese search engines

If you know Japanese search market a little, you would know Yahoo Japan dominates the Japanese market. It is still true in some sense. Since there is no official and updated market share data for Japanese search engines, I’ve accumulated some of them and concluded it. As a marketer, all we need to know is the roughly share not precise data. As you can see above, Yahoo Japan is still the largest search engine in Japan. Then, do you need to invest more Yahoo Japan than Google Japan? The answer is No. You need to look at your products and target customers more precisely. When we decide the amount of

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Japanese keywords contain Kanji, Katakana and Hiragana

Google has been improving almost every single second. Ten years ago when Google Japan launched, Google differentiate Kanji, Katakana and Hiragana. We had to add every single keywords which were potentially typed by Japanese. The current Google becomes much smarter than at that time. They know all three types of Japanese are same keywords. However we still have to think about which characters we should use for ad copies. From native Japanese prospective, each character gives us a different image. To attract your potential customer, you need to use appropriate Japanese character. They do not read your ad copies very carefully but glance at some words on your ad copies.

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