[Interview] They give you water and teach you how to dig the well. Real growth from in-house enablement that leaves know-how behind.

About Arlalink’s business

Low-cost mobile: Daredemo Smartphone Arlalink provides a mobile service that people who cannot sign a contract with a major carrier, for reasons such as a credit event, can take out easily and with confidence, without a credit check. A phone is essential to everyone – for renting a home, for finding work, and for staying in touch – and owning one supports a person’s independence. Working with local government, Arlalink has built its own scheme and grown the business. It also runs other businesses, including mobile phone rental for companies.

Arlalink Inc. provides telecommunications services that meet the needs of the times, centred on low-cost mobile.

Its services address a social problem: people shut out of mobile connectivity.

To reach more people, it began work across digital marketing in 2022.

At the time, with no foundation for digital marketing internally, it faced challenges in winning new customers and in hiring as the business grew.

About 18 months into working with NowVillage, how have those challenges changed?

We asked Mr Takahashi, Representative Director, and Mr Shinjo, head of the marketing division, about the background, what it achieved, and what they expect next.

Should we review the contract with our outside agency? And then a remark that stopped us short

What led you to work with us?

Takahashi:When I met Mr Imamura through an acquaintance, the direct scouting service we had outsourced was not performing, and I was wondering whether to keep investing in outsourcing for hiring and for new customers.

I mentioned it casually, and he said: you could just do that yourselves.

It caught me off guard, and then made complete sense.

I realised I had treated digital marketing as something I did not understand, and had not bothered to dig into it.

The bar to trying something you do not understand looks higher than it is. That is why services that play on the worry do well. But with a certain level of literacy you should be able to learn the skill by trying.

Even knowing that doing it yourself is cheapest and best, when you think about the time and effort of something you do not understand, you end up outsourcing all of it.

NowVillage, by contrast, runs the digital marketing while sharing the know-how with our people and actively supporting us in bringing it in-house. We valued the knowledge staying with us, and began working together.

Cost per acquisition, which had been rising, settled. Keeping both the cash and the know-how is the real strength of in-house enablement

Thank you. Of all the work so far, where do you feel the effect of NowVillage most?

Recruitment consulting Advertising management In-house enablement In-house enablement for SEO

Shinjo:Of everything we have done with NowVillage, I feel the effect most in Google Ads. In January 2023 we launched a service called Daredemo Smartphone“.

At launch we caught the wave and won conversions at a very low cost per acquisition. Then about three months in, as the novelty wore off, cost per acquisition worsened, jumping to more than ten times where it started.

With little know-how, while we were looking for a way to rein it in, Mr Tabiraki of NowVillage helped. His sharp analysis and logical explanations were extremely useful.

As a result we could iterate quickly, and cost per acquisition is now steady at our target. Conversion rate is holding well too, and on brand keywords in particular it runs very efficiently. The difference is striking.

Takahashi:NowVillage’s strength is doing that as part of in-house enablement. Outsourcing the whole thing would not produce this.

With outsourcing, the cash goes out regardless of results and the know-how goes with it, and sometimes nothing is left in the company.

Now, thanks to in-house enablement, both the cash and the know-how stay with us, and we can put all of it into advertising.

When experience and success stay inside the company, repeatability naturally rises, and that is genuinely effective.

NowVillage also does not draw a line at we were not asked to do that; they bring our own people in and move things to get results, and I think it matters a great deal that they understand what is important and act on it.

People often debate whether outsourcing or in-house is better in marketing. I think bringing people inside wins, because the know-how accumulates across the company and the value we can offer customers rises. In future we want to hire web designers and engineers internally too, not only marketers.

The effect in hiring too. NowVillage gives you water and teaches you how to dig the well

We also support your hiring. Has that contributed?

Takahashi:When NowVillage came in, hiring had not really started, so we were at close to zero. We now have a steady 100 applications a month, enough to select from properly, so it is working. Building a pool of applicants and being able to choose matters a great deal.

We also consult you a lot on dealing with recruitment agencies. Honestly we did not know how best to work with them, and there is a lot to learn from Mr Imamura, who came from an agency. I would like to bring even that kind of hard-to-write-down knowledge in-house over time.

What do you expect from us next?

Shinjo:Including the SEO work we are discussing, we want to lift the whole of our web marketing and improve the results. There is plenty of headroom, and it would be good to build that together.

Finally, which companies would you recommend us to?

Shinjo:I think many companies want to bring digital marketing in-house. Mid-sized companies wanting to build a team and grow revenue as an organisation will fit particularly well.

Companies with that kind of ambition tend to believe they only grow by developing their people and going at it together, and that is where the demand for in-house enablement comes from.

Takahashi:Attracting candidates, which NowVillage is good at, is a way of gathering people whose needs are not visible, so it applies in any industry.

There is a saying about not giving someone water but teaching them to dig a well. With NowVillage, they give you the water and teach you how to dig the well.

As with our advertising, being able to teach something repeatable is genuinely valuable.

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Arlalink Inc.

HP：https://www.ala-link.co.jp/

Industry: telecommunications

Service: low-cost mobile　

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