This is my first blog post since joining Sophola earlier this month. Going into a new environment is always challenging, but in my limited time so far I have found Sophola to be an incredibly supportive and welcoming environment. My coworkers have been very patient while I do my best to navigate our weekly meetings in Japanese.

A worthwhile cause with intriguing methods

As this is my first blog post I want to briefly explain what convinced me to join Sophola before outlining what I am going to be writing about for the next series of blog posts. As I mentioned in my interview, Sophola’s ambition to address issues affecting Japanese society, in general, and the countryside, in particular, is something that I really buy into. Sophola is not alone in this ambition, but what really sets it apart, in my opinion, is how it plans to use state-of-the-art tech solutions to achieve this ambition. I’m really excited about exploring these plans in more detail in future posts but for now I just want to highlight that for me and many of my coworkers, this is ultimately not just a job. We are working towards something.

Marketing solutions employing AI and machine learning on the Japanese market

For my first blog series, I am planning to go through some solutions that help companies streamline or in some cases fully automate aspects of their digital marketing in the Japanese market. Whether you are unhappy with your existing SEO or SEM performance or looking to enter the Japanese market with the best possible outlook, these tools have something for everyone.

Over the next couple of weeks, I will be developing on what these solutions can do and with the aid of real world examples show how AI and machine learning are helping companies increase performance and save on time.

Automate your paid marketing in Japan with AdScale 

One of the biggest challenges facing companies and agencies is that paid media optimisation is getting increasingly complicated. Dealing with multiple ad channels and budgets manually is both time consuming and inefficient. While Google and other ad platforms offer some automation in terms of bidding there are still many aspects that need to be managed manually. Paid media efforts often lack transparency and the ability to predict potential future improvements. These issues are often amplified in a less familiar market.

AdScale is the only digital advertising platform that utilizes AI and machine learning to automate both budgeting and bidding across multiple ad channels, including important Japanese channels like Yahoo. 

In my next blog post, I will expand on how AdScale works and how Sophola is working with our partners to bring this technology to Japanese customers.

Target long tail keywords with automated landing pages to improve your user experience and SEO/SEM performance with Longtail UX

Long tail keywords, search queries with four or more words, make up 50-70% of all Google searches. This high volume of total searches, spread across many long tail keywords each with relatively little traffic and competition, represents a huge opportunity for many sites. This is especially true for Japanese search queries where linguistic quirks create almost infinite variations in the same keyword. Most sites, however, are not designed to answer the questions that long tail users are asking and therefore provide a poor user experience. Longtail UX looks to fill that gap by automatically creating tailor-made landing pages and user experiences for each long tail keyword. 

In my third blog post, I will go through how these landing pages can massively improve your user experience in addition to giving you actionable SEO performance data and managing SEM campaigns for those same keywords.

Monetise all your visual content with Markable’s cutting-edge visual AI

While the previous two solutions deal with AI in the realms of SEO and SEM, Markable uses deep learning visual AI to analyse your static images and video content and turn them shoppable. Making a wealth of images and videos tools of discovery and conversions, Markable’s suite of e-commerce tools lets users search through your catalog quickly and accurately to find what they are looking for, discover similar products or even purchase items seamlessly as they appear without leaving your videos.

In my fourth blog post, I will detail the different ways that Markable can improve conversion rates, increase order totals, encourage engagement and more for Japanese e-commerce sites and apps.

Wrapping up

Over the next month I will be expanding on each of these topics and coming back to this post to add links and additional thoughts. I hope you will follow me as I familiarise myself with these tools and look at how particular issues impact on the Japanese market. 

Sebastian Benedikz
Global Sales Executive
SOPHOLA, Inc