Salted liquorice is very popular in Sweden, the Scottish love deep fried Mars bars, and in Finland sautéed reindeer is a national dish. We're all different and it should therefore be no surprise that there are also preferences for different types of content around the world.

Because like food, most regional differences stem from what is available and how tastes and markets have evolved accordingly. But what kind of content do different audiences want? As marketers we need to know, and I have some recent research that provides some of the answers...

If you're an IT manager in Kenya you probably want different information from one of your contemporaries in the US, right? It stands to reason that research reports and papers aimed at one market may not be appropriate for another.

People in emerging markets might not even have the broadband speed to trial information promoted in European or US material. This all makes perfect sense when you think about it, yet I found some recent research that suggests most of us are failing to meet the needs of customers and prospects in different countries. Last month's excellent report by IDG Connect shows how different types of IT content are received in different regions and shows that the majority of B2B marketers are simply not taking localisation into account.

And that is costing us money and losing us sales.

Everyone's talking about it, but content marketing could be a really bad move for you and your company. Let me explain why.

I recently listened to an episode of the excellent FIR podcast (great for keeping in touch with marketing/tech news while commuting, I find), which featured Tom Foremski, a leading Silicon Valley writer/journalist. He is most famous for coining the phrase "every company is now a media company" - a sentiment which resonates in today's social media obsessed world. But I would like to take issue with Tom. Every company should not be a media company. In fact, if any of the following statements are true of your company, you should not be investing in content marketing right now: