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

■ Company profile
Asherdesign Inc.
Website: https://acial.co.jp/
Industry: staffing and recruitment
Employees: 280 (as of September 2024)
Services: consulting (web 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.

・Sport and HR (https://www.a-cial.com/aa/)
Career support specialising in people from sport, including student athletes and retired athletes
・Sport and IT (https://tb.acial.co.jp/)
Teaching programming to people from sport and matching them with IT companies and projects
・Sport and local government (https://mc.acial.co.jp/)
Supporting the “community transition” that moves responsibility for school club activities from schools to the local community

We supported their marketing for five years, from October 2020 to September 2025.

The problem: no marketing foundation, and no structure to support business growth

As Asherdesign grew its sport and HR business, it faced the following problems.

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 and so on) was not in place, and as an organisation their marketing capability was “close to zero”.
There was no clear basis for strategic decisions such as “which channel should we invest in?” and “how do we make results repeatable?”, and building something that could carry medium- to long-term growth had become urgent.

No one dedicated to marketing

At the time, they recognised that marketing was essential to growing the HR business, but there was no one internally dedicated to it as a specialist.
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 on their own.

What we did: comprehensive support to build the marketing foundation from scratch

To address the “lack of marketing systems” that Asherdesign faced,
NowVillage worked alongside them on consulting, advertising, SEO and CS (customer success) improvement, from strategy design through execution and improvement.
Specifically, we did four main things.

① Supporting the design of the marketing strategy

First, we worked out where marketing could contribute to the business, and together put the underlying strategy in place: the customer profile, the key messages, the path through to conversion and so on.
・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 flow through to conversion
We began by making that underlying “route to success” clear.

② Building and running advertising and SEO

Working from the strategy, we supported both advertising and SEO, to deliver acquisition in the short and the medium to long 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 of these activities worked together.

③ Improving customer support: raising conversion from registration to interview

Beyond growing “registrations” through marketing, we also focused on improving 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.

Main work 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 users’ interest alive, and the introduction of the right ways 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 accuracy of the data behind any improvement.

・Making it stick on the ground and building an improvement cycle (PDCA)
Rather than a one-off improvement, we set things up so that the team itself monitors conversion and keeps acting on it.

Through these measures we established a “winning CS flow” that reliably turns acquired users into interviews and maximises the final number of 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 putting strategy and systems in place; we kept supporting the work at a practical level.
So that Asherdesign’s own team could run it themselves, we reviewed results and activity in regular meetings, and helped build a structure that could turn the improvement cycle quickly.

Main support 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 we helped marketing keep running continuously inside the company.

Results: marketing turned into a system, and a “winning formula” established

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

Marketing successfully turned into a “system”

Through regular meetings two or three times a week and a monthly all-hands meeting, we continuously selected activity, set KPIs and proposed improvements. PR, advertising, SEO, CS, social media and other channels worked together, and work that had depended on individuals moved to 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, such as 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 put in place.

Advertising and SEO delivered steadily, and acquisition grew substantially

Support for bringing advertising, SEO and affiliates in-house produced results in acquisition over both the short and the 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 / Meta)
・Results were particularly strong in the sport-focused areas.
・Careers: monthly registrations grew from 50 to 500
・New graduates: monthly registrations grew from 200 to 600. As the various advertising, SEO and other activities worked together, it was not a single channel but the “acquisition capability of the business as a whole” that rose.

Customer success strengthened

In CS, with a team including part-time staff, we built the operation, designed KPIs and produced manuals, helping to improve the interview rate.

Results
・Careers: the rate from qualified registration to interview held improved from 25% to 40%
・New graduates: the rate from registration to interview held rose 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 also developed successfully

To widen the reach of their marketing, we also supported the launch of social media and video.

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

■ X (formerly Twitter)
・Supported the running of five employee accounts, including Mr Kozono’s
・Mr Kozono’s followers: grew from 2,500 to 8,000

Using 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, gave us the following comment on our support.

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

In that situation, NowVillage worked carefully alongside us from the earliest stage of building the system,
and I came to feel that marketing works not as a series of ‘one-off activities’
but as ‘a weapon for growing the business’.

If your company knows it has marketing problems but doesn’t know how to solve them, I think it would be well worth talking to NowVillage.”

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

NowVillage Inc. is a marketing partner that supports you end to end, from designing marketing strategy through running each activity to analysing the numbers and making improvements.
Our strength is supporting you across the digital field, from advertising, SEO and content planning to data analysis and building CS operations, and we specialise in putting the “systems”, “structure” and “operations” in place to fit each company’s challenges.
As with Asherdesign, for companies that say

“We want to build a marketing foundation from scratch”
“We want a repeatable ‘winning formula'”

we can work alongside you from strategy through to day-to-day operation on the ground.
If you are facing challenges with your marketing set-up or customer acquisition, please feel free to get in touch.

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