Thinking to start B2B marketing in Japan? It’s completely different from the United State B2B marketing situation. In this article, I will introduce some charts of the Japanese B2B marketing situation (mid and small size companies) . You might get a lot of insights from the data and a hit a way of doing B2B marketing in Japan market.
Less than 20% of SMB in Japan has marketing department
This is a chart of “Which department of your company is responsible for marketing?” How do you think the result?
100 - 300 people companies
According to this survey, 20% of companies do not have marketing function. In more than 30% companies, they do not have marketing department and sales support team is responsible for marketing as well. About 20% companies have PR does marketing as well.
Only 20% has own marketing department. If your company’s product is for SMB marketing team, you have to understand this situation and should create some other types of buyer persona besides a marketing department person.
50-100 people companies
10% have a marketing department and sales support team is responsible for marketing in 50% of this sized companies. In Japan, a lot of B2B companies have a sales support team. It creates sales documents for sales team and manages trade show. It focuses on support for sales team and it’s not a marketing team and inside sales team.
Less than 100 people companies
Less than 20% companies have a marketing department and around 40% companies don’t have a marketing function in their company. These companies, except startups and IT companies, do not know about marketing.
No person focusing on marketing in 66% SMB companies
66% of companies say that they do not have a person who focuses on the marketing effort and performance in their companies. It’s completely different from the situation in the United States. As I said that sales support team or PR is responsible for marketing in some companies but marketing is not their main task. So they do some marketing but they do not have “real” responsibility for marketing.
48% SMB companies have less than $50,000 marketing budget per year
Of course, they do not have enough marketing budget either. 32% of them use trade show, 26% use DM and 20% use outbound call for their marketing effort. Surprisingly, 17% of them do not use any digital marketing effort including own website. This is the situation of SMB BtoB companies in Japan 2016. If you want to reach out a person who is responsible for marketing in SMB companies, you have to know this situation. Sometimes you have to talk with a head of sales, person from PR and sales support team.
In Japan, B2B marketing is still not popular way of getting new customers. It means that it’s difficult for companies which want to sell products to marketers in SMB. But if you have a great B2B marketing team in your company, it’s easier to stand out in Japan market.
(Survey, Innova)
