Digital Marketing Professional

Support your go-to-market strategy

Despite the fact that Japan faces the ageing issue and that the number of retired people is increasing, Japanese people have a high purchasing power and their consumption power is rising as they kill their spare time and enjoy their second life, creating more B2C opportunities.

Due to the decline in the workforce, B2B business is expanding rapidly despite the lack of digitalization and efficiency.

Local strategists and marketers are crucial to the success of Japanese businesses, especially marketing. Global standards still apply, but business practices in Japan have evolved uniquely.nordic shift offers a variety of support services to companies entering the Japanese market.

Besides helping you enter the Japanese market and grow your business, we will also help you build a business community and create stability.

Our Service

MARKET RESEARCH

With over 25 years' experience in the Japanese market and knowledge of European, US, Asian, and Oceania business practices, Ken Irie will assist you in your B2B and B2C market research.

STRATEGY DESIGN

Based on Japanese-specific insights, we design personas and customer journeys, integrate them with your go-to-market plan, and help you design a feasible approach.

BUSINESS GOAL SETTING

As part of the strategy, timelines will be developed and tangible objectives will be set for each stage. In order to accomplish meaningful business objectives, we set feasible and challenging goals.

CAMPAIGN PLANNING

With a unique language, Japan's platforms are evolving in their own way, and the key success factors lie in having the right people on board who are familiar with the local market landscape, including Yahoo Japan, LINE, Smart News, and News Pics.

CAMPAIGN OPTIMIZATION

In order to ensure that a campaign achieves results according to the KPIs, it is closely monitored for each measure once it has been launched. By repeating the hypothesis and verifying it quantitatively and qualitatively at high speed, we aim to achieve KPI as quickly as possible.

CREATIVE AUDIT

A Japanese creative tone and manner are unique and different from global standards because of its advanced manga culture. Leading local customisation while adhering to your brand guidelines is crucial.

TRANSLATION/TRANSCREATION

Your brand image will be severely damaged if you do not structure your text in natural Japanese. In addition, translating Japanese requires the same amount of time and passion as creating English content - transcreation is an important brand-building process that we can assist with.

FONT SELECTION

Your website will give the impression of being a fake site if you make the wrong choice, which can seriously damage your brand. Your brand building in Japan will be rock solid with font selection by our professional designers.

User Case

Case 01

Leading Event Platformer

Objective: Improve B2B lead generation and B2C customer acquisition

Challenge: Unclear business results from using an agency.

Strategy: Establish KPIs that all parties are expected to meet, make sure the data is readily available for verification and feasible actions, clarify 'as is' and 'to be', develop a strategic roadmap, implement feasible and high-impact measures first, and expand the acquisition of hot leads of high quality.

Case 02

Launching Tutoring School Business

Objective: to start up a new tutoring school business

Challenge: Marketing support for business start-up

Strategy: Review of the underperforming initial MVP, pivoting and redefining the management strategy, vision, mission, values, and customer personas, and developing a marketing strategy based on them. A marketing strategy was developed based on these findings, achieving initial KPIs in one week and turning unit economics positive in one month.

Case 03

Leading Japanese hardware manufacturer

Objective: to rebuild digital marketing strategies in the Asian region.

Challenge: Digital marketing is operated individually in each Asian country. The head office wants to take the lead in strengthening it, but the indicators and obtainable data are different, and it is unclear where to start.

Strategy: Re-organise the data currently available, reconfirm the data that can be obtained from GA, FB and other media data, shopping malls, etc., and tentatively set KPIs. Build a scheme to monitor the ROI of each measure, acquire deeper data as the next step, and from there expand the scope of the PDCA sequentially.

Case 04

European B2C consumer goods manufacturer

Objective: To develop a Go To Market Plan for entering the Japanese market.

Challenge: global strategy does not work for the Japanese market, and the strategy needs to be restructured.

Strategy: Reorganize the global strategy and the degree of freedom allowed locally based on KPIs. Develop a Go To Market Plan that separates global branding from local measures and customizes where appropriate. As a result of successful awareness expansion, the area of approval from the headquarters has been expanded, and the company is now moving into the interest and purchase phase.

Case 05

US pharmaceutical manufacturer

Objective: Gap between global strategy and local needs in Japan

Challenge: Global marketing strategy comes down from European HQ, but global strategy and assets do not fit the Japanese market, and local strategy is essential to expand business in Japan.

Strategy: Increase the scope of the flexibility of local marketing activities from HQ by building trusting relationships with key people at HQ, repeating AB testing of global versus local assets within the brand guidelines, and proving with data that local assets are superior in multiple KPIs.

Company

About nordic shift

Japanese market specialist

nordic shift develops and executes meaningful digital marketing strategies to help clients grow their businesses.

As the external environment rapidly changes, it is essential to strengthen marketing and branding from the customer's perspective in order to respond to product development and service provision.

nordic shift works with clients to improve their business by developing branding strategies to gain recognition from customers and implementing marketing strategies to execute them.

While digital technology is essential to today's marketing, many companies lack the in-house expertise to use it, or have difficulty training and recruiting human resources.
It is common for outsourcing marketing activities to advertising agencies and traditional marketing consulting firms to result in an overwhelming amount of knowledge, know-how, and experience. Due to the great asymmetry of information, it is difficult to determine whether a company's proposals and measures are actually useful. There are a lot of situations like this.

Having managed in-house digital marketing at multiple businesses, Ken Irie, the representative of nordic shift, can optimize the marketing strategy by analyzing not just superficial metrics like cost-per-click and cost-per-conversion, but also a manager's perspective, business data, and marketing strategy to determine if the acquired conversions are meaningful.
By combining management perspectives, various business data, and marketing strategies, we work with companies to scrutinize and verify whether conversions are truly meaningful, and optimize strategies accordingly to realize marketing that is meaningful to the business.

Ken Irie

His experience includes being the Director of Digital Marketing for Air New Zealand, the New Zealand Tourism Board, IHG and Air Asia, as well as a digital consultant agency and a Scandinavian watch manufacturer.

Managed digital marketing in-house from upstream to downstream. He has created a team that handles paid advertising, creative management, customer service, social media distribution, and strategic planning and execution.

He founded nordic shift in Copenhagen in 2021 and moved to Amsterdam in 2022.Strategy and marketing support are provided to foreign companies from Europe entering and expanding into the Japanese market.

Company Profile

Registered Name：nordic shift digital marketing

Address：Professor JH Gunningstraat 40 1068MS Amsterdam, Netherlands

Drector：Ken Irie

VAT：NL004450348B84