Whether you have a small, mid-size, or large business, social media management will likely be a large part of your digital marketing strategy, also when you are trying to enter or enlarge your Japanese market. With close to three-quarter of the total population on social media, most of whom you can find on Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, Youtube, and Instagram, chances are that you will find your target audience on the social media networks. Social media marketing in Japan comes with its own set of challenges, but if you get it right it can be hugely rewarding and bring you a whole new sales market. Let’s go over the basics of social media management for your digital marketing strategy.

Setting Up a Digital Marketing Strategy

Once you’ve decided to enter a new market, setting up your new website for the country (or adding a country to your multi-lingual/multi-national website) and creating a working digital infrastructure for delivering your product or service should come first. Creating superior product or service descriptions will be a paramount for your success, so it will pay off to spend some extra effort on that part. When that part is up and running, you are going to spread brand awareness and make targeted campaigns to help your potential customers find you and learn about you. A paid online advertising campaign, for example on a search engine, can be an effective way to spread the word about your business.

After your website and infrastructure is set up, you should also start working on your social media strategy. Online advertising is an important pillar of your digital marketing strategy, but a good social media strategy and consequent social media management will really drive those results home.

Social Media Management : Most Important Factors

Any strong marketing strategy is built on the fact that you know your market, you know there is a lack of a service or a product in that market, and you can offer them that service or product. Knowing your audience will point you in the right direction of how to manage your social media accounts. Which important factors should you especially watch for efficient and effective social media management?

1. Choosing your social media channels; where is your target audience in Japan? Knowing this will help you build your profiles and follower count, although it is a good idea to also have (simple) social media presence on other channels to widen your reach. 
2. Type of content: video, pictures, graphics, text, a combination thereof, you can choose many ways to reach your audience with content. Which type of content works best depends on the social media channel, your audience, and your product. 
3. Subjects of content: only a very small percentage of your followers are already intent on buying your product, and the rest will be harder to convince. That does not mean that it is impossible, though! Understanding what their problems and needs are, and creating content that addresses these issues and offers solutions that can, of course, include your product, can push many of the fence-sitters to the buying side. Even people who didn’t yet know they needed your product may get convinced. Consistent publication of interesting new content will help your brand stay on top of your audience’s mind in a competitive environment.
4. How to approach customer engagement: the option of interacting with your audience is one of the best parts of social media marketing. It gives you the opportunity to learn directly from your customers what they need and how you can improve your product to meet their needs. Tone of voice is very important in customer interactions, so keep your audience’s characteristics in mind when deciding how to go about this.
5. Social media advertising: while your content may be doing a lot of the work in finding your audience and keeping them, advertising is also part of a complete social media management strategy. The good news is that it is relatively cheap to give your posts a boost, and that it is easy to customize the boosts to reach your target audience. Ads on social media also come in many forms like picture ads, video ads, ads in story reels, carousel ads, and more. There is always a format that suits your product.

Social Media Software Tools

A key element in social media management is the usage of social media software tools. They can make your life a lot easier by giving you quick, comprehensive, and up-to-date information on how your social media accounts are doing and how your advertisements are performing. Unless you have an extremely small audience and sales, you can’t get the full picture without using social media metrics. Here are a few things you have to look for when you are deciding on which social media software to subscribe for:

• User experience: is their user interface easy to use for your type of business?
• Security: are your and your customers’ data protected from hackers?
• Analytics and reporting: how easy is it to find the metrics that matter for your strategy?
• Integration options: is the software going to be an all-in-one solution or will you still need to use several apps and platforms?

If you’d decide to let a digital marketing agency help you out, you don’t need to worry about finding the best tools and subscribing to them, as they will have access to the best and most up-to-date tools out there to benefit your brand’s strategy. Especially if you want to enter a new market like Japan, being backed by a digital media partner will not only streamline your social media marketing, but they will also take the pain out of seo content writing in a different language and the not to be underestimated process of content localization.

Your Digital Media Agency Partner in Japan

Hashi Media is Japan’s go-to content marketing and social media company. If you are planning on entering the Japanese market and don’t know where to start, we’ve got you covered.

• Content creation
• Social media management
• Digital marketing strategy
• Brand localization

If you enjoyed what you read today and found it valuable, contact us today and let’s talk about your project.