What is enterprise marketing?
Enterprise marketing is all about expanding an already sizable customer base. This typically involves multiple marketing teams all working on a complex range of activities designed to increase awareness and consideration. While many small businesses may only focus on a couple of social channels and email, enterprise marketing typically involves testing and using multichannel or omnichannel marketing strategies. According to Harvard Business Review, 73% of consumers shop on multiple channels during a buying journey. Businesses may even employ multiple departments to create custom strategies for each channel. These approaches are all designed to help businesses outperform their competitors and increase market share.
Omnichannel marketing removes the boundaries between sales and marketing channels.
Enterprise marketing challenges
According to a recent IDC report, 72% of enterprise retailers interviewed view expanding their market reach as a priority. But enterprise marketers face four barriers to achieving that goal:
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Scaling up
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Vendor relationship management
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Siloed communication
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Resource allocation
1. Scaling up
While there are ways to make scaling up easier internally, some parts of your marketing plan might be harder to manage. Enterprise marketers often find content targeting and personalization difficult. The same IDC report states that “59% of companies see personalized marketing as a priority. Some marketers try to tackle this problem alone, but tools such as Shopify's built-in CMS are designed to help you stay flexible even as you grow.
2. Vendor relationship management
Vendor management is all about handling costs and services related to your vendors efficiently. If you’re an enterprise marketer, you need to oversee all vendor processes and procedures centrally. This way you can effectively track and monitor documents and different SaaS tools.
Like using a content management system, enterprise marketers might forget about the advantages of monitoring vendor relationships when they first expand their marketing program. It's an aspect of your overall marketing strategy that shouldn't be ignored because it's a key way to make sure transactions with your vendors go smoothly from start to finish.
3. Siloed communication
Expanding your marketing to an enterprise level often means grappling with numerous opinions from various company departments. While collaboration is essential, too many voices can lead to confusion and content that doesn't align with your brand. To streamline communication and ensure consistency, consider implementing a content collaboration software. This tool facilitates interdepartmental communication and task assignment, keeping everyone focused on maintaining your brand's voice and standards throughout the marketing process.
4. Resource allocation
In the same way, your business needs to carefully watch and handle its operations. This includes keeping track of your resources, production materials, software, and customer dealings. Many successful enterprise marketing programs use enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems to manage their company data. Whether you're growing your business or already established, an ERP system makes it easier by gathering all the needed resource information in one place. This saves you from the hassle of constantly searching for these stats.
How to create an enterprise marketing strategy
Good enterprise marketing strategies give you clarity, bad strategies overcomplicate. Does your enterprise marketing strategy align marketing decisions across the business? If not, go back to the drawing board. Typically, your strategy should clearly identify your positioning, brand objectives, target audience, audience insights, ways to win across each channel, and key performance indicators. Keep it as simple as possible, but no simpler.
Clearly define your target market
Defining your target audience is crucial for enterprise businesses. It gives your brand a clear identity and ensures your content resonates deeply. Rather than targeting everyone, focus on an ideal customer who embodies your brand. This approach fosters natural connections with customers who align with your products. In larger companies, identifying various customer personas is vital for effective messaging.
Maintain consistent messaging
First, identify your industry and competitors, highlighting your unique qualities. Then, pinpoint your company's strengths to shape your language. Next, define your niche, reflecting your ideal customer and aligning with your marketing goals. Once established, maintain a consistent brand voice across all platforms, ensuring relative uniformity in tone, language, and style.
Run continuous performance evaluations
Before diving into growing your business with enterprise marketing, it's crucial to plan your strategy. This means figuring out what your company aims to achieve in the future. These goals will shape your marketing plan and set benchmarks for success. However, deciding on these goals can be challenging. Sometimes, they're determined by company shareholders rather than the marketing team. It's essential to establish these objectives early on to ensure everyone is on the same page and working toward the same goals.
Six proven enterprise marketing strategies to scale your business
So far, we’ve identified what enterprise marketing is, outlined the challenges and identified the three key parts of an enterprise marketing strategy. Now, let’s look at six proven enterprise marketing strategies to help scale your business:
1. Personalizing inbound marketing
Inbound marketing means bringing new people to your website or a seller’s site that has your products, using content that’s useful and aimed at the right audience. It’s made with the aim of getting someone to click and read, using your brand's style and offering something interesting, educational, or engaging.
Enterprise businesses find inbound marketing helpful because it brings customers straight to them, helping them grow quickly. When you make special content just for your ideal customer, it grabs their interest and gets them involved with your brand. Marketing calendars for holidays can be helpful here, so you can target niche events that are important to your target persona. And because it’s all about attracting people naturally, it helps companies grow by keeping both current and new customers interested. Automation can play a key role in personalizing the customer experience.
2. Prioritizing lead scoring
Lead scoring is how marketers rate possible leads, based on how likely they are to become a customer. It looks at where leads are in the sales process and who is most likely to buy with a little more effort. By finding the top leads using a CRM platform, you can see which audience members deserve more attention. Using marketing automation tools to score leads can be very helpful for big businesses. It saves time for marketers and helps enterprise businesses with lots of customers know who to focus on.
3. Attuning brand awareness
We all know boosting brand recognition improves conversion. Just like finding your customers using your specific focus and brand style, brand recognition helps figure out how your company can catch the eye of both current and potential customers. While your company should have a clear brand style, you can try different types of content to see how people react to it.
Regularly connect with your audience through social media, which makes it super easy for companies to bond with consumers. This connection adds a personal touch that otherwise wouldn't be there and helps consumers connect with your brand. For lots of brands, investing in offline marketing channels can help drive mid-to long-term results. In some market segments, many customers may prefer traditional marketing methods, particularly in B2B. You may also be able to reach customers who may not be active online, for example, if you .
4. Utilizing word-of-mouth marketing
Word-of-mouth marketing is all about targeting your audience and sharing your message directly with them. It's the opposite of someone stumbling upon your brand by clicking an ad or using Google.
Social media plays an outsized role in spreading word of mouth for enterprise businesses—especially those in the direct-to-consumer space—because these platforms make reaching large groups of people easy—whether they're in your niche or just part of your industry. Lots of enterprise businesses are also turning to affiliate marketing to support word of mouth, growing and creating a community without the traditional ad spend. Of course, these tactics should all be a part of a larger multichannel marketing strategy.
5. Promoting omnichannel growth with a headless CMS
A headless content management system (CMS) is great for boosting omnichannel growth. It separates your website from its ecommerce functions, giving developers the freedom to use any front-end technology they want to create top-notch content experiences for visitors. A headless CMS helps enterprise marketing programs customize web pages instead of using premade templates to give each customer a unique experience. It also helps you stay nimble and adapt to market changes quickly by updating the front end without messing with the back end.
“Speed, efficiency, and cost are key. As companies adopt more advanced omnichannel business models, the commerce architecture they require needs to deliver greater speed, efficiency, and cost-effectiveness.”
Source: IDC
6. Allocating enterprise marketing resources strategically
First, you need to assess your objectives, budget, resources, and challenges. Next, try to pinpoint priorities and opportunities. That should give you sufficient information to establish allocation criteria based on objectives, audience, ROI, and resource availability. When you allocate resources, consider timing, dependencies, and flexibility. Communicate with your team, stakeholders, and partners continually to maintain alignment. Finally, monitor KPIs regularly, analyzing actual versus expected results.
Simplify enterprise marketing with Shopify
If you’re a revenue lead for a business transitioning to an enterprise marketing program, the tips we’ve just covered will help you understand how the complexity can be better managed. Make sure you take time to also explore the links too—they contain a wealth of information designed to help you on your enterprise marketing journey. Challenges will arise, but if you’re using Shopify, you’ll always feel prepared.
Enterprise marketing FAQ
What is meant by enterprise marketing?
Enterprise marketing involves sophisticated strategies tailored for large-scale businesses with substantial revenue and extensive operations. It focuses on growth, expansion, and retaining a sizable customer base while catering to the unique needs and challenges of enterprises.
What is the enterprise market?
The enterprise market encompasses large-scale businesses earning around one billion dollars annually, employing over 1,000 individuals.
How do you create an enterprise marketing strategy?
First, conduct market research, define your goals and identify your target audience. Next, conduct competitive analysis. Now you’re ready to develop key messaging and choose your marketing channels. Finally, remember to create, track, and analyze KPIs.
How do you target enterprise clients?
Conduct research on your target enterprise customers so you understand their industry, business model, key challenges, and strategic objectives. Build a customer persona for the typical product champion and decision-maker in the enterprise buying committee.
