Marketing Copywriter

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Job Description

Tofugu is seeking a marketing copywriter to write emails, page copy, and other written promotional materials.

Know what you won't really have to do? Write social media copy. Although it's a huge part of copywriting today, we're not all that into it, because social media doesn't encourage depth of learning. In fact, as a medium—ignore the content itself for a moment—it encourages quite the opposite: shallow but high-volume "information processing," or in our case "learning." That's really just processing as much info as you can, as quickly as you can, letting it go in one eye and out the other. It feels a lot like learning, but this kind of medium is actually quite useless for teaching things. That said, we will use social media as a way to inform people of new articles, podcasts, and the like, but only with the intention of getting them off the social media website itself. I'll stop soapboxing now because I could make this job listing into half a book. Suffice to say, if you're here to make Tofugu into a social media powerhouse through your marketing prowess, this isn't going to be the role for you.

We're here to help people to learn and use what they learn, and this role, despite being categorized as "marketing," is a lot more about helping people to do just that. It's an untraditional marketing role, but at least you'll be able to go to sleep at night knowing that you're helping (or at least trying to help) people.

Before applying for this job, I highly recommend you read through the following internal pages:

• The "Voice" of Tofugu & WaniKani


• How To: Writing to Teach

Those are the guidelines we generally follow. But, because marketing tends (traditionally) to be more about bullshitting than helping people, I'd like to just take a moment to emphasize the following points. They come from the above pages, though, so make sure you read those pages if you're thinking about applying.

• Be useful: Our marketing copy is about being useful. We want to help people to evolve into better versions of themselves. More specifically: helping people to become better learners and guiding them toward more life-altering experiences with Japan, and the Japanese language.


• Tell the truth, not the "Truth": We don't lie to our learners. We try to tell it like it is, even if that means saying something good about a "competitor." Our mission is to help people to learn Japanese and to use their Japanese to create life experiences. It doesn't really matter to us who or what we recommend, as long as we're creating progress for the learner toward fulfilling that goal. Another big opportunity to lie is when it comes to talking about how "easy" it is to do or learn something. But, learning is difficult, and it needs to be in order to reach enough depth to be useful. Telling people otherwise is a disservice to them and their time, even though it means we aren't capturing the gullible or overly optimistic. They'll come around eventually when they realize the time spent using methods that prioritize easiness over actual learning is being wasted.


• Exaggeration: Related to truth and truthiness, in a way. We avoid getting overly excited about things in our marketing. Most things don't deserve an exclamation mark. Most things aren't really "the best" or "amazing" or anything half that good. We may try to be humorous. We may try to make points that we think are important. But, we don't scream, yell, and flail our arms while doing it.

If that still sounds good to you, keep reading!

Responsibilities

• You will write emails to let people know about new Tofugu articles, grammar pages, podcasts, and other content, products, giveaways, or downloadables. You're not only expected to write copy that informs people about new stuff, but you're also expected to figure out how to make that more useful to the learner. That may be additional context, new content, or something else. You may even write emails that are their own original content, not specifically linked to anything else. Original content can help people, too.


• You will write emails for WaniKani as well. New features, helpful lessons, and information related to learning kanji / Japanese vocabulary, sale time emails, and the like.


• You will write page copy. Landing pages, feature pages, etc. If there are words on a page, you might help write them.


• Sometimes the copy will come from you. Other times you'll get requests or "creative directions," then have to figure out how to turn that into something awesome.

Qualifications

• You have enough Japanese knowledge to write about the things we do in a useful way: new articles, podcasts, features, pages, etc. That's probably something like JLPT 4 or 3 or so (or equivalent). If you don't understand the content you're writing about, that is, in technical terms, bullshitting. If you remember, we don't do that, which means you'll need enough Japanese to be successful in this role.


• Some teaching experience (formal or informal) might help too. To write copy that's useful to the student (versus superficial marketing barf) you're going to need to be able to do some quality teaching in your copy.


• You have a native-level English reading and writing ability. You can produce error-free content that follows our style guide.


• You write well, you write fast, and you can manage tight deadlines. At Tofugu, by "tight" we usually mean in days and not hours. So, kind of slow when compared to a lot of copywriting jobs.


• You're great at taking, processing, internalizing, and applying feedback in quick succession.


• You have the creativity to take the general creative direction of something and turn it into an effective copy. This can mean creating multiple versions of the same thing that are completely different from each other.


• You are extremely detail-oriented. Links go to the right place. Words are spelled correctly. You organize copy clearly so the right emails go to the right segments.

About Tofugu

Almost everybody at Tofugu has taken a Japanese (or English, or French, or whatever) class or had tutors. But we experienced a lack of explanation and had to move at the speed of the slowest students. We learned kanji by writing them hundreds of times because "that's just how it's always been done." We all thought there must be a better, more effective way to learn Japanese, even if it's not "traditional." So we began writing. We learned how humans actually learn and made WaniKani for learning kanji because sometimes tradition is overrated.

To supplement our studies, we turned to textbooks and the Internet. Though practical, we found them to be overly-dumbed-down. "This is just the way things are," they said. When we dug deeper into linguistic papers, we found the answers we were looking for, but they were way too weedy and technical for the everyday Japanese learner. So we kept writing, and we've been bridging the gap between Japanese linguistics and you, the Japanese learner, ever since.

We are building tools and writing about the Japanese language for our past selves: people who were (and still are) excited about learning. Then we are sharing everything we can with you. We want to be the Japanese teacher we never had, for you.