Building a marketing foundation from scratch at the intersection of sport and HR | Asherdesign Inc.

About the client
We would be glad to work out the right answer for where you are.
HP：https://acial.co.jp/
Industry: staffing and recruitment
Asherdesign Inc.
Employees: 280 (as of September 2024)

What we did: consulting (advertising, SEO, landing page and service site production, improving customer success, PR development and more)

・Asherdesign Inc. (founded 2014, Shibuya-ku, Tokyo) runs SPORTS FORCE, a platform that uses the power of sport to drive industry growth and bring society up to date. It works in three main areas.（https://www.a-cial.com/aa/）
Sport and HR
・Career support specialising in people from sport, including student athletes and retired athletes（https://tb.acial.co.jp/）
Sport and IT
・Teaching programming to people from sport and matching them with IT companies and projects（https://mc.acial.co.jp/）
Sport and local government

Supporting the shift of after-school club activity from schools to the local community

Digital marketing support

Building a marketing foundation from scratch in sport and HR | Asherdesign Inc.

In their sport and HR business, Asherdesign faced the following.

No marketing foundation, and a focus on awareness
They were strong at planning and at creating conversation in sport, and ran mainly awareness work such as collaborations with well-known manga and J.League clubs.
But the systematic marketing foundation for acquisition – advertising, SEO, owned media, social media – was not in place, and as an organisation their marketing capability was close to zero.

There was no clear basis for deciding which channel to invest in or how to make results repeatable, and building something that could carry medium- to long-term growth had become urgent.

No one dedicated to marketing
They recognised that marketing was essential to growing the HR business, but there was no one internally whose job it was.
As a result they lacked the know-how to run the whole cycle of
choosing activity and designing strategy
building the way it is run
checking the effect against data and。

there were limits to how far they could scale the business alone

What we did: building the marketing foundation from scratch, across the board
To address the lack of marketing systems,
NowVillage worked alongside them on consulting, advertising, SEO and customer success, from strategy through execution and improvement.

① We did four main things.

Designing the marketing strategy
First we worked out where marketing could contribute to the business, and put the foundations in place together: who the customer is, what to say, and the path through.
Who to reach (defining the persona)
What value to convey (setting the message)
The role of each channel (advertising, SEO, social media and so on)
Designing the path to conversion

② and began with making that underlying route to success clear.

Working from the strategy, we supported both advertising and SEO, to deliver acquisition in the short and the longer term.

Advertising
Taking stock of the existing advertising
Reworking the structure to improve results
Sorting out budget allocation and strategy
Proposals for improving creative and landing pages

SEO
Competitor and search volume analysis
Proposing a direction for improving content
Organising the structure of the owned media
Strategy for mid- and long-tail keywords

We kept the whole of marketing consistent, so that each piece of work supported the others.

③ Improving customer support: raising conversion from registration to interview

Beyond growing registrations through marketing, we focused on the process that leads directly to business results: holding the interview. We optimised the experience for registered users and built the structure to maximise conversion.

What we did on customer support
Making conversion visible and finding the bottleneck
We quantified the drop-off at each step from registration to interview set and interview held.
That made clear where the problem was.

Optimising communication with users
We reviewed the thank-you email after registration and the workflow for arranging interviews.
We supported a pace that keeps interest alive, and the right way of making contact.

Firm rules for data entry and management
We organised the entry rules so that the reasons an interview did not happen could be captured as data.
That improved the quality of the data behind any improvement.

Making it stick, and building a cycle of improvement
Rather than a one-off improvement, we set it up so that the team itself monitors conversion and keeps acting on it.

Through this we established a customer success flow that reliably turns acquired users into interviews and maximises placements.

a marketing operation in which improvement keeps running was built.

4. Working alongside them through delivery (ongoing support for day-to-day operation and improvement)

We did not stop at strategy and systems; we supported the day-to-day work as well.
So that Asherdesign’s own team could run it, we reviewed results and the work itself in regular meetings, and helped build a short improvement cycle.

What we did during delivery
・Reviewing the numbers in regular meetings
KPI design and progress checks
Support for planning new activity and campaigns
Proposals for improving landing pages, creative and ad copy
Reviewing the direction of SEO content
Analysing performance by channel and proposing improvements

Through this, strategy, activity and improvement ran end to end, and marketing kept moving inside the company.

Results: marketing turned into a system, and a repeatable way of winning

With the foundation we built and our ongoing support, marketing improved steadily at Asherdesign and produced clear results in each area.
The main results are below.

Marketing turned into a system

Through regular meetings two or three times a week and a monthly all-hands, we kept selecting activity, setting KPIs and proposing improvements. PR, advertising, SEO, customer success and social media worked together, and what had depended on individuals became a repeatable process.

Main results
・Developing a PR lead (supported end to end, from planning and list building to approaching media)
Systems the company can run itself took hold, across networking events, social media and media relations
We also helped with interviews for marketing hires, strengthening the team. In this way, a foundation for running marketing as an organisation was created.

Advertising and SEO delivered steadily, and acquisition grew substantially

Support for bringing advertising, SEO and affiliates in-house produced results in both the short and medium term.

SEO (in-house)
70 articles published in about a year
Monthly registrations grew from 0 to 30
A structure for producing articles was established

Advertising (Google and Meta)
・Results were particularly strong in the sport field.
Careers: monthly registrations grew from 50 to 500
Graduates: monthly registrations grew from 200 to 600. As the advertising and SEO work came together, it was not a single channel but the acquisition capability of the business as a whole that rose.

Customer success strengthened

In customer success, with a team including part-time staff, we built the operation, designed KPIs and produced manuals, which improved interview rates.

Results
Careers: from qualified registration to interview held improved from 25% to 40%
Graduates: from registration to interview held improved from 30% to 50%. With improvement now running on data, it became possible to see where conversion falls away on each route.

New channels such as social media and YouTube

To widen their marketing, we also helped launch social media and video.

YouTube (Taiikukai Shukatsu TV)
Supported end to end: planning, editing, thumbnails and uploading
Subscribers passed 1,000

X (formerly Twitter)
Supported five employee accounts including Mr Kozono’s
Mr Kozono’s followers grew from 2,500 to 8,000

Social media and video widened awareness and built longer-term brand value.

A comment from Mr Kozono, Representative Director and CEO of Asherdesign Inc.

Mr Kozono, Representative Director and CEO, said the following about our work.

“I had thought of marketing as something vaguely necessary,
but I did not really understand what role it plays in the business
or how it leads to results.

NowVillage stayed with us carefully from the earliest stage of building the system,
and I came to see marketing not as a series of one-off activities
but as a weapon for growing the business.

If you know you have a marketing problem but not what to do about it, I would recommend talking to NowVillage.”

Working alongside you from marketing strategy through execution and analysis:NowVillage Inc.

NowVillage Inc. is a marketing partner covering everything from designing marketing strategy through execution to measurement and improvement covering everything from strategy through execution to improvement。
Our strength is working across digital – advertising, SEO, content planning, data analysis and building customer success – and putting the systems, structure and operations in place to match each company’s situation.
As with Asherdesign, if you

want to build a marketing foundation from scratch
or want a repeatable way of winning

we can work alongside you from strategy through to day-to-day operation.
We can work alongside you from strategy through to day-to-day operation.

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Talk to NowVillage