How do you scale your marketing strategy to enterprise-level and keep leads flowing into your funnel?
One thing’s for sure: it’s not always simple.
At the enterprise level, with 1000-plus employees and more than $1 billion in annual revenue, massive growth drives the organization. The way you structure your campaigns, segment customers, and build CRM hierarchies becomes critical. An SMB digital marketing strategy, meanwhile, will typically focus on a customer base that best fits the product or service rather than exponential growth.
Enterprise marketing is both a gift and a curse — while marketing teams have more personnel and resources at their fingertips, things can get complicated quickly.
Marketers must manage complex governance and multiple stakeholders, resulting in decreased agility. Getting ahead of large-scale marketing challenges is critical to ensure that quality MQLs keep flowing into your funnel.
What Is an Enterprise Marketing Strategy?
An enterprise marketing strategy combines growth-focused strategies and organization-wide resources to fuel marketing efforts.
This requires collaboration across the company, working with multiple teams from sales to product development.
How to Avoid Enterprise Marketing Pitfalls
Getting ahead of enterprise marketing challenges will help keep your marketing strategy (and funnel) on track. Here are three ways you can ensure success for your team.
1. Personalize at scale
Target high-value accounts using account-based marketing (ABM) — a strategy-based approach that allows marketing and sales teams to personalize touchpoints throughout the buyer’s journey.
For instance, with access to real-time data, you can personalize messages based on website activity (first-party data) and new funding rounds (third-party intent data).
When those MQLs go to sales, reps will know which content drove leads further down the funnel, helping them guide the conversation toward a deal.
2. Integrate your tech stack
One of the more difficult enterprise marketing challenges is making sure your technology stack — your ERP, CRM, and MAT tools — can connect complex, org-wide processes.
Closing the deal will depend on a broad understanding of the customer’s journey, starting from where a lead first engages with you to how they transition through the sales pipeline.
If back-office ERP and front-office CRM don’t connect, teams can’t “see” the complete buying process.
Yet a 2020 CIO survey conducted by Accenture shows that less than 30 percent of IT stakeholders completely agree that ERP is the primary enabler to bridge business and functional silos.
By integrating key systems, your marketing strategy, sales processes, operations, and financials all align.
Keep in mind that your technology stack is only as good as its data. It doesn’t make sense to deck out your enterprise technology without cleaning up your dirty data and maintaining excellent information hygiene.
3. Manage competing internal goals
At the enterprise level, experts across the org make up the marketing team structure. Problems arise when individuals’ expertise spills over to other departments.
In other words, conflicting expert opinions can throw marketing goals off course.
The digital manager’s thoughts on ad timing might conflict with product development’s release schedule. And as SMEs weigh in, content — from whitepapers to blog posts — may stray from the company’s brand messaging, creating a patchwork of tone and voice.
How do you manage org-wide SMEs’ input and expertise?
At the enterprise level, you need robust collaboration software. Working on a project management platform such as Asana or Monday.com can keep SME input organized and on a trajectory that fits your marketing strategy.
Using an internal communications platform (like Slack or Microsoft Teams) will also break down communication silos, allowing teams to collaborate with greater efficiency and transparency.
Connect the Dots for Enterprise Marketing Strategy Success
Enterprise marketing strategy is a different beast compared to SMB and MM marketing approaches. It requires cross-communication and collaboration across multiple departments while ensuring that stakeholders’ opinions align with the strategy’s goals.
At the same time, by tackling enterprise-level challenges, including cleaning house on dirty data, you can build and manage a strategy that fuels long-term growth at scale.
Big thanks to Danica Clarke for collaborating on this post and providing enterprise insights.