So, you’re a growing B2B company looking to attract bigger and better clients. Everyone keeps telling you that enterprise advertising is the way forward, yet nobody has been quite clear on exactly what that is or how to do it.
Rest assured. We have you covered.
In this post, our enterprise-level marketing specialists go over the basics of enterprise advertising and the most effective strategies to help you put these tips to work for your expanding business.
What Is Enterprise Advertising?
In a nutshell, enterprise advertising refers to a type of marketing for large businesses.
Though there’s no one definition of an enterprise-level company, it’s pretty much universally accepted that the term refers to large-scale companies, typically nationwide or multinational organizations with several locations, hundreds (if not thousands) of employees, and possibly scores of different products and services, each with their target audience.
Enterprise advertising is simply an approach used by B2B companies companies to target those vast business empires and win them as clients, considering the unique needs of enterprise prospects and the strategies needed to attract them.
Dive Deeper: 6 Proven Advertising Strategies for Online Success
How Is Enterprise Marketing Different from Regular Marketing?
So why do we need enterprise advertising, anyway? Aren’t the principles of marketing and advertising pretty much the same across the board? Well, yes, but…
The keyword “target audience” makes all the difference between enterprise and traditional marketing most growing businesses are familiar with.
With traditional marketing, you’re operating on a one-to-many basis, using one or two channels such as PPC ads, social media posts or blog content to attract as many new customers as possible.
This may work for B2C advertising, as the person who comes across your ad either has sole responsibility for making their own purchasing decisions or, at the very least, must run it by a spouse or family member.
It may also work well for traditional B2B marketing aimed at small and growing companies as, again, purchasing decisions are handled by one person or, at most, a small team of decision-makers.
With enterprise marketing, however, this one-to-many approach isn’t as effective.
Enterprise organizations typically have complex management structures, stakeholders and board members, making it trickier to determine precisely who you have to convince that your product or service is worth the investment.
As such, you’ll benefit more from taking a one-to-one approach, identifying the key decision-makers in your target companies and building relationships with them, and earning the trust of these individual stakeholders.
Ultimately, your enterprise marketing campaigns must be much more personal than your standard approach, offering solutions tailored your client’s unique and often complex needs.
Dive Deeper: 8 Enterprise PPC Automation Tools to Level Up Your Ads
The Challenges of Enterprise Advertising
Setting and Allocating Budgets
Attracting and retaining enterprise clients can be a costly endeavor for businesses. It requires a significant investment in marketing, sales and other resources to develop and maintain relationships with large clients.
For growing businesses looking to win their first enterprise contracts, an even greater challenge is to manage that budget effectively, ensuring that every dollar of ad spend produces the best results.
More often than not, you’ll need a multi-channel approach to landing enterprise clients. Since some of those channels require a much bigger investment than others, it’s important to constantly and consistently review where your budget is being spent and the results it generates to ensure the best possible ROI in your marketing efforts.
Dive Deeper:
* The Competitive Pricing Strategy Guide (Covers B2B and B2C Businesses)
* Why You Should Use Multiple Channels to Maximize Your Customer Acquisition
Effective Collaboration
Enterprise marketing’s multi-channel approach will typically mean bringing multiple departments or specialists together to develop the different aspects of the campaign.
One major obstacle to overcome is simply getting your sales team, marketing team and other experts on the same page and keeping them there. This ensures that messages, branding and marketing goals are clearly communicated and adhered to.
As a business looking to attract enterprise customers, you’ll need to ensure that your company’s internal marketing team, account managers and other key players all have access to the same guidelines and use leading communication and collaboration tools to work in unison on achieving a common goal.
Moving to Account-Based Marketing
Remember earlier, how we said that the one thing that really makes enterprise marketing strategies unique is that they focus on campaigns specifically targeted to key decision makers?
This is where account-based marketing (ABM) comes into play, requiring you to shift from your usual one-to-many approach to a targeted one-to-one strategy.
With a traditional marketing funnel, the goal is to fill your funnel with as many new leads and prospects as possible. ABM is all about flipping this funnel on its head. So instead of casting as wide a net as possible, the aim is to focus on a small handful of prospects.
This presents unique challenges, particularly when finding the right tools. Decision makers must identify and research the key choices with the biggest influence over their company’s purchasing and contracts. They must also tailor their marketing efforts to their buying journey.
Measuring Success
As we’ve already established, for an enterprise marketing campaign to be effective, it typically requires many different strategies and content types.
Imagine a campaign that combines email and direct mail marketing, social media, and content creation. Now imagine the challenges that can arise in determining which of those methods has the most significant impact. That’s before we realize that each department or specialist will likely have their own goals and metrics to keep track of.
You can probably understand why managing and measuring any campaign’s success can be tricky.
This is another reason why fostering a sense of collaboration and regular open communication can be so essential, ensuring that everyone is working with the same aims in mind and using the same analytics tools to make it easier to measure the ROI of your campaign.
Top 3 Enterprise Marketing Strategies
Now that you know the challenges in targeting enterprise-level clients, it’s time to learn how to overcome them.
Below, we’ll look at three essential game plans that businesses must pay attention to if they’re going to land those game-changing enterprise contracts.
1) Use Inbound Marketing to Improve Personalization
Inbound marketing is any marketing activity that brings leads and customers to you rather than you heading out into the world to find them.
It may include SEO, social media, e-mail campaigns, blogs, videos and webinars. But one of the best tactics is to create high-quality target content that delivers exceptional value for a particular audience.
Given that an effective enterprise marketing strategy is all about personalization, you can see why taking an inbound marketing approach can help you build relationships with your customers, establishing your business as a trusted source.
This means that whether you’re crafting a new blog post, creating a podcast or targeting your clients via social media, you identify a very specific pain point and tailor a solution.
For example, let’s say you’re a SaaS company with a new high-level project management software.
To get the attention of potential customers, you may produce a comprehensive guide to streamlining efficiency in project management and publish it as a guest post on a reputable website known to attract top-level managers at large organizations.
Doing so increases your brand awareness among your target customers and provides them with genuinely helpful content, sewing the seeds of trust that can eventually blossom into a sale.
Add a backlink into the equation, directing that link to more high-quality, tailored content, and you’re one step closer to a lead.
Dive Deeper:
* 6 Inbound Marketing Case Studies to Inspire Your Own Strategy
* The Anatomy of an Effective SaaS Lead Generation Strategy
2) Use Marketing Automation Tools for Efficient Lead Scoring
With limited resources at your disposal, you’ll benefit from using a process known as lead scoring to rank your prospective leads according to their likelihood to buy.
Lead scoring is a marketing methodology that assesses the potential quality and value of a lead to prioritize them based on their likelihood of conversion. It involves assigning a numerical score to each lead based on various criteria and behaviors, such as:
- Demographic information
- Engagement level
- Buying intent
- Lead source (channel or campaign)
- Firmographics (info about the lead’s company)
- Lead behavior
This allows you to channel time and money into your most promising leads, meaning a greater chance of converting.
If figuring out how to rank your leads fills you with dread, don’t worry; you don’t have to do it yourself.
There are a number of top marketing automation tools that can do the whole thing for you. These tools use advanced algorithms and artificial intelligence to score your leads according to many different factors so that you know where to focus your marketing programs first.
Dive Deeper: 4 Ways to Use Automation with Account-Based Marketing for Better Lead Nurturing
3) Develop a Comprehensive Brand Image
With so many different channels and strategies involved in enterprise marketing, it can be challenging to maintain a cohesive message, let alone make sure that your brand stands out among the countless others all competing for your clients.
Build a single, cohesive brand image. If you do so, you’re well on your way to ensuring that enterprise businesses know exactly who you are and what you have to offer.
For example, suppose you’re a logistics firm looking to pitch to an enterprise business. In that case, you’d focus on a brand identity that revolves around a commitment to reliability, efficiency and attention to detail, getting that point across in everything you do.
Consistency is key.
Maintaining a consistent brand voice can build trust with your audience and establish a strong brand identity that truly helps you stand out from the crowd.
Moreover, it makes it easier for your customers to recognize and feel more connected to your brand over time. So, take the time to define your brand voice and ensure that it’s reflected consistently in all your enterprise marketing efforts.
What Are the Best Enterprise Marketing Tools to Use?
We’ve already touched on how automation tools can help you prioritize your leads. They can also be invaluable to your social media marketing campaigns, email campaigns, and more.
Beyond that, you’ll also benefit by adding the following to your arsenal of enterprise marketing tools:
Customer Relationship Management (CRM)
With a top CRM platform, tracking and nurturing your leads is easier. You can keep track of your leads and customers, manage your sales pipeline, and improve communication up to and beyond a sale.
Three excellent choices for enterprises are:
- Salesforce
- HubSpot CRM
- Zoho CRM
Content Management System (CMS)
No self-respecting business trying to attract enterprise clients should be without at least some form of CMS. Essential for managing, maintaining and publishing blog posts and landing pages, top CMS tools contain a wealth of features to make your content marketing strategy easier.
Three excellent choices for enterprises are:
- WordPress
- Sitecore
- Adobe Experience Manager (AEM)
Enterprise Marketing Management Software (EEM)
Throughout this guide, we’ve touched on important factors like communication, project management and inbound marketing, all of which can make or break your enterprise marketing success.
Enterprise Marketing Management tools combine those into one platform, helping you manage your enterprise marketing program across multiple channels, create content and analyze campaign data.
Choosing a good EMM solution can also prove helpful for resource management, helping to keep your project on time and on-budget.
Three excellent choices for enterprises are:
- Adobe Experience Cloud
- Salesforce Marketing Cloud
- Oracle Marketing Cloud
The Final Word on Enterprise Marketing
Using enterprise marketing to attract those large-scale clients can be a game-changer for any company, catapulting you out of the realm of small business and towards building a thriving enterprise of your very own.
To summarize everything we’ve discussed today, the key to success in attracting large-scale organizations is to get out of the one-to-many, broadcast marketing mentality and move towards more highly-targeted campaigns focusing on reaching influential decision-makers and company leaders at large organizations.
Hopefully you’ve learned all about enterprise advertising, but if you just want someone to do the work for you, Single Grain’s enterprise advertising experts can help!👇
