One of the primary challenges small companies face in B2B marketing within the Japanese market is outsourcing content creation. B2B marketing demands a variety of content types—including landing pages, newsletters, white papers, and articles for owned media. Due to lack of internal resources, outsourcing content creation is a common strategy for B2B companies, but the challenges of outsourcing B2B content writing for Japan can complicate the process.
What are the Challenges of Outsourcing B2B Content for Japan and How can a company from overseas manage a successful outsourcing of content writing for the Japanese local audience?
Contents
The Necessity of Localized Content
To effectively engage with the target audience, B2B companies must create content that resonates with local preferences, cultural nuances, and industry-specific requirements. Achieving this necessitates a deep understanding of the market, up-to-date industry knowledge, and insight into potential customers’ needs—factors that many external writers may not possess.
Without this crucial insight, the content produced is at risk of falling flat, ultimately failing to connect with the intended audience.
Challenges of Outsourcing B2B Content writing for Japan: Industry Understanding
The reason industry knowledge is crucial in B2B content creation is that content themes are often based on industry-specific norms and challenges. For example, if a white paper covers basic industry knowledge everyone is already familiar with, no one will bother downloading it. On the other hand, a webinar focusing on industry pain points is likely to attract a significant number of attendees.
Furthermore, industry knowledge is essential for crafting the actual content. If the target audience has a low level of IT literacy, for instance, avoiding technical jargon and using simple explanations with visuals is key. The content must be tailored to the specific literacy level and needs of the industry.
Why B2B is harder than B2C content creation
However, when outsourcing B2B content, it is rare for freelancers or external partners to have prior in-depth knowledge of the target industry. This means that the first step is often helping the external team develop a deep understanding of the industry, which can be quite challenging. Some of the key difficulties include:
- Unlike B2C products, B2B offerings are not everyday items, making it harder to grasp their benefits and value.
- In niche industries, there may not be many resources available, such as books or websites, for freelancers to study from.
- A brief product explanation or lecture from the client often does not provide enough understanding of the industry.
Moreover, the more time is spent on explaining and correcting content, the more it leads to the problem of “It’s faster to create the content internally than to outsource it.”
How to Help External Writers Understand Your Industry
Freelancers and support companies often juggle multiple projects at once, so they cannot dedicate endless hours to understanding one specific industry. Therefore, it is essential to help them grasp the industry efficiently. Some methods to accelerate this process include:
- Providing a glossary of industry-specific terms that appear in sales materials or landing pages.
- Sharing case studies of product implementations.
- Offering recordings of sales meetings between sales teams and clients.
- Sharing meeting notes from past successful or unsuccessful deals.
- Allowing them to attend sales meetings or customer success (CS) meetings.
The quickest way to give external writers an overview of the industry is by sharing glossaries and case studies. However, since these materials are typically edited for external communication, they may omit unfavorable information, making it harder to grasp the raw customer feedback or actual field conditions.
For a more authentic understanding, it’s beneficial to provide sales meeting videos, meeting notes, and similar materials that capture the unfiltered voice of the customer. If possible, having the writers sit in on a few sales meetings is also highly recommended. For SaaS products, allowing them to observe CS team meetings during customer onboarding is another way to help them see how customers actually use the product.
Based on my own experience, all of this can be done within about 8 hours, or 1 to 2 business days.
How to Identify Writers Who can quickly Adapt to Your Industry
From a client’s perspective, when outsourcing content creation, it’s important to assess not only the skill level and past achievements of the writer, but also their ability to quickly grasp industry knowledge.
3 questions to ask to determine if the writer is fit for the job
Some ways to identify this include:
- Asking about industries they’ve previously written content for.
- Asking about their approach to learning a new industry.
- Requesting to see the first draft of past content they’ve created.
If the writer has experience across various industries, they’ve likely had to go through the process of understanding new industries multiple times, which can indicate they are capable of learning unfamiliar fields quickly.
When discussing their approach to understanding new industries, you can gauge how independently they are able to gather information. For instance, I’ve worked with someone who said they relied on client feedback to improve their drafts. This meant they often produced rough first drafts and required significant input from the client, which increased the amount of time needed for revisions. In such cases, it might be faster to create the content in-house.
The Goal is Good Enough Writing for Editing
Looking at an initial draft of a writer’s work can give you insight into how accurately they can develop high-quality content before client revisions. If they can produce solid writing, even in a rough draft, it can significantly reduce the workload for the client.
By understanding the challenges of outsourcing B2B content for Japan, businesses can reduce the frustration and improve the customer engagement.
Follow me!
