A Roadmap to Success: 10 Steps for Enterprise Marketing

Enterprise marketing is not your typical marketing strategy. It requires seamless coordination from all groups within an organization. For large-scale marketing programs like this, a company needs consistency through every customer interaction and piece of content.

So, how does a company go about executing an enterprise marketing strategy? This article explains ten steps to form the plan, put it into practice, and monitor progress.

How is Enterprise Marketing Different?

A typical marketing program is usually simple and on a smaller scale. On the other hand, an enterprise marketing strategy uses teams and resources across the entire organization.

Enterprise marketing utilizes bigger budgets to execute more dynamic campaigns, including brand awareness and omnichannel marketing.

10 Steps to Launching an Enterprise Marketing Strategy

There are a lot of moving parts that go into executing a solid enterprise marketing strategy. It takes synergy with all the cross-functional groups within the organization. Below are ten behaviors and steps to transforming your vision into a robust marketing program.

Understand Your Target Audience

Before launching your enterprise marketing strategy, you must know who to target. When you understand your ideal audience, you can gear all parts of the campaign toward them. The more characteristics you know about your customer, the more effective your enterprise marketing strategy will be.

So, how do you truly know your target market? Here are the things to understand about your customer:

• Location – where your customers hang out, both a physical location and online (Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Snapchat, LinkedIn, and other marketing channels)
• Age – is your target market younger, older, or widespread?
• Gender – does your product or service solve a specific gender’s needs?
• Education level – education level can correspond with how much the target customer makes
• Interests and hobbies – what your customers do in their spare time gives you an idea of what types of products they buy
• Buying motives – not only should you understand why your customers buy, but you should have a good idea of their objections

There is also a chance your business could have products and services for multiple target markets. You will need to create multiple customer profiles and adapt our enterprise marketing strategy to accommodate this.

Define Your Message

Your enterprise marketing strategy will have different pieces of content. However, all parts of the strategy must communicate a consistent message. Having a constant message will make your brand, product, or service much more recognizable.

What are the essential things to include in the message? Your company’s long-term goals and mission are a good place to start. The message must showcase how your product or service solves a need. More importantly, make your message about the customer.

Establish a Strong Content Marketing System

Content development is critical for every brand. Your customers read thousands of advertisements, books, articles, and social media posts per day. A content marketing strategy is essential to stay at the forefront of your customers’ minds. There are three reasons why content marketing is valuable for an enterprise marketing system.

First, content marketing strategies will boost brand awareness. Consistent social media posting will capture the attention of your current and potential customers. Your marketing teams should outline a social media calendar with posts ready for all the upcoming days of the month.

Secondly, content marketing will allow your company to interact with your ideal customer profile. Your followers will like, comment, and share your content. By reading and addressing comments, you can gain critical feedback. People will share what is important to them, which you can inject back into your marketing strategy.

Make SEO a Top Priority

You outlined your message, defined your target market, and developed a strong content marketing plan. Next, you must leverage the power of SEO in a world powered by search engines. Enterprise marketing programs need a strong SEO component to expand the customer base.

SEO is more than stuffing your content with keywords, verbs, and phrases. It is a marketing concept that evolves constantly. However, there are a few key principles to implement in your enterprise SEO strategy.

First, citations and links are critical for driving traffic to the site from Google. The search engine scans the internet for high-authority links when ranking your website in the search results. These links need to be from credible sites, which will show Google that your website is also reliable.

Next, your enterprise marketing team should do thorough research on industry-relevant keywords. If you want to gain website visitors from Google, your keywords need to answer the search question. When you apply accurate keywords, it will increase visibility for your site. To find these keywords, you can perform a quick competitive analysis or use tools like SEMrush.

Where you place the keywords in your website is equally important. The most effective areas to place keywords are in the post or page’s title, page URL, or SEO title. When it comes to the body text, try to place keywords in various headings and in the first paragraphs.

Use Word-of-Mouth Marketing to Your Advantage

Social proof is a powerful influencing technique. Your company’s marketing and advertising only go so far. However, when your customers spread the good news about your product or service, it carries much more weight.

Your customers will tell their friends and family when they are satisfied with their experience. When it comes to a robust enterprise marketing strategy, there are also things you can do to facilitate this process.

Social media is the perfect place to put word-of-mouth marketing into practice. People love to share the highlights from their day. If your loyal customers posts photos and videos using your product, it is free publicity and will increase brand awareness.

You can also apply word-of-mouth marketing through social media contests. Launch a contest that incentivizes people to showcase how they use your product. Everyone who posts will enter a drawing. Not only is this a great way to engage your followers, but it will also boost brand awareness.

Use Your Resources Effectively

Organization is key when it comes to launching enterprise marketing strategies. You need a centralized location to house all your marketing information. It would be best for your company to invest in a CRM platform that manages all your customer data. A CRM gives you a real-time snapshot of your customer profiles, where they are in the buying cycle, and what future actions you should take.

These platforms do more than just handle customer information. They give your business the ability to build, oversee, and execute the ideal enterprise business strategy. Your enterprise marketing strategy will require help from all groups. A centralized platform helps consolidate this information where everyone can find it. People can collaborate better, and it will allow your business to reach its goals quicker.

When we talk about using resources effectively, this applies to people as well. It takes a cross-functional team effort to bring your product to the customer. Below are the critical groups that can utilize a centralized platform for long-term marketing success:

• Customer support – fielding questions and feedback from the current customer to relay to the sales team
• Sales team – prospecting new business by adding new customers into the CRM
• Information Technology – troubleshooting any issues or kinks within the system
• Marketing team – developing campaigns that generate leads for the sales team
• Upper management – pulling reports from the CRM to analyze key performance indicators

Monitor Your Performance

Your company must continue to adapt if it wants to have a successful enterprise marketing strategy.

When you launch the enterprise marketing program, you may have to apply different methods and approaches. Perhaps your tactics are not providing the results you want. Maybe an external event throws off the strategy. Regardless, your team may monitor the plan and decide it needs to be adjusted.

To monitor your program, you must have a system for analyzing your results and metrics. You defined your goals and objectives in one of the earlier steps. However, these goals must be measurable. That way, you can quickly evaluate the successes and failures of your enterprise marketing strategy. More importantly, you can assess it in real-time while you roll it out.

Having a performance evaluation system in place is also critical for upper management. These leaders make critical decisions for the company. However, they cannot make sound choices without proper data. Reporting measurable figures and numbers to leadership will showcase the success of the marketing program. It will give stakeholders an idea of how the enterprise business performs.

What does a solid evaluation system look like? First, identify time periods for assessing performance. This could be weekly, monthly, or quarterly measurements. You should dedicate these meetings to analyzing the numbers for the period, addressing any gaps or issues, and then implementing a new strategy to yield better results.

Explore Omnichannel Marketing

If your business wants to stay relevant and reach its enterprise business goals, you need to provide unique experiences for customers on all marketing channels. Deliver personalized value for customers when they engage with your brand on social media, website, chatbots, or through your products or services. However, omnichannel marketing is difficult to keep up with when you generate content manually.

One solution to fulfill omnichannel marketing is through a headless content management system. This system allows you to constantly regenerate new pieces of content. A headless content management system will house your marketing content away from the technology mediums that will display it.

Why is this special for your enterprise marketing strategy? With this solution, your marketing team can refer to a universal source of accuracy and truth. They can always utilize small pieces of content and efficiently post it to several devices and marketing channels.

There are a couple of things you need to look for when investing in a content management system. First, the CMS should provide your marketing professionals with the resources they need to optimize and personalize content for every part of the marketing funnel. Secondly, the CMS should make it easy to mesh with third-party platforms to translate content to other languages and get SEO tips.

Strengthen Relationships with Vendors

Vendor relationships are another important aspect of executing your enterprise marketing strategy. Vendor management powers the internal controls, systems, costs, and services that relate to your vendors. Your company must have an organized place to manage these procedures, processes, and relationships.

This location should also simplify SaaS resources and documents. It should be easy to monitor, track, and refer to these pieces of information. When you scale your marketing strategies, a solid vendor management system is vital.

You cannot execute the enterprise marketing strategy on your own. It takes the marketing efforts of your team members and internal teams. However, the enterprise marketing strategy will not reach its full potential without healthy external relationships with vendors.

A strong vendor management system ensures that your transactions are timely and accurate. It also keeps both parties accountable to hold up their end of the contract. When you can keep track of your vendor finances and activities, it is a win-win situation for everyone involved.

Build Personalization as Much as You Can

Personalization is important in executing your inbound marketing strategies. If you want to drive customers to your website you need to speak to their preferences, passions, and problems. Your brand message should be fully geared toward the customer.

It all starts with unique content creation. Once you identify your buyer personas, you can develop pieces of content that provide value to the customer and drive them to your website.

Final Wrap Up

A solid enterprise marketing strategy requires effort in many capacities. Everyone in the organization must be on the same page. If your organization is considering moving to an enterprise marketing system, the planning must start right now.

Not only should branding be consistent, but your team should be ready for any future problems that could arise. Having performance evaluation systems in place will also make your business flexible in the face of change. However, the most important thing to remember is the customer. every decision you make should be geared toward solving their problems and delivering meaningful value.

FAQ

Are you still unsure of the ins and outs of enterprise marketing? Here are some of the most frequently asked questions involving this strategy.