On Digital Marketing and Building a Business: An Introduction by Kuniyuki Imamura

Hello. I am Kuniyuki Imamura (@Kuniyuki119), representative director of NowVillage. I have decided to start writing on note.

As this is my first note post, I have written it for anyone wondering ‘who is Kuniyuki Imamura?’ or ‘what is the president of NowVillage like?’

I started my first business at 25 and have run several companies since. Through all of it, what I have faced above all is‘digital marketing’ and ‘business growth’, so I would like to introduce myself around those two themes.

Taking an interest in life abroad and in marketing

After leaving my local secondary school in Kagoshima, I went to study at the University of Alabama in Huntsville in the United States, majoring in marketing in the business school.

As a student, the choice to study marketing abroad is not one many people have made, I think.

the choice to study marketing abroad Let me explain the background to making it.

My interest in going abroad started when my sister spent a year studying in Canada during secondary school and came back so changed in her language skills and her confidence with people that it shook me.

I joined a study trip to China in middle school and volunteer work in India in secondary school, and people abroad seemed to have a strong appetite for a challenge, while Japanese people seemed to have less energy for drawing others in. That played a part too.

My interest in marketing came from an acquaintance of my mother’s, an executive officer at Olympus, who said ‘from here on, marketing is a growth field so it will be interesting to study’, and that stayed with me.

Studying abroad

So, admitted at last, I began a life of working in English and studying marketing at the same time.

It was hard at first, but my dislike of cutting corners on whatever is in front of me paid off, and the top three in the faculty was where my grades eventually reached.

That gives you Being able to skip ahead and graduate in three and a half years gave me a great deal of confidence.

Looking back, 2006 to 2009, the years I was at university, were still an era of marketing at Japanese companies, and especially of digital marketing having a low standing.

Founding UZUZ

After that I took a job in Japan, and after various twists and turns, at the age of 25 I founded Early in their working life job-hunting support specialist UZUZ Inc..

As of 2020, UZUZ was around 450 million yen in annual revenue・a company of about 45 staff

Running UZUZ meant holding‘early-career job changers’as a consistent key theme throughout, and running not just the business but our own hiring in line with it.

As we pushed the business forward, it became clear again that digital marketing is a very important lever for growing a business.

Digital marketing at UZUZ

The watchword for digital marketing in running UZUZ was‘do the unglamorous work, thoroughly, with your own hands’.

Nobody knows the right answer. Digital marketing is that kind of world, and in it,

• catching up on information quickly,
• turning it into output at once,
• testing the results over and over

nothing outside that cycle will translate into business results.

So we sometimes ran enormous A/B tests, 1,000 YouTube videos or 300 Facebook banners at a time, in a keep going until you win stance that we carried through right across the organisation.

Through that, every method going, from SEO to Google Ads, affiliate advertising, Twitter and YouTube, we learned the knack of putting to work in our own business.

As a result UZUZ was able, month after month, to attract around 2,000 job seekers through digital marketing, and drew attention as an unusual result within the industry.

That led to a high profile in recruitment for early-career job changers, and had a large impact on the business.

Diversifying the business

As we kept growing in recruitment,‘why is UZUZ growing so fast?’was a question we were asked more and more.

UZUZ had also built its own systems for corporate sales and customer support, not just for digital marketing, so requests to turn that know-how into a service grew too.

On top of that, recruitment had high margins but the weakness of being a flow business, and we wanted to overcome that, so we began taking on businesses in a range of fields beyond recruitment.

WWW Inc., which provides marketing support focused on recruitment companies, was founded in this period too.

Personally, it was also what got me involved in supporting the launch of all sorts of businesses, inside the company and out.

Leaving UZUZ and founding NowVillage

As I came into contact with executives outside the company, one iron rule about launching a new business took hold in me.

‘Get the pioneers in that market to tell you the secret of their growth.’

That is the rule.

In other words, get access to the know-how behind success and hack the upstream.

It is something we still apply rigorously at NowVillage.

Balance ‘thinking for yourself’ against ‘being taught by those who have succeeded’, and keep turning those two actions round and round.

That, I think, is the most important thing in growing a business as fast as possible.

At the same time, our core recruitment business had the problem that clients inevitably clustered in the city centre.

Digital marketing, by contrast, I came to understand deeply as a service that can be delivered without regard to area or industry, and I grew strongly interested in it in a new way.

I stepped up my studying from there, and became even more absorbed in digital marketing.

For my last two years at UZUZ I also held the role of chairman, and set up a subsidiary offering a service to spread digital marketing know-how.

As I gradually came to want to do it from scratch under my own steam, I decided to start NowVillage.

That is how NowVillage came to be founded.

The stance a marketer needs

From my student days to now, I have consistently studied and practised digital marketing.

Why did digital marketing get such a hold on me?

Because digital marketing is what contributes most to hitting your targets when you look at things from a management point of view.

Digital marketing is

that kind of world.

In that bracing world, a marketer has to keep making the best move available.

For example,

None of that will do.

That is exactly why

taking that plain but dependable road is, I think, the stance a marketer needs.

In closing

NowVillage, founded last year, is a company dedicated to digital marketing support.

What I have built up around digital marketing, as described above, we carry out at the level of the whole organisation.

If you would like an even-handed opinion on your own digital marketing, do get in touch with NowVillage.

Thank you for reading to the end.