Partner Marketing Manager

At Shopify, we want to make commerce better for everyone, everywhere. Countries differ in many ways in terms of language, culture, and how people engage with commerce. We want to embrace these differences and make Shopify the right platform for all merchants, no matter where they are on the planet. 

As Partner Marketing Manager in Japan, you will be responsible for planning and implementing Japan based marketing initiatives with our partners, including key platforms, ecommerce agencies, Shopify experts, and other organisations. The objective is to drive acquisition of new merchants onto the Shopify platform and to help partners and merchants grow and scale.

With a laser focus on Japan, you will be part of the APAC Marketing Team building repeatable, best-practice partner co-marketing initiatives including integrated marketing campaigns, digital activations, virtual, field events and content. You will work closely with a team of regional partner managers to help identify and amplify the efforts of our best partners. This will include educating our partner ecosystem, deploying tools and programs, and providing ideas and feedback to the business. 

This role requires that you’re an excellent marketer, able to nimbly identify and focus on priority initiatives. You must work closely with colleagues in marketing, partnerships, sales, merchant success, launch engineering and support. 

Responsibilities:

• Enrich and expand relationships with our Japan partners by planning and managing co-marketing efforts across Japan, including marketing campaigns, field events (virtual and IRL), content marketing and other initiatives

• Increase awareness and generate leads locally

• Help Shopify merchants to drive online sales through partners

• Identify, build and promote case studies to increase awareness in targeted audience segments

• Educate partner managers and the partner community on global and regional marketing initiatives, including product marketing, customer marketing, digital activations, campaigns, content and PR initiatives

• Ensure timely and relevant communications are deployed to keep our partners abreast of program and product enhancements

• Drive new partner acquisition through campaigns that build the partner programs brand and drive conversion in the forms of new partner sign ups.

• Manage regional partner marketing budget, financial models, performance metrics and tracking systems for regular analysis and reporting

• Develop and make regionally-relevant partner facing materials to aid with onboarding, training and education

• Produce and deliver presentations to internal and partner audiences

• Assess the effectiveness of your regional initiatives. Report on success metrics, insights, and recommendations.

• Answer partner marketing requests, prioritising workflow, and identifying new opportunities

• Work closely with Partner Managers to ensure partners are successfully onboarded, activated and engaged

Requirements:

• Minimum 5 years of experience in marketing, including demonstrable work with partner, channel or community ecosystems

• Fluency in both spoken and written Japanese and English 

• Understanding of partner ecosystems, audience segmentation and their motivations

• Ability to thrive in uncertainty, resolve ambiguity and think quickly on your feet

• Excellent communication and organisational skills while being able to stay focused on the big picture and pay attention to details

• Knowledge of how to run successful digital and offline in-person integrated marketing campaigns

• Experience running and coordinating IRL events 

• Experience helping drive global business, product, and product marketing strategy

• A resourceful attitude and positive negotiation skills - you'll be working with a lot of different teams across Shopify and external ecosystem partners

• Experience working for a global company and are excellent in executing across time zones and cultures

Bonus points:

• Experience in sales, partnerships or at an agency

At Shopify, we are committed to building and fostering an environment where our employees feel included, valued, and heard. Our belief is that a strong commitment to diversity and inclusion enables us to truly make commerce better for everyone. We strongly encourage applications from Indigenous people, racialized people, people with disabilities, people from gender and sexually diverse communities and/or people with intersectional identities.