Consultations up 150% and placements up 130% after a full rethink of marketing strategy | CREEK & RIVER Co., Ltd.

■ Company profile
CREEK & RIVER Co., Ltd.
Website: https://www.cri.co.jp/
Industry: Staffing services
Employees: Approx. 3,800 (group-wide)
Services provided: Advertising management / SEO / Job site and landing page renewal

CREEK & RIVER Co., Ltd. (founded in 1990, headquartered in Minato, Tokyo) has a two-part mission: raising the lifetime value of professionals and contributing to value creation for its clients. It runs an agency business providing staffing and recruitment, a produce business taking on production and development work, and a rights management business that plans and distributes intellectual property.

Within the company, the digital entertainment division runs Famicari, a career change service dedicated to the game industry, helping creators build their careers and helping game makers solve their challenges.

Career change service site: Famicari

The challenge: results hidden in a “black box”, and a gap with the target audience

The Famicari business was working to attract more users, but its overall marketing strategy and its data-based decision criteria (KPIs) were unclear.

Because its marketing channels and ad accounts were split into many small units, it was hard to analyze which actions had led to which results, and performance had become opaque.

There was also a yield problem: consultations and placements were not growing in line with registrations.

Much of the traffic and many of the registrations came from people other than those the service most needed to reach, namely people with game industry experience, and the systems for building up and tracking customer information to turn activity into real business results were not yet in place.

Our support: end-to-end support, from overall strategy to hands-on execution and bringing work in-house

NowVillage provided consistent, hands-on support covering everything from redesigning the marketing as a whole to acquisition, site improvements, SEO and bringing work in-house.

The main areas of work were as follows.

• Consolidating ad accounts and shifting acquisition toward quality
  We consolidated the fragmented ad accounts into the best-performing groups to make performance visible, opened up new channels and ran PDCA improvement cycles.
  Once sufficient volume had been secured (around summer 2025), we switched to quality-focused acquisition aimed at winning the people with game industry experience the business had been looking for.
  
• Persona design based on frontline interviews, and landing page and job site improvements
  Based on interviews with real users and the company’s own career advisers, and informed by competitor research, we designed personas and messaging.
  We fundamentally improved the UI/UX, for example by repositioning the search bar, bringing event page production in-house and introducing a step form (application form) based on a drop-off rate study.
  
• Building an SEO strategy tied to business results, and supporting the move in-house
  Rather than simply chasing search volume, we shared criteria for choosing keywords that lead directly to results, and redesigned the site structure and user journeys.
  We gave careful guidance on how to approach rewrites and new articles and how to track the numbers, helping the in-house team build the ability to analyze and run things on its own.

The results: a direct link to business results, and a self-sufficient, data-driven team

Structuring and optimizing the marketing as a whole delivered gains not only in traffic but in the results at the core of the business.

• Traffic grown to 350%, consultations up 150% and placements up 130%
  Over the four years since support began, traffic to the site as a whole grew to 350%.
  The number of people reaching a consultation was up 150% year on year, and final placements were up 130% year on year, a major result that contributes directly to the growth of the business.
  
• A better fit with the target audience
  With the shift to quality-focused acquisition, the share of registrations from people with game industry experience, the people the service most wanted to reach, rose substantially.
  
• SEO recovery and a stronger in-house team
  Following the renewed SEO push from autumn 2024, organic traffic recovered to nearly double.
  How to read the data and how to come up with improvements have become established within the team, which can now carry out its own analysis and plan its next moves.

Comments from CREEK & RIVER Co., Ltd.

“NowVillage does not just run our ads for us. They are a partner who commits to our business results as if they were their own.
What struck me most was that right after the consulting began, they suggested going to hear from users who had actually succeeded in changing jobs, and then carried out those interviews themselves.
Working with them feels like having one more marketer on our own team.
We are very grateful that they look beyond surface-level design, find the bottlenecks in our business and make proposals that lead to results.”

The partner behind the marketing: NowVillage

NowVillage does not see itself as a contractor that simply carries out web tasks. We support the full scope of marketing as a partner who works closely with each client on its business and management challenges and delivers solid results.

• Comprehensive proposals that address the root of the problem
  Across advertising management, SEO and landing page and site renewals, we go beyond one-off measures, identifying the bottlenecks in the business and making proposals that optimize the whole.
• An approach grounded in frontline reality
  Through interviews with real users and frontline staff, we build messages and strategies that genuinely resonate with the target audience.
• Careful guidance and hands-on support toward self-sufficiency
  We help embed the thinking behind each measure and the know-how of data analysis, so that your team can drive its marketing independently.

“We understand that marketing matters, but we don’t know where to start.”
“We’re struggling with rising CPA and with yield after acquisition.”

If this sounds like your company, please take advantage of NowVillage’s free consultation.
We will propose the plan best suited to growing your business.