Hi!
Any fellow marketers from North America moved to Japan for work? If so, how was the transition of your marketing experience into a different market?
Like Luffy from One Piece, my dream has always been to move to a different country. I love adventure and chasing new experiences.
A little about me is that I'm currently a 27 male who lives in Canada with roughly 3-4 years of marketing experience. My experience is everywhere from sales, email automations, content creation, lead gen, GA4 reports, tag manager configuration and CRM management, but I wouldn't consider these my strengths.
My full-time role is working as a web content specialist, where I manage an enterprise website. The main skill I'm trying to improve on is working with full-stack devs – so learning how to communicate and manage projects with them, while building up technical knowledge. In addition, I manage a lot of GMB profiles, Figma wireframes, and build lead gen pages with Elementor.
While working full-time, I have a small startup where I sell SEO services where I sell SEO optimized websites for local businesses. This alone, I can generate 1 -3k a month in CAD. However, i have a partner who deals with most of the sales and account management, but I help with the project management, execution of the keyword research, technical audits, and content writing.
I'm not sure how well I would compete in the Japanese marketing with these skills, as I see a lot of content-focused roles (not for me). However, I would like to work at a Japanese org to immerse myself in the culture.
My goal is to make this move within the next 1.5 – 2 years. I'm paying off my credit card debts and want to save up a bit before making this transition – so I'm not stranded and can enjoy myself in Japan or whichever country i feel like staying at. I still have time to prepare myself in terms of skill development and I do intend to take Japanese language courses before the move.
by Hot-Forever7782