Enterprise marketing is as rewarding as it is challenging. After all, you are responsible for your company’s global image and the stakes are high. You have to manage complex campaigns that span multiple channels, departments, and stakeholders.
In fact, 74% of enterprise marketers report coordinating efforts across different departments as their top challenge.
If you can overcome these issues, though, the rewards are plentiful. We are here to help make your transition into the world of enterprise marketing easier. We’ll be looking into the common questions, such as:
- How enterprise marketing is different from other marketing
- How to build a strong enterprise marketing strategy
- Which tools will you need to make your journey as smooth as possible
Let’s dive in!
What is enterprise marketing?
Enterprise marketing is a company-wide, cross-departmental effort to retain your existing customer base while attracting new potential customers and driving revenue growth through multi-channel campaigns.
It typically revolves around some major marketing objectives, such as:
- Multi-channel marketing
- Lead generation
- Building brand awareness
- Inbound marketing
- Coordination of multiple marketing strategies and stakeholders
- Current and potential customers’ engagement
Because of the size, scope, and cost of enterprise marketing, it’s typically adopted by medium to large enterprise businesses. Sometimes it is also the strategy of choice for small companies headed in that direction.
Gartner differentiates between the business sizes as follows:
- Small businesses are companies with fewer than 100 employees;
- Midsize enterprises employ between 100 and 999 workers;
- Large enterprises are organizations that support more than 1000 employees, usually internationally.
Check out our solution designed specifically for enterprise marketers — GetResponse MAX. It brings customization to your marketing automation like never before!
As such, enterprise marketing is different in terms of its complexity. It is not enough to stick to profound content management or a strong email marketing strategy to achieve all of your goals here. Instead, unlike smaller businesses, your enterprise requires you to think globally every step of the way.
So here are some ideas on how to do just that.
7 steps to get started with enterprise marketing
Here are 7 proven methods to get you started with your enterprise marketing strategy.
1. Work backward from your goals
When it comes to developing a marketing strategy, it’s always better to set your goals first and figure out how to get there later. This approach is especially important with large-scale enterprise marketing.
Here are some benefits of working backward from your goals:
Cross-channel marketing means working with people from the entire company
As an enterprise marketer, you’ll need to work with people all across your company to achieve your enterprise marketing goals. Joe from accounting or Sasha from product development may not share your enthusiasm or understanding of marketing campaigns.
Communicating your goals is a good way to get them on board. This is important because you’ll need their cooperation, insight, and resources to succeed.
Working backward leads to higher annual revenue through combined efforts and goals
Enterprise marketers typically juggle multiple goals, marketing strategies, and stakeholders at the same time. Working backward from your goals helps you figure out if and where any of these juggling acts intersect so you can work smarter, not harder.
Take a look at this example. Your company is trying to penetrate a new market with an existing product. Your key objectives may include growing both brand awareness and sales at the same time. Knowing this allows you to choose a marketing strategy that addresses these goals simultaneously, like running ads on social media with special offers.
More marketing-oriented goals mean more measurable results
Research from the Content Marketing Institute shows that only 25% of B2B enterprise marketers feel like they understand what an effective or successful content marketing program looks like in their organization.
By taking a goals-first approach, you’ll be able to precisely define the meaning of success for each campaign. This way, it will be easier for you to clearly communicate results across departments while continuously tweaking your methods based on what’s working and what isn’t.
2. Identify the best channels to reach new customer
The next step in developing an enterprise marketing strategy is to identify the best channels to build a customer journey based on your company’s strengths and weaknesses.
Most enterprise businesses have some strong owned channels — i.e. major websites, large email lists, vast CRM databases, and more.
If that’s the case for you, focus on optimizing these channels to make sure you’re getting the most out of what you already have. Take your email list, for example. Are you using dedicated IPs to ensure maximum deliverability? Have you warmed up your IP to boost open rates?
Case in point: iMoney Group, the leading financial comparison aggregator in Southeast Asia, was using a shared IP address to send marketing emails.
The company realized they needed better infrastructure to support their fast, high-volume sending patterns and wanted more control over their sender reputation. Plus, their costs were rising dramatically as their database grew.
So, iMoney went with our enterprise marketing software — GetResponse MAX — to set up dedicated IPs to ensure maximum deliverability. After a comprehensive warmup process, their average open rate was 20% higher.
3. Know how much your marketing strategy will cost your enterprise business
Once you’ve identified the best channels for your company to focus on, it’s time to dig into the costs. This is another significant advantage with owned channels — since they’re already yours, it may cost less to optimize them than to pour resources into paid or shared channels.
Enterprise marketing usually requires a mix of channels and approaches, so it’s best to figure out all the costs upfront in order to maximize your ROI.
When considering costs, keep the following in mind:
- Staffing costs
- Tools or software costs
- Consultant fees
- Freelancer costs
- Fees associated with outside agencies
- Advertising costs
- Production costs
4. Get the right people for each part of your multi-channel marketing
Next, look at your enterprise marketing team and get the right people in place for each channel. For instance, an email marketing campaign is going to require very different staffing than a national advertising campaign on television or streaming channels.
With this in mind, you’ll want to start by scouring your organization for available talents. Who do you already have on staff with experience in each channel? Do they have the bandwidth to take on another project? If so, bring them on board!
If not, it’s time to line up freelancers, consultants, or outside agencies with the expertise to help you get the job done.
5. Determine your workflow
Once you have all of your people in place, it’s time to figure out your workflow. This is especially important in enterprise businesses where there are many experts from different backgrounds involved in each project.
You’ll want to have a system in place for handling reviews, edits, sign-offs, approvals, and more. At this scale, automating your workflow wherever possible is typically best as you don’t have to worry about things slipping through the cracks.
Continue reading to learn more about marketing automation:
A comprehensive guide to B2B marketing automation
9 boring marketing processes you should automate right now
6. Audit tasks and cut out redundancies
Another thing to look at while determining your workflow is redundancies. The sheer size of enterprise organizations often leads to duplication of work — which is when you have multiple people working on similar tasks.
By auditing all the tasks involved in your enterprise marketing process, you’ll be able to eliminate these duplicate efforts and improve efficiency.
7. Run a test campaign to see if your cross-channel marketing strategy will work
Enterprise marketing often involves big budgets, big teams, big campaigns, and so on. So it’s a good idea to run test campaigns whenever possible before committing to anything on a large scale.
For instance, before spending money on a paid ad campaign, run the same campaign on owned channels and see how it goes. How does your target audience respond to it? Is it bringing in results like conversions or click-throughs?
If it’s bringing in positive results, great! Send it off to your paid channels. If not, you’ve just saved the company a bunch of money!
With that in mind, you should be ready for the next step — selecting the right software to automate all your enterprise marketing efforts.
Enterprise marketing tools you’ll need
Enterprise-level companies tend to have some of the best marketing technology (MarTech) stacks out there. Here are some key tools and software systems you’ll need.
1. Project management software
One of the most critical tools for enterprise marketing teams is project management software. It helps you get into the specifics of each project while keeping everyone on the same page through the bigger picture.
Specifically, project management software helps teams manage long-term projects by assigning and coordinating individual tasks as they relate to one another.
Here are some of the most essential tasks a good project management software should be able to tackle:
- manage workloads
- monitor productivity
- allocate resources
- track multiple projects
- follow each team member’s progress
- analyze productivity
- communicate with team members
Some popular examples of good product management software you must have heard of are Jira, Asana, Trello, etc.
2. Email marketing software
Email marketing software is a must-have in any MarTech stack. Not only can it help you optimize your results through concrete tools like autoresponders and contact list management, but email marketing providers also give you access to valuable insights when it comes to your audience’s behavior.
Here are a few relevant findings from our most recent email marketing benchmarks report:
- There has been an overall drop in email engagement rates. While the average open rates have only slightly decreased (from 22.15% to 22.02%) the drop in the average click-through rates is more noticeable (from 3.43% to 2.13%).
You need to make sure your messaging hits the right tone, doesn’t seem opportunistic, and offers tons of value. One way to achieve this is by doubling down on personalization and marketing automation. - When it comes to autoresponder cycles, it’s not about length. It’s about value. Shorter email drip campaigns tend to produce better results. In fact, the single-message autoresponder cycle (often used as a welcome or thank you email with a link to download something) has an astonishing 98.39% open rate and a 37.26% click-through rate.
- Sending time-sensitive offers? Almost 22% of all email campaigns are opened in the very first hour after sending, and with each hour that passes, your chances of getting more open decrease.
So, if you’re planning a flash sale, consider a re-targeting campaign via email to follow up with the people who don’t respond within six hours.
Not sure if GetResponse is the best email marketing platform for you? Check out our ultimate comparison among the most recognizable email newsletter software on the market!
3. Content marketing system (CMS)
A good CMS facilitates and optimizes the content creation process. It is particularly important as content is becoming the heart of inbound marketing, especially for enterprise-level companies.
A web content management system can be used to publish, edit and interact with web content. This way, it becomes irreplaceable for the proper functioning of your website, as well as its core elements, such as the blog or the customer reviews section.
The most popular CMSs are WordPress, Shopify, Joomla, Wix, etc.
4. Customer relationship management (CRM) software
A good CRM system is at the heart of any good MarTech stack as it allows you to take care of all the core marketing resources:
- managing customer data
- keeping contacts up to date
- tracking new customers’ interactions
- building meaningful customer relationships
- making informed decisions
- being able to collect data and validate assumptions
CRM literally connects you to your users, so the significance it holds for large enterprise companies with thousands of employees could not be emphasized enough.
You can use a good CRM system to solve this problem by tracking all these details and keeping them in one centralized location. This allows all your communication to be personalized, no matter which member of the team is handling the situation.
Some of the CRMs you must have heard about are HubSpot, Salesforce, or Pipedrive.
5. Marketing automation software
Marketing automation software takes care of the routine multi-channel marketing tasks — something that’s essential for enterprise marketing, where huge customer databases and thousands of employees need to coexist together at once.
Can you imagine sending transactional emails manually? These include order confirmations, password reset emails, shipping notifications, and more. You would need an army of staff members to keep up.
Besides taking care of mundane tasks, marketing automation software provides teams with a central marketing database, helping marketers create segmented, personalized, and timely campaigns.
Marketing automation tools also typically feature strong analytics programs that set successful enterprises from mediocre ones — it can help you determine the success of individual campaigns across segments and channels, measuring the impact of campaigns on marketing team KPIs, campaign ROI, and company revenue.
Enterprise Marketing FAQs
Here are the most common questions about enterprise marketing:
What is an enterprise marketing strategy?
Enterprise marketing strategies are typically focused on revenue growth and customer retention for large organizations. They’re used by enterprise-level companies and tend to be cross-departmental in nature, involving multiple goals and stakeholders.
What makes enterprise marketing different from other marketing efforts?
Enterprise marketing is conducted on a larger scale. Budgets are higher, more channels are involved, participation is required across different departments, etc. Because of this, both the risks and rewards tend to be higher compared to smaller-scale marketing efforts.
What’s enterprise marketing management?
Enterprise marketing management refers to the process of overseeing and managing the marketing efforts across a large company with multiple marketing teams.
Conclusion
Hopefully, you’re now feeling more confident about tackling enterprise marketing and ensuring exponential growth for your enterprise business. Remember, it is essential to make sure that all your marketing processes run smoothly and that every person involved knows why they were recruited.
The best way to ensure that it is the case is by relying on marketing automation — it will take care of the routine tasks, keep track of all your leads and contacts, maintain user engagement, and bring in conversions without you having to spend hours in front of your screen every day.
Choose GetResponse MAX today and unlock the full potential of marketing automation!
Source: Enterprise Marketing: The Basics first appeared on the GetResonse blog
