We have all heard of Influencer Marketing but what are the differences in Japan?
Japan Italy Bridge offers services to companies in the field of Digital Marketing and events. Many Italian companies that have requested our promotion services towards the Japanese market, asked us what are the differences between the two countries regarding Influencer Marketing.
Influencer Marketing in Japan: 5 things to know
Author: Erika
For those who do not know what Influencer Marketing is, we are talking about a branch of marketing that benefits from the use of bloggers and influencers with a specific target audience.
Nowadays, this strategy is one of the most effective methods in most markets, this also applies to the Japanese one. In fact, Influencer Marketing in Japan plays a big role but the rules are different than in Western countries.
Today we share with you 5 differences to help you understand better.
The language barrier
One of the aspects of Japanese social media and therefore also of Influencer Marketing is that everything must be done in their language. Unfortunately, Japan is ranked 49th among the 88 countries and regions in the ranking of English language study and knowledge. A lack of expertise when you think about how much Japanese use social media to get informed and communicate.
Because of this, classic global influencers such as Chiara Ferragni, Cameron Dallas and others are not as influential as they are in other countries accustomed to the English language. In fact, sometimes they are almost unknown even compared to local influencers with fewer followers.
This leads to a big dilemma for companies: to use local influencers or completely ignore the Japanese market? True, the Japanese market is now not as profitable as the Chinese one. However, Japan is ranked 3rd in the GDP world ranking and this is too important to completely ignore this country and its audience.
As said before, it is true, Japanese Influencers have fewer followers than global ones. However, precisely because they speak in a language closely related to the culture of the Rising Sun, this leads them to not have many followers in the rest of the world.
What we can understand from this data, however, is that in this case engagement becomes extremely important. In fact, Japanese influencers are extremely connected to their audience and the interactions far exceed those of the westerners one.
Japanese hashtags require a cultural background
When a company opens to the Japanese market, it must understand the uniqueness of this country and its culture. It is therefore important to work with correct hashtags and use them properly. This will lead us to find the target community that we can approach and get a return on our investment.
Influencers and micro-influencers can be found using hashtags. However, finding the correct Japanese hashtag is not so easy for those who do not speak the language and do not know the culture. Moreover, very often the most common hashtags are neologisms.
For example #インク沼 is a direct translation of “Bottomless Swamp of Ink”. Apparently, this doesn’t make any sense, except that “Bottomless swamp of something” is an internet slang used a lot by Japanese people to describe when someone is really passionate about something. However, if we take away the cultural background, this hashtag completely loses its meaning.
photo credits: @v_sarasara, @tommy_notes_16 , @mizuki___iz
In addition, Japanese hashtags can often be very complicated for a Western eye to understand. This happens because of the three ways of writing the language, namely the mix of Kanji, Hiragana and Katakana.
So when we use Japanese hashtags, we have to be careful how they are written because the combination of the three ways can bring different meaning. In the language of internet, a hashtag written in a different way also brings different results on an audience level. In fact, this can affect the number of people we might reach.
Influencers in Japan are distributed on different platforms
Even in the West, it is rare that an influencer has the same strength on all the most popular social platforms. Many are popular only on Instagram, others only on Tik Tok or Twitter. This has even more effect in Japan with the presence of some specific platforms for Japanese culture. For example, we have NewsPicks that interfaces with a purely corporate audience. While note is a social dedicated entirely to the content creators such as stories, tutorials, news blogs and especially manga.
The top Influencers and agencies
As it also happens in the West, many Japanese influencers are followed by some agencies when they start to become popular. At the moment, unfortunately, there are few influencers who work freelance. So, if you want to work with an influencer who belongs to an agency, you have to go through the agency itself.
All this has its pros and cons.
Pros.
- Access to major influencers
- You save time in finding the right influencer since agencies like ours cover this part of the work for you.
- The agency negotiates contracts and fees
In this case, the work of the agency therefore becomes a benefit for the company that finds itself having a job tailored to its interests.
Cons.
- Higher costs
- Minor flexibility
- Direct contacts of influencers remain private
Unfortunately, when using an agency you have to comply with the rules of the agency and these vary from agency to agency.
photo credits: @watanabenaomi703 , @rolaofficial
Undisclosed paid posts
Japanese people are very strict when it comes to honesty and transparency. This severity is also applied in Influencer Marketing in Japan. In fact, when paid posts from influencers not reported as such, they tend to be ignored by the public and give a bad impression.
However, there are no direct laws governing the transparency of an Influencer-sponsored post in Japan. In addition, not all influencers are aware of the right way to communicate a partnership.
For a company, it is therefore very important to educate the chosen influencers and not to work randomly to get impressions.
In the West, we now have clear guidelines on the use of sponsorship through Influencer Marketing and these should also be used for collaborations with Japanese Influencers.
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