Do you work on content marketing in the United States? I think that your answer is “Absolutely, YES!”. According to a survey of the Content Marketing Institute (CMI), 88% of B2B companies in the United States already are working on content marketing.
In Japan, the situation around content marketing is different from the United States’ situation. You can find a positive potential for your Japanese marketing strategy, using contents. I will compare content marketing difference between Japan and the U.S. from surveys for the two countries’ marketers.
Percentage of using content marketing in Japan and United States
In the United States, 88% of B2B marketers say that they are using content marketing. On the other hand, only 60% of marketers (not only B2B) answer that they are working on content marketing.
In Japan, companies started to try content marketing from 2013. Marketing situation in Japan is 3 years late from the one in the United States. So you can imagine the Japanese situation if you remember the situation 3 years ago. The percentage of companies in Japan would grow rapidly because the other survey for B2C marketers in Japan shows that 70% of B2C marketers use content marketing in 2016 (from my experiences, less than 50% B2B companies are using content marketing).
Most important metrics for content marketing
In CMI survey for the U.S. B2B marketers, they think that most important metric of content marketing is sales lead quality (87%) but in Japan, the most important one is website traffic (53%). In the U.S., marketers take the whole sales funnel seriously but Japanese marketers focus on the top of the funnel.
In 2013 and 2014, marketers start to be interested in content marketing to deal with Google’s Penguin and Panda update in Japan. Most of them do not think content can generate leads yet.
What kinds of social media are used for content marketing
In the U.S., B2B marketers love LinkedIn to accomplish the goal of their marketing effort. 66% of B2B marketers use LinkedIn for content marketing. But in Japan, LinkedIn has only about 1M users and marketers like to use Facebook for their content marketing (85%).
You can see the big difference for social media which are used for content marketing between in Japan and the United States. This result comes from the difference of what kind of social media Japanese people are using.
B2B content marketing is the big advantage for the U.S. companies
As you can see, content marketing in Japan is late from the U.S. content marketing situation. You should take advantage of it. Japanese companies still do not believe the potential of content marketing. Of course, creating content in Japanese for your personas and whole sales funnel is not easy. Don’t be afraid, if you can create Japanese contents (not only for SEO), you could make a lot of benefits from them. Your competitors in Japan market might not start content marketing in the right way.
Content Marketing Survey for 1,000 Marketers | Yahoo Japan (in Japanese)
