Marketing as an enterprise organisation requires more consideration than SME marketing strategies might. You’re likely targeting larger organisations with complex buyer cycles, are expected to lead the way in your industry, and managing your resource is more of a challenges. There are many targeted enterprise marketing techniques that can help with this, from omni-channel marketing to account-based marketing to outsourced marketing.

No matter what strategy you ultimately take, whether singular or multifaceted, there are a few marketing techniques that are particularly appropriate for marketing teams in enterprise organisations:

Thought leadership

As a large enterprise, you’re expected to be on top of the latest industry news and trends. People look to you for answers. They want to trust that you, the industry experts, can be a signpost to interesting, trustworthy information and will shed light or unique perspective on topical issues.

Sharing and commenting on newsworthy content is a great first step, but becoming producers of insightful content will be the strongest string in your thought leadership bow. This is how you build a reputation as the go-to organisation in your sector.

Some excellent ways to support thought leadership development:

• Curate high-value reports on an industry issue over a longer period of time
• Talk to experts in your audience’s field for guest blogs
• Try joint marketing with related organisations in your ecosystemResearch, read and critically review the topics
• you want to become a leader in
• Hire content writers with good analytical, research and interview skills
• React quickly when there are timely or new market issues and trends

Social media for enterprise

The arguments to create business pages for social media are similar to those of thought leadership. As a large enterprise organisation, if you’re to be seen as an authoritative player in your market, then you need an active social media presence.

This means more than just using your social media profiles as a channel for delivering campaign content. It means becoming a trusted source of information, including news commentary, insights on market trends, and educational or informative content that actually adds value to your audience’s day.

You need to have your finger on the pulse of your industry, and of your target audiences’ industries.

If you haven’t already, the best place to start is to build a social-specific brand persona and social media strategy. These should be closely integrated with your overall brand strategy but be tailored for the content type and style of different channels – for example Twitter may require a more informal, news-style feed whereas LinkedIn could be your platform for audience-specific messaging and educational material.

Optimise conversion rates

Work smart, not hard.

Conversion rate optimisation (CRO) is the act of increasing the number of prospects completing a desired action – say downloading a white paper.

When you’re marketing at scale, it’s important to simplify your efforts in any way you can to ensure you can manage your activity. By finding ways to optimise conversion rates, you don’t necessarily have to produce more marketing materials, you just need to improve the results of what you’re already doing.

Discover 4 more impactful ways to increase conversion in your sales funnel

Some ways of doing this:

• Review campaign performance: Identify areas that could be improved, try a/b testing content, make some changes, and then re-iterate the same campaign again to get better results. The changes can sometimes be so simple – e.g. reducing copy, changing imagery, or inputting new data.
• Research your audience: This is sometimes arduous work but so worth it. Talk to clients, teammates, stakeholders, host surveys, whatever it takes. The better you understand your audience’s needs, the more compelling your efforts will be.
• Use your sales funnel: Build a sales funnel to understand your audiences’ journeys and ensure there is an activity/asset/message for every stage designed to urge them further down the funnel towards conversion.
• Add more CTAs: By adding more opportunities for prospects to convert you’re increasing your chances of conversion – simple right? Examples include links on blogs or website pop-ups. Also strengthen your CTAs, keeping them clear, concise, and compelling.
• Optimise content for conversion: Understand what kind of content converts people and focus on producing more of these if you want to increase conversion. For example, a case study or downloadable guide may be better suited to conversion than an informative blog.
• Make conversion easy: The pathway to conversion should be as simple as possible. This involves decluttering CTAs, removing distractions, minimising steps to conversion and reducing the required actions, such as form fields.
• Add urgency: Deadlines or upselling language or real-time responsiveness (e.g. a chat bot) will help to drive prospects forward.

Learn more about how to build successful enterprise marketing strategies in the full guide.