Enterprises often need global marketing strategies that can get hyperspecific depending on the target regions and countries.
Enterprise-level companies need well-planned strategies and workflow processes to achieve their goals and maintain productivity and efficiency in internal marketing operations and external collaborations.
Thankfully, enterprise marketing tools help streamline moving parts and teamwork. You can easily define, break down, and monitor your enterprise marketing strategy and execution using these tools. This article discusses how businesses and marketers plan and collaborate on successful enterprise marketing campaigns.
What is enterprise marketing?
Enterprise marketing is marketing for big companies that focus on growth and expansion, in addition to closing sales and deals. Enterprise marketing aims to provide value for existing customers, attract new ones, and increase market share.
The enterprise marketing strategy involves developing customized marketing plans that take into account the unique needs and challenges of enterprise customers, as well as the longer sales cycles and more complex decision-making processes typically associated with large enterprises. The goal of enterprise marketing is to establish strong relationships with customers, build brand awareness and loyalty, and ultimately drive revenue growth for the company.
How does enterprise marketing differ from traditional marketing?
While there are many similarities between enterprise and traditional marketing, they differ in the following ways. Enterprise marketing:
- Focuses on customers in international markets and regions
- Focuses on growth and expansion, not only sales and deals
- Relies on in-depth market segmentation
- Relies on multi-channel marketing
Let's look at each of these elements.
1. International market targeting
Enterprise marketing spans several international markets and is carefully broken down into key geographical regions and countries. International market targeting is important for enterprise marketing teams to remain cohesive and consistent at the brand development level while incorporating localized, relevant content and value for each market based on their needs, language, and preferences.
International market targeting helps highlight the similarities and differences between groups of people. It helps to position a product as the best solution to customers' needs by understanding what makes them unique.
2. Deeper marketing penetration
Even with a global customer base or users, enterprise marketing prioritizes reaching, engaging, and attracting new customers from different markets. Deep market penetration positions a company as one of the industry leaders in a region and helps gain trust with customers as they become familiar with the brand.
For agencies working on enterprise marketing, this means:
- Getting down to the roots when entering new markets
- Bringing on cultural consultants or indigenous collaborators to support your marketing team
- Fine-tuning the company's global marketing strategy to fit into local contexts
It's essential to understand how customers in different countries use your products. This helps to highlight your value in the brand and ad copy and form a unique connection with customers.
3. Diversification of audiences
As an enterprise grows, so does its audience. Most enterprises have several marketing personas and use cases. Some may be similar in certain aspects and conflicting in others.
It's crucial to identify, separate, and engage with each audience in their different languages and personalities. This requires investing in:
- Data and marketing automation software
- Customer relationship management (CRM) software
- Business intelligence (BI) tools
These tools help synchronize your high-level marketing efforts and local market execution to nurture existing customers and attract new ones to your product with personalized messaging.
4. Greater reliance on multi-channel marketing
Enterprises rely on multi-channel marketing campaigns to achieve their goals. Multi-channel marketing helps create synchronized brand messaging across active marketing channels and platforms.
For example, say a new enterprise client wants a marketing campaign to launch a product on five continents: North and South America, Europe, Asia, and Africa. You must agree on a central message for the product launch and then tweak it to fit each platform the company broadcasts on.
This includes social media, landing pages, email newsletters, paid advertisements, and web and mobile apps. You want the message on every platform or channel to tie back to the main idea and connect customers to the main product page, regardless of where they first stumble across it.
Is enterprise marketing different from enterprise digital marketing?
Enterprise marketing is different from enterprise digital marketing. Think of enterprise marketing as an umbrella that includes enterprise digital marketing. Enterprise marketing sits at the top position in a tree chart, and enterprise digital marketing sits below as one of its components.
Enterprise marketing includes online (like enterprise digital marketing) and offline marketing strategies like live events, experiential marketing showcases, and big game sponsorships. These offline tactics help reach and engage potential customers who do not spend much time online.
Connect your online and offline marketing channels to ensure customers don't fall off at specific touchpoints. Omni-channel marketing can help enterprise marketing teams cater to their new and existing customers at every stage of the customer journey.
Who is responsible for enterprise marketing management?
Enterprise marketing managers are responsible for enterprise marketing activities, operations, and project management. Depending on the organization's structure, they may be called a marketing director, marketing manager, or marketing lead.
The enterprise marketing manager may report to the Chief Marketing Officer (CMO), Senior Vice-President of Marketing (SVP), or Chief Executive Officer (CEO).
They manage teams of marketing specialists who add unique insights and expertise to the company's marketing, including:
- Designers
- Content writers and creators
- Public relations (PR) managers
- Search engine optimization (SEO) specialists
- Digital ad specialists
- Content managers
- Market researchers and analysts
Enterprise marketing manager skills
The enterprise marketing manager's responsibilities include planning and executing marketing campaigns, managing marketing projects, aligning internal processes, and managing marketing operations.
To achieve these goals, an enterprise marketing manager must have these skills:
- Project management skills
- Communication skills
- Digital marketing skills
- Keyword research and SEO skills
- Workflow processes and automation skills
- Leadership and team management skills
- Social listening and analytics skills
- Research skills
- Budgeting and resource management skills
- Stakeholder engagement skills
The enterprise marketing manager must have a minimum understanding of these skills, even though you may hire specialists to do the actual work during marketing campaigns. Having these skills on your team helps you attract, hire, and collaborate with the best specialists in each field.
Depending on the organization and its needs, the prioritized skills may vary. However, enterprise marketing managers across the board must be adept at managing internal and external teams, harnessing the creative best of each contributor, and delivering exciting, creative, and engaging campaigns.
Tips for becoming an enterprise marketing manager
There are no fixed paths to becoming an enterprise marketing manager. You may be promoted within your current company or head-hunted from your current role if you already work in marketing. However, if you have never worked in marketing, you can begin a new career in enterprise marketing management by following the steps below:
- Take credible online courses on marketing
- Earn a bachelor's degree in marketing
- Share your marketing lessons on social media
- Build a portfolio with real-world experiences
- Pursue an MBA for more knowledge and advancement
Five tips for enterprise marketing strategies
Drawing up an enterprise marketing strategy requires an eye for detail and a finger on the pulse of the different markets you're targeting. Start by defining your primary marketing goals and accompanying metrics, then follow our five-step process below.
1. Identify and segment your audience
Write down your key target audiences and their qualifying traits to guide your brand messaging and personality. Research and note the marketing personas you're prioritizing or marketing to in various marketing campaigns, and make this clear to your team members.
While it's usual for enterprise marketing teams to identify several customer personas and market segments, it's critical to focus on one or two closely related ones for each marketing campaign. This clarifies who your campaigns target and who you're trying to attract with your ad messages.
2. Personalize your messaging
Once you have identified and segmented your audience and personas, it's time to create your central marketing message. Then, you can localize and personalize it to fit target markets.
Invite cultural and creative consultants to check your copy for specific elements and spruce it up with local nuance. Send team members to speak with potential customers who fit the ideal customer persona. Your goal is to understand how real people use your product, as this helps create a brand voice that remains consistent and speaks to the potential market.
3. Use the appropriate channels
Specific demographics are more likely to be found on specific channels from social media sites like Twitter, Snapchat, Facebook, and even TikTok. Other users may be found elsewhere on the Internet: news sites, professional communities, or special interest pages, e.g., traveling, cooking, parenting, hiking, or even philosophy.
Finding and using the appropriate channels helps get you closer to the enterprise's key markets. When you find and engage with your market on their chosen platforms and in their language and tone of voice, you have a higher chance of converting prospects into long-term customers.
This is the perfect step to plug in a targeted content marketing strategy to create an owned platform for the enterprise marketing team to publish company news, announcements, and product launches to build a personal rapport with customers. 
4. Remember that value matters
While the primary goal of enterprise marketing is to increase growth and sales, providing value should never be overlooked. Lead scoring is an important element in enterprise marketing. A good rule of thumb is to sell only 20% of the time and provide value to existing and potential customers the other 80% of the time.
This creates a healthy balance and shows customers that you care about them, their well-being, and how they use your products. Activate social listening and track earned media value (EMV) to measure market engagement and reactions to your campaigns. Curate feedback and product suggestions you can use to improve your products and thus customer experience and satisfaction.
5. Perform regular evaluations
Enterprise marketing has a wide range of marketing metrics to choose from. For platforms like social media, websites, and landing pages, you may monitor follower growth and engagement and post impressions and engagement. However, when it comes to specific marketing campaigns, it's best to track goal-driven metrics, e.g., customer lifetime value (LTV), account conversions, sales per lead, and organic search growth. These metrics provide more clarity on the overall enterprise marketing goals.
Common challenges in enterprise marketing
Enterprise marketing presents unique challenges. These can include:
1. Effective resource allocation
Enterprise marketing requires big budgets and wide-scale marketing plans and campaigns. It can be challenging for marketing managers to allocate resources to meet set goals and targets, especially when working with multiple or remote teams.
2. Scaling consistently
Enterprise teams are large and grow quickly. Managing marketing projects in sync may become difficult as the teams, markets, and goals evolve. Team members may start to miss messages and be confused about their contributions to projects.
Scaling brand messaging across different languages and cultures also brings its own challenges. Your enterprise marketing strategy should include how to localize brand messaging and content to fit into new cultural contexts.
3. Missing cultural contexts
When entering new markets or localizing a global brand message for various markets, it may be challenging to add the correct local nuance to make the message stand out and attract the intended reactions and engagement from potential customers and users. Working with cultural consultants and indigenous team members helps to overcome this challenge.
4. Communication silos
Enterprise marketing teams are often made up of multiple specialized teams working on different parts of a campaign. For example, an internal enterprise marketing team may be working with sales teams, creative agencies, and service providers, including design, product development, content marketing, and promotions teams.
With many teams, communication silos easily crop up, and messages are missed or lost in translation. It's important to use marketing project management software to bring together all marketing projects to one platform where all involved teams and team members can get up-to-date information on their tasks and projects.
5. Stakeholder differences
Without stakeholder buy-in, it would be impossible to deliver successful marketing projects. Enterprise marketing plans are often subject to many opinions, even from managers in other departments. This is because marketing is the mouthpiece of the entire organization, and every stakeholder would like to ensure the correct messaging is shared with external parties. Marketing managers have to present a strategy that considers each stakeholder's requirements, creating win-win situations that get the support of key stakeholders and create room for the marketing teams to contribute their best work.
What is an enterprise marketing tool?
Enterprise marketing tools help coordinate all the tasks, teams, and processes involved in delivering marketing projects and campaigns. These tools improve collaboration, productivity, and efficiency, moving projects along through automation and timely reminders. They also serve as a portal to communicate, store and share files and documents with team members.
Enterprise marketing management tools and software make it easy to follow marketing best practices and create an efficient workflow to generate leads and drive success. They also reduce rework by providing templates that improve the marketing team's efficiency and move projects quicker from one stage to the next.
Using the right software, marketing managers can set up and maintain effective processes for team success. Some of the critical software enterprise marketing teams need to thrive are:
- Marketing automation software
- Customer relationship management (CRM) software
- Email marketing software
- Social media management and scheduling software
- Search engine optimization (SEO) and analytics tools
- Calendar scheduling tools
- Account-based marketing (ABM) software
- Sales and marketing intelligence software
- Events calendar and management software
- Project management tools
There are many other useful enterprise marketing tools not mentioned in this list. Companies of different sizes, in different industries, with different types of audiences, have different needs and functionalities required from their top marketing software.
Features to look for in enterprise marketing tools
Must-have features to look for in your enterprise marketing tools include:
1. App and software integration
Enterprise marketing software should integrate easily with other business-critical tools and applications to make your teams' workflows structured, trackable, and easily replicable.
Workflows are the core of any marketing operation or campaign. The best enterprise marketing tools make it easy to move from one task to the next without losing the flow of work, useful information, or access to other team members' inputs and progress.
If your marketing tools are not integrated into your tech stack, you would have to compile data from several applications to gain insights to power future marketing activities.
2. Database management
The best enterprise marketing tools make it easy to manage files, documents, customer data and information, and knowledge and insights gathered from marketing research and campaigns.
Using a no-code database and document management system makes it easy for your marketing teams and external collaborators to retrieve, access, and share files and media assets needing approval from involved team members and stakeholders.
Instead of sending an email or seeking permission or technical access to the organization's database, every invited collaborator and team member has access to a profile set up with adequate permissions to get their work done seamlessly and securely.
3. Digital asset management
It would be challenging to execute a modern marketing campaign without digital asset management. Enterprise marketing tools make it easy to use, manage, proof and approve, and store digital assets and media.
Digital assets may come in different formats, such as PDFs, images, videos, audio, and spreadsheets. Every enterprise marketing team needs a platform that is secure and easily accessible by the team and external collaborators.
Consider making this feature accessible on mobile devices as well as the web, as team members and collaborators may sometimes work on the go and need to complete their work using their smartphones. Ensure that your digital management platform can compress file sizes and enable file sharing without too much internet data.
4. Analytics and reporting
Enterprise marketing software makes it easy to generate reports and analytical insights into past marketing campaigns, activities, and projects. So long as the correct inputs, e.g., goals and metrics, are set up in the software, it can generate and share scheduled marketing reports highlighting specific metrics with the team.
This makes it easy to keep involved shareholders in the loop with marketing activities and progress. Anyone with the right access can see what has been accomplished, what's left to be done, and the results generated so far.
Depending on the software, team members may be able to see whose work generated a specific result and how such results can be replicated. Conversions can be linked to specific accounts or specific blog or social media posts, showing marketing teams where to double down on their efforts or improve some marketing elements.
5. Automation
Automation connects and optimizes your marketing team's workflows and processes by taking care of repetitive tasks like scheduling social posts and designing the company newsletter. Marketing automation takes care of the smaller tasks so your teams can focus on more valuable work.
6. Collaboration
Enterprise marketing tools enable easy collaboration between team members by allowing visibility into shared spaces, sharing relevant reports, and sending notifications to alert team members about deadlines and pending tasks. These collaboration features keep team members updated and in the loop about what should be done next or prioritized in a crunch.
7. Templates
Enterprise marketing teams need an easily accessible library of templates to efficiently and consistently produce high-quality work. Good enterprise marketing software provides templates marketing teams can customize to suit their organization's needs. Use templates to do the heavy lifting for important yet repetitive tasks such as creating new project plans.
Why use Wrike as your enterprise marketing solution?
Wrike’s enterprise project management software provides all these features and more. With Wrike, you have an enterprise marketing solution that streamlines marketing project management, marketing operations, and marketing execution in a secure, collaborative workspace for teams of any size.
Wrike provides a customizable workspace for marketing teams, creative agencies, and professional service providers to plan, execute, and monitor marketing projects efficiently.
Creating an enterprise marketing strategy that yields good results takes time and effort. Wrike makes it easy to plan, manage, and execute enterprise marketing plans and processes. Are you ready to streamline yours for the best results? Get started with a two-week free trial of Wrike today.
