Your marketing strategy is central to determining your business’ performance and financial success. If you are a large enterprise, it only makes sense to concentrate your efforts in the right places to get maximum results with minimum resource wastage.
While not every marketing effort will give the desired result, there are plenty of ways to take your business to the next level of growth.
This article aims to shed light on the concept of enterprise marketing and give you a comprehensive overview of enterprise marketing strategies.
What Is Enterprise Marketing?
Enterprise marketing is a set of multifaceted marketing strategies focusing on growth and expansion instead of only holding onto their existing customer base. The key focus of an enterprise marketing team is growing and developing powerful combinations of marketing strategies to reach this objective. Having said that, enterprise marketing does not only rely on your marketing team but leverages a cross-departmental team that collaborates.
The role of the enterprise marketing team has evolved. Initially, it focused on advertising that later spread into public relations, sales promotions, social media marketing, and content creation/ distribution. The enterprise marketing manager plays a leading role and is often found at the intersection between business strategy and tactical execution. They are responsible for designing campaigns to influence customer and employee decision-making, such as product launches or new partnerships.
Enterprise marketing typically circles the areas of multichannel marketing, brand awareness, and social media engagement. Enterprise companies can test and use all channels to target potential customers, unlike small businesses that utilize one or two channels, such as social media and emails. Smaller businesses often compete for customers, while enterprise companies use their size and relevancy to increase brand awareness and expand their customer base.
There are a variety of tools in enterprise marketing that companies use to manage their marketing tactics smoothly-
- Customer Relationship Management (CRM) platforms
- Marketing automation software
- Email marketing software
- Search Engine Optimization (SEO) tools and databases
- Chatbot software
- Calendar scheduling automation tools
- Account-based marketing (ABM) software
- Landing page optimization tools
- Sales and marketing intelligence (for cloud providers)
- Event management platforms
- Unified Communications and Collaboration (UCC) software
- Project management tools
- Social media management and monitoring platforms
What Makes Enterprise Marketing Different from Typical Marketing?
Compared to a typical marketing program, the enterprise marketing approach is on a much grander scale. Smaller companies often lack the budget for a large-scale marketing campaign, whereas enterprises often find it hard to utilize their resources correctly. But what makes enterprise marketing stand out is its ability to gather forces across an organization to increase sales while retaining an existing customer base. Here are some key enterprise marketing strategies that help businesses stand out from the crowd-
Multi-Channel Marketing
Multi-channel marketing, AKA cross-channel marketing, aims to target customers through numerous marketing channels simultaneously.
One of the main advantages enterprise marketers have over smaller marketing teams is that they don’t have to deal with minute budget restrictions. A limited budget can create roadblocks to a smooth marketing journey. Whereas enterprise ABM has proven offerings, audiences, funnels, and other data to start from that can help them to reach a mass audience quickly.
The key elements of this marketing strategy include the following
- Brand reach: Focuses on increasing brand awareness to expand their reach and advertise on the popular channels customers use.
- Messaging: Creating messages that resonate with the target buyer.
- Consistency: Delivering consistent marketing messages across all channels that customers may use.
- Engagement: Focusing on increasing engagement on social media by improving content to enhance the personal and interactive experience.
- Experience: Integrating separate customer experiences on multiple channels to deliver a unified message.
The starting point for your multi-channel marketing strategy typically starts with an email. Collecting an email address unlocks a recurring and personalized point of contact with a potential customer. You can also use the email signup process to begin to segment users.
A good example here would be Grammarly. They are great at using data across marketing channels. They customize their weekly email to the writing activity, allowing them to send targeted resources that help users learn and evolve as a writer.
Here are some other ways enterprise marketing differs from the usual marketing program.
- Enterprise digital marketing allows you to execute cross-channel marketing campaigns at a greater scale, while regular marketing usually focuses on just a few channels.
- From content production to SEO link building to social media, Enterprise marketing often involves a combination of different marketing approaches. On the other hand, regular marketing programs often focus on specific strategies at a time.
- Enterprise marketing programs don’t only involve the marketing team. Even product development teams and stakeholders are utilized to execute the program effectively. Meanwhile, regular marketing programs mostly just involve the internal marketing team.
Roadblocks to Enterprise Marketing
While trying to create a stellar enterprise marketing strategy, you are bound to encounter many challenges along the way. If you aim for big goals involving big budgets, things might get a little complicated because of the multifaceted nature of marketing campaigns. Here are some roadblocks that you should be prepared to face along the way-
1. Mismatched resource allocation
As mentioned, enterprise marketing strategy involves multiple channels and strategies, which may make it challenging for a business to understand how to allocate resources effectively. Some strategies may need bigger investments than others to deliver consistent results. To overcome these, businesses must consistently review existing strategies and budget allocations to ensure strategic resource distribution.
2. Lack of collaboration
Enterprise SEO marketing strategy utilizes a combination of various marketing forces involving different teams for successful execution. When different teams work together on a project, they have their own opinions and approaches. This can result in siloed communication, which may impact the collaboration negatively. If this happens, you may end up with campaigns that don’t fit your brand image or live up to the brand’s standards.
3. Ineffective program management
At this point, you must already know that marketing programs operate on a massive scale. Involving too many strategies and channels at once means challenges are inevitable. For example, marketers may struggle to track how certain strategies are performing and fail to analyze them. Moreover, there can be a lack of visibility of what different teams are doing, making it difficult to delegate or manage tasks effectively.
4. Communicating Unique Value Proposition
Communicating your unique value proposition is the most critical aspect of marketing. However, a few marketers may face challenges in communicating their unique value proposition. You can overcome this by observing your competitors’ strengths and weaknesses. This will help you to carve out a niche and shine through your competitors.
Challenges are an inevitable part of every SEO marketing endeavor. However, sometimes navigating through them becomes extremely difficult, especially when you don’t have proper guidance and support. Here, professional enterprise content marketing agencies like TripleDart play a crucial role. They can help you tailor your marketing strategies and support you throughout your marketing journey to keep your challenges in check.
Enterprise Marketing Strategy
Here are 11 enterprise marketing strategies that can help you ace your marketing game
1. Identify your clearly defined target market
While part of being an enterprise company means you have a vast and varied audience, you must try to identify a clearly defined target audience. It will help you concentrate your efforts on the specific target audience that are more likely to convert. Otherwise, you will just be talking to everyone, wasting time, resources, and effort.
While it sounds good to target multiple types of consumers with your marketing, it also makes more sense to have an ideal customer type in mind- someone you can write to, someone you are interested in your product, or someone sure to identify with how your brand speaks, looks, and acts. This way, you can organically connect with the customers for whom your products and services are intended.
Here are some questions you need to ask yourself to help you identify your market:
Who are the target buyers, and how will you get them?
Find out more about the sites they visit, the types of blogs they read, what social media channels they are most active on, and what they search on Google (keywords they use).
How do they describe the service you offer?
Does your target market use the common industry term when describing the product, or do they use something else?
Decisions
What types of products and services do they choose and why? How do they compare products? Are features more important than price? Are they looking for any specific feature?
Need
What problems does your target audience face? What solutions are they looking for? How will your product benefit them?
2. Keep it personal
Personalizing your messaging is a great way to make your targeted audience stay invested and relate more to your product. You can start by identifying your target audiences and qualifying traits to guide your brand messaging and personality.
Once you have identified and segmented your audience and personas, you can focus on developing your central marketing message and localizing it to fit the target markets.
You can also invite cultural and creative consultants to check your copy for specific elements and enhance it with local nuance. This is one of the best ways of producing organic leads that allows companies to effectively scale up their business using current and ideal customers.
For example, ConvertKit, an email marketing tool for creatives, ensures their new users get what they want ASAP. They have a welcome screen asking the users what they want to accomplish.
They also give you a few options if you are moving from a specific tool, and customize your moving instructions to help you get the job done faster.
3. Focus on lead scoring to promote enterprise growth
Marketers rank prospective leads through lead scoring. The score determines how likely a lead is to convert into a client or customer. By identifying the highest-ranking lead, marketers can identify prospects worthy of serious attention.
Businesses need lead scoring to understand who is genuinely interested in their product and ready to buy.
For example, Lead Pilot is a simple and easy-to-use inbound marketing tool for financial advisors with an integrated lead scoring tool. Each lead is assigned a score between 1 to 100, and the score is changed and updated in real-time to take each of their actions into account. A higher score means the lead is more likely to be qualified.
4. Brand Awareness
Building brand awareness is central to boosting the brand’s conversion rate. The main goal of brand awareness in enterprise marketing is to pay attention to current and potential customers and influence them to engage with your brand. Most awareness efforts should be directed toward the brand’s target audience. However, limiting your campaigns to only your known target audience could reverse growth efforts.
While experimenting with messaging, enterprise marketers can also hop on trends by collaborating with influencers, rolling out new promotions and campaigns, and staying in line with the current website's best practices.
Let’s not forget about social engagement here. It is the key to building relationships with consumers. Social engagement adds a human touch to your brand, and consumers are more likely to appreciate genuine human interactions over chatbox and tailored responses.
Let’s talk about Pitch here. It is a presentation software and created a brand awareness PR campaign after it closed new funding deals. In the campaign, they mentioned how the company was doing and the upcoming new product features because of the funding. The video campaign was presented by Pitch’s CEO and founder, Christian Reber, to engage and connect better with the target audiences.
5. Allocate your enterprise marketing strategy resources correctly
A study by Mckinsey states that “companies that reallocated more resources earned, on average, 20 percent higher total returns to shareholders annually.”
Resource allocation is a vital aspect of your business that can significantly impact your success rate. Like your business requires the right tools and resources to succeed, your employees also need the right tools and resources to perform their jobs effectively.
To run your business with precision and efficiency, you must deepen your understanding of your ‘significant levers.’ Here specific KPIs, like leads, bookings, billings, and other growth factors, will impact your assumptions and guide your business planning.
Some benefits of effective resource allocation include:
- Higher efficiency
- Reduced time spent on projects
- Enhanced employee satisfaction
- Reduced workplace stress
- Achievement of goals
- Higher employee retention rates
6. Upgrade your messaging strategy
A strong brand message resonates with your audience and sets you apart from your competitors. Therefore, you must consider several factors when crafting your brand message strategy. For effective messaging, your strategy can make use of these four crucial elements-
- Have a SMART goal format. They are Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Time-bound.
- Craft a message that is different from your competitors.
- Personalize messaging for a specific target audience.
- Tell your brand story at different touchpoints across the customer journey.
The messaging strategy should also focus on communicating a business’s value propositions in the clearest form possible. The value proposition captures what your company does uniquely and what value it brings to the market.
For example, CRM software provider, Pipedrive, promotes their messaging in. a clear, succinct manner by promising a 28% increase in sales with its software.
7. Utilize word-of-mouth marketing (WOMM)
Word-of-mouth marketing (WOMM) is when someone appreciates one business's product or services and recommends it to their family, friends, acquaintances, and strangers. 74% of consumers stated that word of mouth was a primary influence on their purchasing decisions.
WOMM works when you influence your audience to share and promote your product. And by this, we do not mean when someone clicks on your ad or uses a search engine like Google to discover your brand.
One of the most common and effective ways to achieve word-of-mouth marketing is through social media. You can target massive audiences in digital platforms, whether that is your specific niche or the extended market within your industry.
The best part about WOMM is that you don’t have to spend money on advertising. It happens when people are impressed with your offerings and messages and naturally embrace your brand.
However, some brands also have affiliate marketing programs and referral programs that encourage customers to promote their brand by rewarding them for referring new customers.
For example, T-Mobile's referral program allows you to earn up to $500 per year. Under this program, members can earn $50 for each friend they refer that decides to join.
8. Review your performance continuously
If you want to continue growing and evolving steadily, it is time to review your marketing performance consistently if you haven't already. It is a continuous process that should be done regularly to ensure your strategies bring the desired results.
Here are some moments reviewing your marketing performance becomes essential
- Before creating a new strategy
- After you have reached your deadline
- Throughout all your marketing campaigns
- When planning your marketing budget
After evaluating your performance, you will get a clear picture of what works and doesn’t and tweak your strategy accordingly. You should be able to;
- Identify the channels that generate good results and remove the ones or cut down the budget of low-performing ones.
- If something worked, great; now you must understand the ‘why’ and ‘how’ behind it to utilize the same strategy in the future.
- If something didn't work as well as you wanted it, you have to identify the reasons behind it too. For example, if your emails get very few open, it is time to work more on your subject lines.
9. Manage internal conflicts
Experts across the organization make up the marketing team structure at the enterprise level. When there is cross-collaboration, sometimes problems arise when individuals’ expertise spills over to other departments. To put it more clearly, conflicting expert opinions can divert you from the marketing goals. For example, the digital manager’s thoughts on ad timing might conflict with product development’s release schedule.
To stay more aligned across departments, you can make use of a project management platform to keep you organized and on a trajectory that fits your marketing strategy. Or you can utilize internal communication platforms like Slack or Microsoft Teams to break down communication silos, allowing teams to collaborate with greater efficiency and transparency.
10. Content Marketing
Enterprise content marketing is not only about creating social media posts, enterprise link building or writing creative emails with a catchy copy. It goes far beyond. If you use it correctly, content marketing can drive significant leads. Publishing blogs, white papers, and case studies can be a great way to connect more with your audience.
Your content should focus on topics that interest your current and potential customers. You can then start focusing on creating an effective strategy to deploy content on social media, optimize keywords, and even promote the content in ads to drive traffic. The more your content is relevant to your audience, the more authority and credibility you will gain.
For example, Hubspot, an inbound marketing automation software and platform, is mostly known for its product and comprehensive written content. It has become one of the go-to sources for SaaS marketing, cementing its authority in the field.
11. The International market approach
Enterprise marketing is carefully broken down into key geographical regions and countries that span several international markets. You cannot ignore international marketing to expand and penetrate a broader market landscape. This enables businesses to remain cohesive and consistent at the brand development level while incorporating localized, relevant content and value for each market based on their needs, languages, and preferences.
How to create an enterprise marketing strategy?
Here are a few ways to create a compelling enterprise marketing strategy-
1. Set your company’s goals for expansion
Businesses typically implement performance reviews and evaluations before choosing a specific strategy. This helps companies identify areas that require improvement and plan strategies. This helps them with determining long-term goals and objectives while using enterprise marketing.
The goals and objectives usually include key performance indicators(KPIs), based on which businesses derive statistical measurements to measure performance and reveal growth. Company leaders, stakeholders, and upper management typically form the goals and objectives.
2. Identify a target market and audience
As previously mentioned, enterprise companies typically have multiple audiences. Creating a brand identity with certain traits that align with a specific target market can help you concentrate your resources on specific segments that are more likely to convert than others.
Additionally, determining a target audience will also help enterprise companies develop buyer personas, including target consumers’ demographics, interests, and buying habits.
Creating buyer personas will assist you with the creation of ad campaigns that meet the market’s needs. Sometimes companies may also need multiple buyer personas to target different consumer groups within a market.
3. Create a brand voice
Creating a brand voice is crucial to help attract customers. It supports your company goals and helps businesses directly talk to consumers. To create a brand voice, businesses first identify the industry’s practices and analyze competitors to determine how the company can differentiate itself from others in the market. You can also determine the marketing campaign's goals and create a tone that achieves those goals through a specific buyer persona.
4. Maintain consistency in messaging
Maintaining a consistent brand voice is important as it impacts the success of the marketing campaign. Consumers connect with your brand voice as it often acts as a style guide for content such as emails, social media posts, and product packaging. To maintain consistency, use the same tone, language, style, and other indicators that affect a company’s message.
Tips for Using Enterprise Marketing
Still unsure of how to build your enterprise marketing strategy?
Here, use our tips-
1. Balance your account-based marketing and enterprise marketing
Enterprise marketing and account-based marketing (ABM) both require an extremely tailored approach to building rapport with accounts and the buyers within them.
Account-based marketing empowers you to compile critical business intelligence on your target accounts. This allows you to easily develop enterprise marketing programs across your intended channels.
2. Analyze your marketing assets and scale accordingly
Enterprise marketing requires expertise and knowledge of the tools available to scale and take your marketing programs to the next level. This means you must review your inbound marketing programs, social selling approach, content strategy, lead scoring processes, and organizational preparedness to meet the expectations of the accounts you sell to.
You can also make use of a variety of tools like Marketo and Salesforce to ensure your reach your audiences effectively by analyzing data performance and minimizing outreach obstacles
3. Ask for a helping hand from your executive team
You will likely need executive buy-in to develop and implement de-siloed programs when developing an enterprise marketing strategy, for which certain team members can be held accountable. Also, executive buy-in and approval lend serious credibility to any enterprise marketing initiative when implemented strategically.
4. Typical key performance indicators may not work always
Even if every marketing strategy utilizes KPIs to measure the impact on pipeline and revenue, it may not always work for an enterprise marketing program. Instead, you can start considering account-specific KPIs, which may include account penetration, sales per lead, and customer lifetime value (LTV). organic search growth, and account conversions. This will help you get more clarity as it relates to enterprise marketing campaign performance.
Get a Better Return on your Marketing Investment with TripleDart
TripleDart is a growth-driven B2B Enterprise SEO agency that focuses on enabling enterprises to reach all their marketing goals. We help businesses create their brand awareness and affinity by targeting the right people at the right time with custom messaging to boost conversions.
Here is how we helped HowNow- a learning experience platform reduce their CPL by 110% via personalized Paid Search strategies-
What HowNow wanted - to cancel the volatility of their conversion rate by bringing in relevant leads.
What TripleDart did
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