Enterprise marketing: Definition, challenges & strategies

A large (and growing) organization’s marketing strategies are going to look very different from a smaller organization’s marketing strategies. The same is true for the way you would market to a large vs. small organization. Enterprise marketing is an admittedly vague term that can encompass either of these angles, so we’ll take a closer look at both.

Effective enterprise marketing strategies help large companies outshine competitors, capture their target audience’s attention, and grow sustainably. Meanwhile, strategies designed to reach enterprise-level companies help operations of any size capture the attention of industry giants.

From building a strong brand identity to leveraging the right digital channels, we’ll explore key strategies to scale marketing efforts to the enterprise level as well as tactics for marketing to enterprise organizations.

What is enterprise marketing?

Enterprise marketing refers to strategies that are relevant for large companies totrying to grow an audience while maintaining an existing customer base. As the name suggests, it’s specifically designed for large businesses, or enterprises, and involves a more complex approach than traditional marketing.

How to adapt your marketing strategy as you scale

Here are some tried-and-true methods to help you successfully scale traditional marketing tactics to support the kind of growth an enterprise company needs to succeed.

1. Build brand awareness as you grow

Increased brand awareness leads to greater recognition, credibility, and trust among consumers—all things that can help you drive business growth. To level up your brand awareness efforts: 

• Engage with your audience on social media: Maintain the same level of engagement with your audience, even if your follower count grows larger. Participate in online conversations, reply to comments and mentions, and create relevant content.

• Test new types of content: Try new formats like video, infographics, or podcasts to capture your audience’s attention and stand out in a crowded digital landscape.

• Sponsor events in your niche: Support relevant industry conferences, trade shows, or local community events to showcase your brand to a larger audience, establish it as an industry leader, and forge valuable partnerships.

2. Ensure your website is built for sustainable growth

Website health and business growth have a symbiotic relationship. Gains in brand recognition should contribute to gains in web traffic and conversions, while well-oiled websites help businesses gain search equity and build recognition.

As your business grows, your website must be in peak condition to handle an influx of traffic, a greater volume of web pages, and more sophisticated functionality. Even small issues early on can become massive expenses or roadblocks later as your web presence scales. 

Here are a few ways to ensure your website is set up for long-term success:

• Test page speed with a tool like the aptly named PageSpeed Insights. If load times are laggy, consider compressing images, switching to a more efficient host, limiting page redirects, enabling page caching, and streamlining page design.

• Audit your website for technical issues like broken links, crawl path issues, 301 redirects, 404 errors, etc.

• Check mobile vs. desktop performance to make sure users are getting the same quality of experience across devices.

• Optimize the website’s hierarchy by segmenting related groups of pages into subdomains.

• Have a consistent, replicable process for uploading pages, optimizing metadata, and updating old content.

• Consider implementing a digital asset management (DAM) system to store and organize your growing pool of essential marketing assets.

3. Implement lead scoring

Lead scoring assesses and prioritizes potential customers based on their level of interest, engagement, and likelihood of conversion. Lead scoring grades various criteria like demographics, behavior, engagement with marketing materials, and interactions with the brand with a numerical score. 

It helps teams choose leads with the highest potential for conversion to optimize sales and marketing strategies. To implement lead scoring effectively, define and establish clear criteria and attributes that determine lead quality, including: 

• Lead source

• Job title

• Website activity

• Email interactions

• Social media engagement

Use a customer relationship management (CRM) system or marketing automation platform to help you track and analyze lead data to assign scores and rank leads accordingly. Sales and marketing teams can then prioritize their efforts and tailor their approach.

4. Create authoritative content

High-quality educational content lures in your target audience while establishing your brand as a dependable source in your industry.

Conduct thorough research on your target audience, industry trends, and topics relevant to your niche to start creating authoritative content. Then develop an enterprise content marketing strategy that aligns with your expertise and addresses your audience’s pain points. 

Invest in primary research, in-depth guides, and expert opinions to further enhance the credibility of your content. Make sure you deliver value that doesn’t already exist with other unique value adds, like: 

• Subject matter expert interviews

• Case studies

• Surveys

• Images

5. Invest in a headless CMS

Migrating to a headless CMS is one way to set your company up for future growth. Unlike a traditional CMS that connects the front end and back end of a website, a headless CMS separates the presentation and content management layers. Basically, it lets content and development team members work independently on each layer for faster front-end updates.

A headless CMS also makes it easier to adopt emerging technologies like virtual reality, voice assistants, and IoT devices, ensuring the company stays ahead of the curve. It also allows you to:

• Promote multi-channel growth: Teams can seamlessly deliver content across multiple platforms like websites, mobile apps, and emails. 

• Manage information in one centralized location: Streamline content creation, updates, and distribution from one hub.

• Customize content to create a personalized experience: Deliver tailored messages to specific audience segments.

• Add new touchpoints to the customer journey: The headless architecture allows for quick integration with emerging technologies and channels.

• Use APIs: Integrate your CMS with external systems, like Slack or your CRM, with APIs to easily send information between tools in your tech stack.

6. Target competitive, high-value keywords in your content

If your digital marketing strategy includes SEO content, you may have shied away from competitive keywords as you built authority in your industry. From a content standpoint, enterprise marketing is about leveraging that authority in order to rank for high-value keywords, which may not have been achievable in the past.

In many instances, that may mean building content around obvious and highly competitive bottom-funnel keywords (those tied very closely to your brand and offerings) that have a higher likelihood of converting traffic. It can also mean going after the short-tail keywords (broad terms that are one to three words long) with massive search volume and equally high competition. Websites with high domain authority ratings should have an easier time ranking for coveted high-traffic, high-conversion keywords.

7. Coordinate multi-channel marketing

Enterprise brands need to be present on multiple channels to reach new audience segments. Organize multi-channel marketing, or integrated marketing, campaigns to maximize brand exposure, reach a wider audience, and deliver consistent messaging. 

With multi-channel marketing, companies connect with customers at various touchpoints, increasing the likelihood of capturing their attention and converting them into loyal customers. For effective multi-channel marketing, identify relevant channels for your target audience and align messaging across those channels.

Maintain a consistent message to ensure customers receive a unified brand experience regardless of the channel they engage. This consistency increases brand recognition and trust, so customers perceive you the same way on every channel. Utilize analytics and performance tracking tools to monitor the effectiveness of each channel and adjust your strategy accordingly.

8. Define and structure marketing programs

You need to organize clear and efficient marketing programs so you can effectively execute marketing initiatives. Clearly defined marketing programs are a full-scale look at marketing activities for the entire company. They ensure alignment with overarching goals and focus resources on appropriate activities.

Structure also helps break down complex marketing strategies into manageable components for better planning, execution, result measurement, and other elements of marketing campaign management. Follow this structure breakdown: 

1. Programs: Break programs into specific initiatives or campaigns that support overall goals. 

2. Initiatives: Structure initiatives into projects that represent specific activities or tactics.

3. Projects: Assign individual tasks that must be completed for the project to succeed.

4. Tasks: Define clear deliverables or outcomes within tasks that contribute to the success of the project and program as a whole. 

9. Outline your expansion plan 

A well-established marketing plan describes how you’ll get from point A to point B. Here’s how to outline your plan:

• Set goals: Decide on SMART goals that align with your overall business objectives. 

• Distribute resources: Allocate budget, staffing, and technology resources to support the planned growth.

• Create a roadmap: A roadmap helps visualize the timeline, milestones, and steps needed to achieve marketing goals. Outline the sequence of activities and initiatives required for a successful expansion.

10. Measure your goals

Consistent reporting helps you understand how well your strategies are performing, how you’re gaining and keeping customers, and how your business is doing overall. 

Your goals should clearly define what needs to happen to reach success. And if you add relevant KPIs to these goals, you can provide more context to your progress. 

For instance, if your SMART goal is to increase website traffic by 30% within six months, you’ll need to track website traffic, but you can create a full picture by also tracking:

• Unique visitors

• Page views

• Average session duration

• Bounce rate

• Conversion rate

• Organic traffic 

• Referral traffic

What are the challenges of enterprise marketing?

Scaling traditional marketing efforts to an enterprise level comes with growing pains. Processes and teams become disconnected, especially if they weren’t that well organized to begin with. Here are a few common enterprise marketing challenges you may encounter as you grow.

Scaling internal processes

A small company can get away with informal processes and procedures, but this method becomes unsustainable as a company grows. Even if you started out with formal processes, it can still be difficult to scale them because:

• The number of people involved increases: It’s more difficult to keep everyone on the same page and ensure processes are followed. This results in delayed product-to-market launches or campaign approvals.

• The complexity of your processes increases: More factors to account for in a larger company makes it difficult to design or update a process. 

• The need for change increases: It’s hard to meet the current needs of your business when you’re growing faster than you can keep up with. 

Preventing data silos

Data silos set your company up for increased costs, reduced productivity, and limited visibility into shared data—this should be avoided at all costs, but that’s often easier said than done. Data silos happen because:

• Departments and number of systems increase: It’s easy to stay informed when your company is so small you know everyone by name. As your company grows, communication between departments may suffer.

• Data governance needs to be established: A company without an active policy for how data should be collected, stored, and used is bound to end up siloed. 

• Different departments have unique data needs: A marketing department needs access to customer data, while a sales department needs access to product data. Different needs make it harder to create a unified data repository that satisfies every department.

Managing resources

You need sufficient resources and proper distribution backing your plans in order to scale without straining your team. However, it can be difficult to manage resources at an enterprise company because:

• Demand for resources increases: Budgets, teams, and tools expand, and the demand for them will continue to grow along with your company. As a result, it becomes increasingly complex to ensure resource needs are being met and existing resources are being used efficiently.

• Infrastructure is changing: Enterprise companies often expand physical facilities, invest in new technology and equipment, and hire additional staff. That means more training, more oversight, more staff, and more dynamic tools for managing that infrastructure.

• Communication breaks down: As teams grow or even spread across different locations, it’s more challenging to coordinate and align resources effectively. Lack of communication can lead to inefficiencies, duplicative efforts, and goal misalignment.

How to reach an enterprise audience with your marketing efforts

On the other side of the enterprise marketing coin is knowing how to effectively market to an enterprise. This process is somewhat different from marketing to smaller businesses for a few reasons:

• Audience: The people making the purchase decisions may not be the ones actually using or directly benefiting from the product or service you offer.

• Red tape: Purchase decisions may have to move up their chain of command multiple levels over multiple meetings, leading to more friction points.

• Conversion time: The customer journey can be much longer because there are more stakeholders involved.

• Customer values: Customers are highly focused on long-term ROI.

• Vendor track record: Proven expertise and reliability are more important.

• Expectations: Enterprises value long-term relationships and reliable solutions to problems.

• Breaking in: Enterprises may already have long-established relationships with competitors that are difficult or expensive to back out of or replace.

Whether you’re an established corporation or a rapidly growing up-and-comer, reaching an enterprise-level company comes down to a few key tenets.

Market to the person, not the company

When you’re marketing to a huge company, it’s easy to forget that there may be one person who will ultimately make the buying decision—someone who likely will not be the one actually interacting with your product or service.

Let’s say you’re marketing a revolutionary project-management platform that helps teams collaborate across an organization. The people who will work with that solution the most—low- to senior-level employees—likely won’t be much involved in the software selection process. 

At the lowest level, managers who have to communicate across teams may be comparing competing solutions like yours to see which is the most user-friendly. Meanwhile, the CEO may be considering how the cost of the software and implementation timeline fit into the budget and product rollout schedule. That means you’ll need to appeal to the managers with their boots on the ground while also proving value to senior decision-makers.

Identify pain points and show you can solve them through content

Marketing to enterprises means showing an understanding of pain points for the individuals noted above—and showing how your offering solves those pain points. Rather than create content about the market you’re trying to reach, build content about common problems for companies operating within that market. 

For example, a company offering software that streamlines compliance in the health care industry shouldn’t center their content on health care, or even purely on compliance. Instead, the company should dive into distinct issues compliance officers or health care company managers regularly face that complicate compliance processes.

Have a presence in their channels

Because they value experience, brand awareness, and a deep understanding of their needs, the enterprises you market to need to know that you are where they are—both online and offline. Managers and senior executives are often active on social media channels like X/Twitter, LinkedIn, and even TikTok. There could also be major trade shows and conferences they attend every year—setting up sponsorships, ads, presentations, booths, or events in these places can be extremely valuable publicity.

The best way to know for sure is to research specific companies in your target market. See where the companies maintain an active social media presence and, if possible, look up their relevant managers and executives to see which channels they use. It can also be useful to see who they follow to understand the kinds of thought leaders and voices they look to for industry advice and product recommendations.

Organizing your enterprise marketing strategies is half the battle. Airtable serves as a marketing campaign management tool to help your marketing team plan larger campaigns more efficiently. Connect your teams and workflows so your enterprise company can continue to grow and produce results.