While many businesses launch marketing campaigns to hold onto their existing customers, some organizations need to go beyond that and strive for exponential growth. They may now be dealing in billions of dollars’ worth of revenue, which means that a single marketing campaign is no longer going to cut it. That’s where enterprise marketing comes in, offering businesses the chance to grow their reach exponentially to expand their colossal revenues.
If you’re not sure what enterprise marketing is or why it’s important, this article aims to guide you through just that. Read on to learn more about enterprise marketing, what makes it different from regular marketing programs, what challenges you have to face, and how to create an enterprise marketing strategy. Let’s dive in.
What is Enterprise Marketing? [Strategies and Best Practices]:
What is Enterprise Marketing?
Enterprise marketing refers to the combination of all the marketing strategies employed by an organization with the goal to achieve growth and expansion. It is complex and multifaceted, typically going beyond the company’s internal marketing team and involving employees, product developers, and even stakeholders.
This type of marketing is mostly used by enterprise-level businesses that yield billions of dollars in revenue and employ thousands of people. As such, the scale of the campaigns also tends to be massive, involving multiple channels and strategies. In other words, it doesn’t just stop at advertising but also includes everything from product development to content production and social media.
How Enterprise Marketing is Different from Regular Marketing
Simply put, enterprise marketing involves marketing at a grander scale than your typical marketing program. It involves multi-channel approaches and multifaceted strategies powered by a much bigger budget and backed by a number of teams. Meanwhile, a regular marketing program may only focus on a couple of channels and may be overseen by a dedicated marketing team. Therefore, its budget and approach will also be much more limited compared to enterprise marketing.
So it’s clear to see that there’s a distinctive difference between regular marketing programs and enterprise marketing. Let’s take a look at some of the main ways enterprise marketing is different from the usual marketing program.
- It allows you to execute cross-channel marketing campaigns at a greater scale, while regular marketing usually focuses on just a couple of channels.
- Due to its multi-channel approach, enterprise marketing also allows for extended reach and visibility. You can use it to grow your target audience and quickly achieve massive reach. Meanwhile, regular marketing is often limited to a known target audience.
- Enterprise marketing often involves a combination of different marketing approaches–from content production to product development to social media. However, regular marketing programs often focus on specific strategies at a time.
- Due to the massive scale of the program, enterprise marketing is executed with a much larger budget. Regular marketing programs can be carried out even on a limited budget.
- To carry out enterprise marketing programs, it doesn’t just involve the marketing team. Even product development teams and stakeholders are utilized to effectively execute the program. Meanwhile, regular marketing programs mostly just involve the internal marketing team.
Challenges of Enterprise Marketing
When creating marketing campaigns at an enterprise level, you may come across a lot of challenges along the way. This is because campaigns of this scale tend to be highly complicated and multi-faceted, often aiming for big goals and involving big budgets. So make sure you’re prepared to face the following challenges when executing an enterprise marketing program.
Improper resource allocation
Since enterprise marketing involves multiple channels and strategies, it can become challenging for a business to understand where to best allocate their resources. Some channels and strategies may need a bigger investment than others to deliver the most effective results consistently. Businesses will need to constantly review existing strategies and budget allocations to ensure strategic resource distribution.
Lack of collaboration
In enterprise marketing, different teams are required for successful execution. As a result, you may have different teams working on their own and having their own opinions and approaches. There’s a chance that communication can become siloed, which would result in a lack of collaboration. As such, you could end up with campaigns that don’t fit your brand image or live up to your brand’s standards.
This makes it crucial to employ the right collaboration tools that will allow different departments to easily communicate with each other. These tools can help them share necessary guidelines and expectations and even collaborate on content and tasks.
Difficulty with program management
With enterprise marketing programs operating at such a massive scale and involving so many strategies and channels, businesses may also face challenges managing their programs effectively. They may struggle to keep track of how certain strategies are performing and, as such, fail to see how they could be improved. Moreover, there may be a lack of visibility in what different teams are doing, which would make it difficult to delegate and manage tasks effectively.
Fortunately for enterprise businesses, there are many tools and platforms that can be leveraged to optimize their enterprise marketing management. From robust CRM platforms to email marketing tools to project management software–there are plenty of options that will help them overcome this key challenge.
3 Leading Enterprise Marketing Strategies
Now you have a clear idea of what enterprise marketing is and what makes it distinctive from a typical marketing program. You’re also prepared to face some of the main obstacles that might present along the way as you try to execute enterprise marketing. To better understand how to carry it out, let’s take a look at some key strategies that you can implement.
Personalization to Boost Inbound Marketing Results
Inbound marketing is highly effective for drawing in an audience that’s interested in what you have to sell. It involves using relevant and targeted content to attract new leads to your website or to another site that sells your products. The content helps to inform, engage, and/or entertain the audience, getting them to click and read.
Adding a touch of personalization to your inbound marketing strategy can significantly enhance your results, thus helping you to achieve exponential growth. Personalize your strategy to deliver highly relevant content to specific targets so you can draw in more potential customers and allow them to discover additional content to engage with.
For example, let’s say LinkedIn wants to get more people to use their LinkedIn Services page. They know that small business owners such as professional service providers are highly likely to use the product. So they write an article providing a guide on how to optimize your LinkedIn Service page and publish it through their LinkedIn for Small Business Page. The same content is also delivered as an ad to users who have set up a Service page on LinkedIn but are yet to optimize it.
Word-of-Mouth and User-Generated Content to Spread the Word
It’s a well-known fact that consumers trust other consumers. Of course, it’s only natural that you’d trust the claims coming from someone who’s just a regular consumer than from someone that’s trying to sell you the product. In fact, a whopping 98% of consumers read online reviews to learn more about a local business. This clearly indicates how much of an impact other consumers’ opinions have on consumer purchase decisions.
That’s exactly why marketing tactics such as word-of-mouth and user-generated content should be a crucial part of your enterprise marketing program. Brands nowadays encourage customers to leave reviews, submit their photos and videos, and share their experience publicly with other consumers. 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 has an attractive referral program that 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.
Source: referrals.t-mobile.com
Lead Scoring for Higher Conversions
As enterprise businesses struggle to identify how to best allocate their efforts and resources, lead scoring can be a godsend. This involves ranking prospects based on the likelihood of them converting into paying customers. As such, you can easily identify which of your audiences you should pay serious attention to so you can focus your efforts and resources accordingly. The better you can nurture your high-ranking leads, the better you become at driving conversions.
Fortunately for businesses, the lead scoring process has become much easier with automation tools that will score and rank your leads automatically. This will provide you with pre-ranked leads so you can focus on nurturing them and guiding them closer towards a purchase decision.
Best Practices for Enterprise Marketing
When you try to implement your first enterprise marketing strategy, you may need a bit of help to get started. Check out these best practices that will help you find success with enterprise marketing.
Develop a Brand Voice and Maintain It Consistently
Remember that across all the channels and strategies involved in your enterprise marketing program, the one thing that’ll tie it all to your brand is your brand voice. You need something that stands out from the competition and leaves a distinctive impression on your audience so they can remember that it’s your brand speaking. So it’s crucial that you develop a voice that’s unique to your brand and use it consistently across all your marketing communications.
For example, ASOS has a fun and casual brand voice that aligns with their target audience of younger consumers (between 16 and 34 years old). This reflects across all their social media posts and even in their email marketing.
Map Your Expansion Goals
Having a clear goal helps you understand how you can work towards those goals. Even with enterprise marketing, although your goal is to achieve exponential growth, be more specific about what that growth looks like. This will give you a better sense of direction on what strategies to use to achieve your goal of expansion.
Ideally, you’d want company leaders and stakeholders involved in mapping out your expansion goals. They may work together with upper management to form clear objectives that you can work towards when developing your enterprise marketing strategy. This will also be useful in identifying the main KPIs that will help you measure your progress.
Use It in Combination with Account-Based Marketing
Enterprise marketing works really well with account-based marketing since both involve tailoring your approach according to the needs and interests of your target audience. With account-based marketing, you’ll be able to gather important data on your target accounts, which can then be used to inform your enterprise marketing approaches across various channels.
Measure Results with Account-Specific KPIs
When it comes to enterprise marketing, regular marketing KPIs may not be the most effective way to track your goals. Instead, you’d need to look at account-specific KPIs to get more clarity on how your enterprise marketing program is delivering. This may include KPIs such as organic search growth, account penetration, customer lifetime value, account conversions, and sales per lead.
Achieving Exponential Growth with Enterprise Marketing
Now you have a clear idea of what enterprise marketing is and how you can implement it for your business. You also have a few best practices to help you get a strong start. It’s time to come up with an enterprise marketing program that will help you grow your business exponentially.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is meant by enterprise marketing?
Enterprise marketing refers to the combination of all the marketing strategies employed by an organization with the goal to achieve growth and expansion. See these marketing strategy examples to learn more.
How is enterprise marketing different?
Enterprise marketing involves marketing at a grander scale than your typical marketing program. It involves multi-channel approaches and multifaceted strategies powered by a much bigger budget and backed by a number of teams.
What is enterprise marketing platform?
An enterprise marketing platform is software that enables businesses to unify how they manage marketing strategies across different channels. It is used for campaign management, resource allocation, collaboration, customer experience management, and analytics.
What are enterprise marketers?
Enterprise marketers are marketers who specialize in enterprise marketing strategies.
What are the functions of enterprise marketing management?
Some of the key functions of enterprise marketing management include campaign management across all your marketing channels, resource management, customer experience management, and campaign analytics.
