Marketing to enterprises presents more challenges than what you will find when marketing to an individual trying to decide to purchase your product or service. Enterprise marketing requires an excellent B2B marketing strategy that speaks to leadership teams and why your products or services could benefit this large-scale business. 

Enterprise marketing presents several unique challenges. From shifting employee roles to marketing to new and existing customers, your company needs more resources and team members involved in the process to make it successful. This blog shares the unique challenges enterprise marketers face and how to build an effective enterprise marketing strategy that gives you the best ROI (return on investment). 

What is Unique About Enterprise Marketing?

When it comes to marketing your products or services to an enterprise, it’s critical to understand that you are not selling to a business but to people. In fact, an entire group of decision-makers. So, while getting lost in the relationship aspect of B2B marketing can be easy, remember who you are marketing to and why your product or service can benefit their business or customers. 

But before you catch your audience’s attention, enterprise marketing can present unique challenges to get there. You need the technology, staff, and strategy that speaks to a specific audience, such as a CEO or president of an enterprise organization.  

Enterprise Marketing – The Decision Makers 

Just like any marketing strategy, consider your audience. While you are marketing to another business, you still sell to people. The difference, however, is that most enterprises have, on average, 6-10 decision-makers or key stakeholders. 

While you might impress the first round, you have yet to make a lasting impression and close the sale. Because of these groups of decision-makers, the average enterprise sales cycle can take up to 24 months before it finally closes. So, let’s explore who makes these decisions. 

While it will vary from organization to organization, you’re likely to deal with the C-suite and department leaders in the approval process. In large organizations, department heads such as the VP of Marketing, Technology, Operations, etc., will initiate the B2B research and dialogue when considering purchasing tools. Often, they will be required to obtain proposals from competing vendors and present those options to the C-suite for approval. In some enterprise organizations, large-scale purchases may require approval from a Board of Directors.

The best way to ensure that your product or service survives this entire process is to have strong advocates within the company for your proposal, and they are building group consensus at every step of the process. 

The Challenges Enterprise Marketers Face 

Several unique challenges come with marketing to enterprises. From producing engaging B2B content to scalability and automation, your business will need new resources to succeed in enterprise marketing. You can expect to face several challenges in any enterprise marketing campaign.

Producing Engaging Content 

With access to social media platforms, anyone can build content to market their products and services. So, it is no surprise that creating unique and engaging content would be one of the leading content marketing challenges enterprise marketers face. To produce compelling B2B content, enterprise marketers should focus on making unique content using elements such as timing and limited supplies that make it enticing for the audience to act now.

Lack of Marketing Integration 

Integrating your marketing efforts presents challenges in critical areas.

• Enhancing User Experience: It is crucial to know how to best communicate with consumers who use different devices and communication channels. 
• Technology and Attribution: Obtain the right software and technology for sales, data insights, and communication. A technologically robust customer relationship management (CRM) strategy coupled with a solid B2B marketing and communications plan with automated and educational touchpoints of prospects and existing customers will significantly increase the likelihood of winning B2B deals. Nurturing B2B leads with valuable educational information is just one of several ways you can use a CRM to build rapport and trust with your prospects. 
• Alignment of all Departments: Ensure all departments communicate to achieve overall objectives. 
• Brand Experience: Is your brand effectively portraying itself across multiple channels, partners, and experiences? 

Scalability and Automation 

When you are marketing to an enterprise-level business, you are responsible for a large account. Your CRM will track your marketing efforts, measure success and even streamline the communication process between marketers involved in one project and other departments contributing to any given task. 

Communicating Unique Value Proposition

In a competitive B2B marketing environment, you’re faced with various unique challenges when communicating your unique value proposition and what makes your business stand out from the competition. Leverage your competition by analyzing what is successful for them in addition to their weaknesses. This will help you carve out a niche in your messaging and stand out from the competition.

Establish Effective Cross-Channel Messaging 

You can communicate with potential or current consumers via email blasts, mobile apps, or push notifications. However, one of the most effective ways to deliver personalized messaging is through channels where your audience actively engages with content, such as email and social media platforms like Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and LinkedIn.

While you want to stay top-of-mind with your B2B prospects,  the audience you target depends on the platform. Sharing varied messages by platform and target audiences allows you to tailor your message, create higher engagement rates, and better recall your company and products.  

Enterprise Marketing Tactics that Work

Now that you know which obstacles enterprise marketers regularly face let’s discuss the marketing tactics that can drive bottom-line results for your sales team. From a surgically precise B2B media strategy targeting only the right titles and decision-makers in a company to an omnichannel approach to content and outreach to adding a personalized touch, here are just a few ways your enterprise marketing efforts can help your business get the best ROI. 

Enterprise Marketing Digital Media Tactics 

There are many tactics to use to build a successful enterprise marketing campaign. From using social media platforms to target potential customers at the right time on the right platform to geofencing to advertise locally, connecting with your audience provides your campaign with the best results. This could involve trade shows to showcase your products and services or personalized messaging in email blasts. 

Content Marketing 

Content marketing goes far beyond making social media posts or building creative emails with catchy copy and stunning imagery. Take full advantage of content marketing by propping up your executive team as industry thought leaders while driving traffic back to your website. Publishing blogs, white papers, and case studies provide more content opportunities while positioning your leadership team as thought leaders. 

Carefully select quarterly topics that interest your current and potential customers, then build out an effective content strategy to deploy content on social media, optimize keywords, and even promote the content in ads to drive traffic. The more content you build that is relevant to your audience, the more authority and credibility you will gain. 

Taking an Omnichannel Approach to Content and Outreach

The best way to give a personalized experience when visiting your website is through reliable communications tools. An omnichannel communications tool helps you manage all your communication in one place, including online and offline communication, mobile apps, social media, and more. This allows you to build custom messaging tailored to each customer’s unique needs, add new touchpoints to your website, and add front-end updates without agitating the backend. 

Add a Personalized Touch

Building an enterprise marketing strategy that ensures a personal touch for customers will prevent them from becoming numb to marketing materials. With relevant content, your business can attract leads on various social media channels and retain them by building engaging content. 

Creating a Prospecting Process and Funnel

Because the B2B customer journey is much different than a B2C journey, the sales funnel is different. To have a successful enterprise marketing strategy, you need to create a funnel and prospecting process. The B2B marketing funnel is broken down into six stages: 

Awareness involves your target market and is the lead generation process. The key actions you want to see in this step are traffic to your website, follows on social media channels, nurture campaigns, and more. 

Interest happens when you already have an interested audience. They have expressed interest in your product or services, which prompts them to receive emails, respond to feedback surveys, sign up for free trials, etc. 

Evaluation is the point in time when potential customers are ready to try your product or service. In this stage, the actions are installations and signups of software, attending demos and trials, clicking, and opening emails to learn more. 

Action happens once your leads turn into customers or are interested in the next stage. This is where onboarding, purchases, or contract renewals occur. 

Review is when the decision-makers are ready to make a final decision. At this stage, everything is laid out on the table, including order summaries, FAQs, and product integration summaries. 

Purchase is when all the hard work pays off! Your lead is officially a customer. 

While enterprise-level businesses are typically successful at generating the top-level, things get lost as they move further into the funnel. Creating a clear inbound marketing funnel ensures every step stays on target and boosts conversion rates. 

Scaling Your Enterprise Marketing Efforts

Bullseye Strategy offers data-driven enterprise marketing services that can help improve your strategy. The experts at Bullseye Strategy have more than a dozen years of experience in building successful enterprise campaigns that drive bottom-line results. If you are ready to start enterprise marketing for your brand, contact Bullseye Strategy today.