Our Services

Digital marketing for Japan, built for international businesses.

Tokyo Marketing is a bilingual digital marketing agency based in Tokyo. We specialize in helping foreign companies grow their presence and revenue in Japan — through search, content, social media, e-commerce, and paid advertising. Our team has supported more than 30 companies across industries including SaaS, e-commerce, consumer goods, and professional services. Every service we offer is designed specifically for the Japanese market — not adapted from a Western playbook.

30+

International companies 

supported

6+

Years in 

Japan market

100%

Bilingual team, 

based in Tokyo

Digital Advertising outcome

DIGITAl ADVERTISING (PPC/SEM)

Paid search in Japan requires a different approach than in English-language markets. Japanese keywords are not direct translations of English terms — they carry different intent signals, different competitive dynamics, and different cost-per-click profiles. Ad copy that converts in English will often underperform in Japanese if it is translated rather than written natively. And any paid search strategy in Japan that ignores Yahoo! Japan is immediately leaving 20% of the search market unaddressed, because Yahoo! Japan’s ad management system operates entirely in Japanese and its auction mechanics differ from Google.

Our team includes marketing professionals with direct experience at Google Japan. We understand how Quality Score is evaluated in the Japanese market, how keyword intent differs across Google JP and Yahoo! Japan, and how to write ad copy that accounts for the cultural nuances that determine whether a Japanese user clicks or scrolls past. Every campaign we manage is built from the ground up for Japan — not adapted from a template designed for another market.

Beyond campaign management, we treat conversion rate optimization as a core part of the service rather than an add-on. We audit your landing pages for Japan-market friction, identify the gaps between ad click and conversion, and run structured A/B tests to systematically lower your cost per acquisition over time.

Social Media Advertising

Japan’s social media landscape is unlike any other major market. LINE — Japan’s dominant messaging app — is used by over 94 million people, representing roughly 75% of the entire Japanese population. It is deeply embedded in daily communication in a way that has no real equivalent in Western markets. X (formerly Twitter) has over 58 million users in Japan and remains far more commercially active than in most other countries. Instagram has over 45 million Japanese users with high engagement, particularly in lifestyle, fashion, food, and travel categories. Understanding not just which platforms exist, but how Japanese users actually behave on each of them, is the foundation of any effective social media strategy here.

We build social media advertising campaigns that are native to each platform and tailored to Japanese cultural expectations — not adapted from English-language creative. Japanese social media users respond to different messaging styles, visual conventions, and calls to action than Western audiences. Seasonal campaigns are particularly important in Japan, where cultural moments such as New Year (Oshogatsu), Golden Week, and Obon drive significant shifts in consumer behavior and create conversion opportunities that competitors without local knowledge routinely miss.

Our approach begins with a thorough analysis of your current users and customer journey before any budget is committed to advertising. We build audience strategies around the real data about who your Japanese customers are, which platforms they use, and what motivates them to convert — then run continuous A/B tests on creative, targeting, and landing pages to improve performance systematically over time.

Components of Digital Marketing in Japan
Digital Marketing Google

SEO & LLMO optimization

Search engine optimization in Japan is not simply a matter of translating your existing SEO strategy into Japanese. Japanese search behavior — the queries people use, the way intent is expressed, and the platforms that drive organic traffic — is meaningfully different from English-language markets. Getting this right requires native Japanese keyword research, an understanding of how Google JP and Yahoo! Japan rank content, and the ability to write authoritative content in Japanese that earns trust from both search algorithms and human readers.

In 2025, the search landscape is changing further. AI tools — ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews — now answer millions of queries daily and actively cite authoritative sources. Tokyo Marketing is one of the first agencies in Japan to offer LLMO (Large Language Model Optimization): a practice that structures your content so AI tools recommend your brand when prospects ask about your industry. We track your AI referral score, monitor where your brand is cited across AI platforms, and build the content infrastructure that increases those mentions over time. The result is a compounding new channel of inbound traffic that grows alongside your traditional organic rankings.

Content writing

Japanese consumers are high-information buyers. Before making a purchase or choosing a service provider, they research extensively — on search engines, on Q&A platforms like Yahoo! Chiebukuro and OKWave, on editorial content sites like Note.com, and across industry-specific media. Being present and credible across all of those touchpoints is what separates foreign companies that grow in Japan from those that stall.

Our content writing service goes beyond producing blog articles for your website. We create and publish authoritative content across the Japanese digital platforms where your target customers are already spending time. Each piece of platform content earns a backlink to your domain — raising your domain authority, improving your SEO rankings, and increasing the frequency with which AI tools cite your brand. It is a content strategy built for both the current search landscape and the AI-driven discovery environment that is rapidly emerging.

All content is written by native Japanese professionals with SEO and LLMO best practices built in from the first draft — not added as an afterthought. We handle everything from the initial keyword research to publication and backlink tracking, so you get the results without the operational overhead.

Translation & localization

Standard translation preserves the words. It does not preserve the intent, the search visibility, or the conversion power of your original content. A word-for-word translation of your English website into Japanese will rank for none of the Japanese keywords your target audience uses, because Japanese searchers phrase their queries differently — sometimes entirely differently — from English speakers. The result is a Japanese website that looks localized but performs like it doesn’t exist.

We offer SEO transcreation: a process that begins with native Japanese keyword research for each page, then rebuilds the content in Japanese to rank for those queries while preserving your brand voice and messaging intent. Every transcreated page is reviewed by our SEO team before delivery — meta titles, descriptions, header structure, internal linking, and structured data are all checked and optimized. We also build LLMO best practices into every page, so your content is structured to be cited by AI tools as well as indexed by search engines.

For companies with larger content libraries, we manage full website migrations — prioritizing pages by search opportunity and business impact so every translation investment compounds rather than sprawls.

Amazon / Shopify / EC

Japan is Asia’s second-largest e-commerce market, with total online retail exceeding ¥22 trillion in 2024. It is also one of the most demanding. Japanese online shoppers are thorough researchers — they read product descriptions in detail, scrutinize specifications, compare sellers carefully, and place significant weight on reviews and brand credibility before committing to a purchase. A product listing that performs well in an English-speaking market will rarely perform the same way in Japan without meaningful localization.

Our e-commerce service covers the full journey from market entry to scale. We set up and fully localize Shopify Japan stores — including Japanese storefront configuration, local payment methods such as konbini pay and bank transfer, and structured data for Google Shopping Japan. We write all product copy in Japanese with conversion-focused language that matches the detail and trust-building expectation of Japanese shoppers. And we manage paid ad campaigns on Amazon.co.jp, Google Shopping, and Meta — with Japanese keyword strategy, native ad creative, and ROAS-focused optimization from day one.

For brands entering Japan’s EC market for the first time, we also provide competitive landscape analysis before any budget is committed — mapping who is winning in your category, at what price points, and with what keywords and advertising strategies.

Online shopping - bags with phone

Happy customers

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