As a foreign business owner, marketing in Japan can be difficult due to exclusive nature of Japanese people and language barrier.
To overcome this issue, outsourcing to Japanese influencers for advertising have been popular among companies to spread both awareness and credibility of their products/services in Japan. Selecting the right Japanese influencers can help you target Japanese audience segments who resonate with your brand message.
In this article, we will look at ways to screen Japanese influencers based on your target audiences.
What makes Japanese influencer unique in relation to a conventional advertisement?
Conventional advertisements deliver direct messages to consumers to stimulate their purchase behavior, while influencer marketing, leverages trusted influencers as a medium for delivering company’s product/service, leading to a realistic review and adding more credibility to the brand.
For foreign companies, collaborating with the right Japanese influencers can help them penetrate the Japanese market.
Despite the effectiveness of marketing with Japanese influencers, you must first understand the unique culture of Japan, along with specific audiences in Japan you are wanting to target. Selecting the wrong Japanese influencers can be detrimental for both parties, due to misleading images of influencers and the brand in collaboration.
Japanese consumers heavily values trust, and therefore selecting the right Japanese influencers is key to finding success in Japanese market.
When targeting audiences in the Japanese Market, you must have a clear understanding of Japan’s culture, consumer values, and social media demographics.
Japanese consumer’s values are heavily affected by their rich history and their unique culture. For example, Japanese people’s exclusive nature makes them rely on word of mouth from close friends and family when making purchasing decisions.
Additionally, Japan’s intricate hospitality also known as “omotenashi” must be taken into consideration in shaping resonance between your brand and the Japanese consumers.
Implementing these cultural tendencies into your Japanese influencer marketing will help you target and engage the right audiences in Japan for success.
Understanding values of Japanese consumers plays a critical role in finding success in marketing within Japan. Given, that Japanese values tradition of gift-giving, many companies focus on well presented packaging and presentation to make their products appealing for gifts.
Moreover, maintaining and building a trustworthy brand image is crucial when targeting the Japanese consumers in marketing.
Honest and transparent marketing is required from both the brand and Japanese influencer to find success in Japanese market.
Analysis of Japanese social media demographics is important in finding your right target in Japan.
Social media gives you real-time valuable insights about how they feel about certain products/services. This information is essential for understanding pain points of Japanese consumers, allowing you to implement marketing strategies that will help them solve their problems.
Furthermore, social media reveals audience demographics including region, age, and gender for better persona of your targeted Japanese audiences.
By leveraging on insights from social media, you can work with your Japanese influencer to create targeted campaigns with high engagements and conversions.
After understanding Japan’s demographics and persona of the audiences you want to target in marketing your product/service, you now have to select a Japanese influencer that resonate both with your brand and your target.
Here are factors to consider when selecting the right Japanese influencer.
Make sure the influencer’s followers are genuine and resonating with your brand. It is important to avoid Japanese influencers with purchased followers because it would not lead to increase in conversions nor awareness.
Engagement rate will tell you whether the followers are genuine or not. Engagement rate is measured by number of likes, comments, and shares on influencer’s contents. Higher engagement rate is an indicator of a quality Japanese influencer.
Review past collaborations and success of Japanese influencers to see whether they are good fit for your brand. Look into the comments and see how audiences have reacted and find ways to refine your marketing strategies.
Look and see whether the Japanese influencer’s content genre resonate with your brand. Understand their audiences’ persona to have a vivid picture of who your target is going to be for your marketing strategy.
To see how a Japanese influencer and their audience must resonate with the brand image, lets look at a successful scenario where a company and influencer found success in targeting the right Japanese audience.
Company “B” is a company focused on making healthy workout snacks, and decided to collaborate with a female Japanese influencer “M”, whose contents were leaned towards workouts, dieting, and yoga.
Company “B” relied on influencer “M” to promote their new soy snack in relation to the influencer’s ongoing circuit training campaign, and found success in spreading awareness, while leading to loyal consumers from the campaign.
This is a scenario where credibility and resonance of genre played a crucial role in the campaign’s success and it is proven by over 7000 likes on the post.
Influencer “M” priorly had a dedicated fan base with existing trust from her recommendations, specifically in niches of fitness and nutrition. With alignment of the new soy snack with “M”’s circuit training company, Company “B” successfully found resonance with the audience of the influencer for purchasing decisions.
The campaign is highlighted by increased brand awareness along with enhanced consumer trust and engagement for the Japanese influencer due to right targeting.
Despite the marketing opportunities in Japan, you can find with collaborating with a Japanese influencer, a lack of compatibility between the brand and the influencer’s content can have negative impacts.
Collaborating with influencers with high engagement rate can be detrimental if.
In a case involving a water server PR campaign, a Japanese influencer focused on gadgets and lifestyle contents was selected as a medium for promotion. The campaign did not find success as it did not meet the need of follower’s interests.
Moreover, the influencer provided too many promotional photos from the company, leading to detraction from the influencer’s stylish and aesthetic style contents.
This case highlights how wrong targeting led to loss of trust and authenticity for both the company and the influencer.
Having success in targeting requires understanding the demographics of popular social medias in Japan. The most popular social media platform includes Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, and TikTok. Let’s look at ways to differentiate your targeting strategy based on different platforms.
Based on data in 2023, age range between 10-20 are the major users of Instagram in Japan. Moreover, over 80% of users are looking to find references to make purchasing decisions on Instagram, and it is now a major platform for enhancement of product awareness and conversions.
As user demographic are relatively young in Instagram, pricing must be heavily taken into account when targeting the right audience.
Based on data in 2023, almost 80% of Japanese in their 20s are user of Twitter. Despite the similar demographic with Instagram, Twitter is better suited for targeting for young adults and professionals who shows interest in B2B products.
Moreover, twitter allows you to target audience with specific manner, with use of its keyword feature for segmentation.
Based on data in 20203, around 98% of Japanese in their 20s are users of YouTube, showing its unwavering popularity. YouTube is famous for its skippable and un-skippable ads that can be used to increase both awareness and conversions.
YouTube allows for effective targeting based on search keywords and channels.
Based on data in 2023, around 66% of Japanese in their 10s are users of TikTok. TikTok has recommend feature from its machine learning technology, creating cases of instant viral moments among users.
Given most Japanese TikTok users are in their 10s, keep in mind that when targeting, B2C brands is more compatible in relation to B2B brands.
Influencer targeting in Japan is rapidly evolving, due to technological advancements and cultural nuances.
The targeting of the right Japanese influencer with the right audience persona is going to be requiring utilization of AI for massive data analysis. This will help you with identifying trends and select the right Japanese influencer to collaborate with at the moment.
The future of influencer targeting in Japan will also see rise in new technologies and platforms for companies and influencers to collaborate in for engagements. This will require adaptation and understanding of Japanese demographics furthermore.
Most importantly, Japan’s unique cultural landscape presents lots of challenges for foreign companies when engaging in influencer marketing. Due to different cultural values and language barriers, targeting Japanese consumers and selecting the right Japanese influencers can be difficult.
Successful targeting in Japan’s market requires deep understanding and respect toward these cultural values for long-term trust and authenticity from Japanese consumers.
Despite the challenges presented above, Hotice can provide you convenient solution that can help you select the right Japanese influencers, allowing you to target the right Japanese consumers for market penetration.
With Hotice, they will help you facilitate communication with the Japanese influencers and you do not have to go through difficult process of contact the Japanese influencers yourself.
Contact Hotice now to simplify your targeting and marketing with a Japanese influencer!
