Thursday, March 28, 2024
The Japan National Tourism Organization (JNTO) had specifically sought out the popular influencer to partner with in order to spotlight Ama Hut — as well as a kyūdō (Japanese archery) dojo in Shimane Prefecture — among his followers.
A 2022 survey by the Japan Tourism Agency revealed that relatives and friends (22.8%), social media (21.9%) and video-sharing sites (21.4%) were the top three sources of travel information for foreign tourists.
Having set a goal for 60 million inbound tourists in 2030, the government aims to attract more repeat travelers and are putting in efforts to promote less-traveled places in the hopes of avoiding overtourism while helping to revitalize dwindling communities at the same time.
And with social media being one of the top sources of travel information among foreign tourists, government agencies are turning to influencers to get travelers to venture off the beaten track.
The potential
Hideki Tomioka, JNTO’s executive director on overseas promotion, said his department has been engaging social media influencers to promote Japan overseas since around 2017.
“People look at official government campaigns, such as advertisements put out by JNTO, and they think ‘of course they wouldn’t say bad things about this place … that it is dangerous and so on,’” he said.
“But influencers are independent and post about things that they think are interesting from their own perspective. Even if people know JNTO is sponsoring the post, they tend to feel there is less bias in the content, which is the strength of influencer marketing that we are trying to utilize,” he said.
Tomioka struggles to say how many influencers that JNTO has invited to Japan over the years. This is because the agency’s 26 overseas branches typically invite multiple influencers for every tour, which they organize independently to cater to their specific markets.
“It varies between countries that are geographically close to or far from Japan, or countries that already know a lot about Japan and those that don’t,” he said.
“Countries such as Singapore for example, where repeat visitors make up almost 70%, where everyone already knows a lot about Japan. With these markets, we would engage them in a deeper conversation, showing them a destination, saying, ‘I bet you’ve never seen this before — come see this!’”
Overtourism
Since Japan opened its borders in October 2022 after the COVID-19 pandemic, the number of foreign tourists has been consistently on the rise, even surpassing pre-COVID levels by last November.
Along with that trend, problems of overtourism — fully booked hotels and crowded buses and trains — and tourism-related pollution began to emerge in popular destinations such as Tokyo and Kyoto. The increased human traffic in those destinations also led to local residents feeling disgruntled.
With this in mind, JNTO adopts a strategy of steering tourists away from the popular, overcrowded regions to show them the charms of lesser-known destinations that are worth a visit. Tomioka sees influencers as being especially effective for this strategy, given the sway they have on their followers.
“Most people tend to follow influencers because they are interested in the specific things that the influencer is interested in,” Tomioka explained.
If, for example, JNTO wanted to market ski resorts, having a famous skier show their followers how nice Japanese snow is can be a very targeted and effective way of bringing ski aficionados to Japan.
In addition to the project with Chomad, JNTO also recently invited Nariko Somboom, a popular TikToker in Thailand, to experience wadaiko (Japanese drums) in Miyagi Prefecture and visit Ouchijuku, a preserved townscape from the Edo Period (1601-1868) in Fukushima Prefecture.
The power of influencers
JNTO is not the only one taking advantage of the powerful reach of influencers. Many marketing firms are beginning to involve them when promoting Japanese products and tourism.
Carta Marketing Firm is one of such company. It offers services utilizing influencers for clients including local governments who are looking to target markets primarily in Asia, such as China, South Korea and Taiwan.
Ryosuke Sasaki, Carta Marketing’s strategy planner leading the firm’s influencer-related services, said that even within the short time frame since it began offering such services last August, they have received an overwhelming reception among its clients.
Within the first three months, the company — which used to primarily take on domestic marketing projects — shifted its focus; now, almost 50% of its projects are ones that target international markets.
When taking on jobs from the local governments, “we are always thinking of how we could revitalize rural regions through the power of social media — we are actively trying to incorporate the aspect of revitalization in our projects,” said Sasaki.
Even for a company looking to sell a product, he would suggest an in-person element to the campaign.
For example, instead of just sending a bottle of Japanese wine abroad for influencers to review, influencers could be invited over for a tour of a winery. By doing so, they would be able to market both the wine as well as the winery as a tourist destination.
“By inviting influencers (to Japan), there are more opportunities to get information out there to everyone’s home country — we have an environment that’s more conducive to better communicating how great (Japan is),” he said.
Hidden gems
One of the many influencers that Sasaki works with is award-winning beauty and lifestyle influencer Feifei Chang, who has over 4.26 million followers on Weibo, a popular social media platform in China; 1.8 million followers on TikTok; and 2 million followers on Xiaohongshu, dubbed China’s answer to Instagram.
The 32-year-old influencer from Beijing has taken on many jobs to promote travel destinations in Japan, including from Universal Studios Japan, and Hankyu and Hanshin department stores.
As someone who frequents Japan between 20 to 30 times a year for both business and pleasure, Chang herself admitted she had become more interested in exploring lesser-known areas in the country. She said she still found herself discovering many new things in the country despite her frequent trips.
“A place I got to really like was Kumamoto Prefecture and another was Hida city (in Gifu Prefecture), a city known for its beef, that I got to know through working on (promoting) Hidagyu (Hida beef),” she recounted.
Whenever Chang posts about her visits to rural areas, regardless of whether for business or pleasure, the reception among followers is always very positive.
“There are a lot of comments that say, ‘I want to try visiting too,’ so I definitely think it’s effective,” she said, adding that she feels many of her Chinese followers are keen to explore beyond the usual places such as Tokyo and Osaka.
The future of influencer marketing
Still, it’s hard to gauge how effective influencer projects are given that people usually decide to visit a place due to a combination of reasons, making it difficult to pinpoint the most important factor in deciding travel destinations.
Nevertheless, JNTO makes an effort to calculate the reach and engagement of influencers after inviting them for each tour.
“In most cases, (engagement) goes far and above what we’ve estimated, consistently showing us how powerful influencers are (in our current world),” the agency’s Tomioka said.
Japan is seeing a huge potential for influencer marketing, he said, as more people — both young and old — are turning to social media as their primary source of information.
“I once saw on TV a street interview of a Spanish tourist who was visiting Yanaka,” Tomioka said, referring to the quaint neighborhood in Tokyo that is not often considered a tourist attraction.
“When asked why they came there, they said it was because they saw it on social media content that JNTO had put out in Spanish,” he said, laughing proudly.
Tags: japan
Saturday, April 27, 2024
