What Is Enterprise Content Marketing? Learn the Basics Now
The Glorious Company Team
Enterprise content marketing is creating and using content to raise brand awareness for large-scale organizations like Fortune 500 companies and build long-lasting relationships with their customers. This approach is rooted in a sound content strategy, something that many enterprises lack internally, due to the number of divisions and product teams competing with each other and being disorganized.
Stakeholders in enterprise companies need to learn to get out of their own way and not overthink putting a content marketing plan into action. If they do, paralysis sets in, which leads to many missed content opportunities and chances to connect with and nurture your target audience.
What Is Enterprise Content Marketing?
At the Glorious Company, we have years’ worth of experience partnering with Fortune 500 businesses to shepherd their content marketing. In this time, we’ve learned what it takes to improve their workflows and ensure that high-quality material is created, distributed, and promoted to get the most value from campaigns.
Enterprise content marketing involves large-scale businesses creating their own content with the intention of educating and informing their target audience, as well as addressing and solving their pain points. This forms longer term relationships with their leads and customers, as customers encounter and engage with this content at all stages of the buyer’s journey.
What makes enterprise content marketing truly unique is the sheer scale and complexity of the planning and content creation efforts. Compared with smaller and midsized businesses, marketing for enterprises involves a lot of moving parts and distribution of content across a variety of marketing channels, such as social platforms, emails, and PR releases.
Content marketing at enterprises is also tied into the broader business goals of these large-scale operations, which include brand awareness, thought leadership, and business growth.
Examples of an Enterprise Content Marketing Strategy
There are numerous approaches you can take when marketing your enterprise with content. Here are several common and successful ways to harness the power of content at your large organization.
Blogging
Blogging is a popular technique for many businesses because of the low barrier to entry, cost-effectiveness, and distribution opportunities from organic search. The content on your blog serves to educate and solve the problems of your target audience and builds relationships with leads who find your blog posts from organic search. It’s the first step in the top of the funnel for people who are beginning to discover and engage with your brand.
Your enterprise blog is the perfect place for your company to create thought leader content, setting you apart from your competitors. Simply recruit experts at your own organization to write about their field of expertise and how your Fortune 500’s products and services address the pain points of your target audience. Alternately, you can also partner with a content marketing agency to ideate and create this blog content.
Having a blog and regularly publishing content on it yields rewards. According to Hubspot’s Blog’s 2023 Marketing Strategy & Trends Report, blogging has the highest return on investment (ROI) of any marketing channel at 9%, tied with influencer marketing and social media shopping tools.
Case Studies
Case studies are powerful marketing tools that showcase real-life examples of how your enterprise products or services have solved problems and brought success to your customers. By providing concrete evidence of the positive impact of your offerings, case studies encourage potential customers to choose your business over competitors.
A well-structured case study typically includes several key components. First, it showcases customer success stories, highlighting how your products or services have helped businesses or individuals overcome challenges. This establishes credibility and builds trust with potential customers by demonstrating that your organization has a track record of delivering results.
Next, case studies identify the specific problem or challenge faced by the customer before using your product or service. This enables potential customers to relate and evaluate if your solution could address their own pain points. The role of your company in providing solutions is a crucial aspect of a case study. It explains in detail how your products or services were used to overcome the identified problem. This demonstrates the unique value proposition your organization offers.
Wrap up your case study by emphasizing the results after implementing your solutions, such as improved efficiency, increased revenue, or cost savings.
White Papers
When you want to demonstrate that your enterprise is an expert on a specific issue, you turn to the white paper. A research-heavy piece of content, a white paper presents a problem, your organization’s views on that issue, and then outlines a solution. A white paper is the perfect way to position your large-scale organization as the expert on that topic or issue.
White papers are also very useful further down in the sales funnel, especially the bottom of the sales funnel. This is because, at this stage, your customers will be fully aware of their pain points and your enterprise’s role in providing them with a solution to their problem.
A well-written white paper can mean the difference between your prospects abandoning your funnel or making that final conversion at the bottom of the funnel.
Video
Videos are a powerful tool in enterprise content marketing. Incorporating videos into your content brings numerous benefits to your brand.
Videos significantly boost brand awareness. In today's digital age, people are constantly bombarded with content. Videos, however, have the power to grab attention and stand out from other types of content due to their focus on visuals. Including videos in your content strategy can help you get noticed by your target audience and increase brand visibility.
Videos build trust with your audience. By showcasing your products or services through videos, you are giving potential customers a chance to see them in action. This creates a sense of transparency and authenticity, which can lead to increased trust in your brand. People are more likely to trust a brand that they can see and experience firsthand. A video is almost as good as being able to touch, feel, and test out your product in their own hands.
They’re also an excellent tool for educating your audience. They allow you to break down complex topics or concepts into easily understandable visuals. Whether you are explaining a product feature, demonstrating a tutorial, or sharing industry insights, videos are a more engaging and memorable method of conveying information compared to traditional, text-based content.
The vast majority of businesses are already using video. To wit, 91% of businesses use video as an advertising tool in 2023, according to explainer-video company, Wyzowl. This is an all-time high in their tracking. If you’re not yet using video for marketing purposes at your enterprise, what are you waiting for?
Social Media
Social media is the equivalent of today’s town square, for lack of a better analogy. Any brand that wants to announce anything important will make the announcement on a social platform. This confirms social’s entrenched position as a hub for content creation, curation, and distribution.
Big brands use social media as a convenient way to stay in touch with their target audience. At the click of a button, your enterprise has the power to respond to customer feedback, nurture leads down your sales funnel, or advertise an upcoming launch or new feature.
Social also doubles as a distribution platform, where your brand can get more mileage out of all the other content types you’ve already created. For example, you can:
Post a new product video on X or Twitter
Share your latest white paper on Facebook
Post a company case study with a happy client on Instagram
Infographics
Infographics are powerful tools that simplify complex ideas and data by presenting them visually. They allow for the effective communication of information in a quick and easily understandable manner.
These graphic representations compact large amounts of data into easily digestible chunks, making them ideal for sharing information with a wide audience. Instead of reading a lengthy article or report, viewers can grasp the main points and key insights at a glance.
Using infographics is welcome change of pace for an enterprise content marketing strategy. Instead of complex white papers or case studies, you pivot to presenting information in a more accessible way that’s going to be understood by more people. According to Demandsage, infographics are 30 times more likely to be actually read than a text-based article.
Infographics rely on various visual elements like charts, graphs, icons, and illustrations to present data in a compelling manner. By combining text with visuals, they enhance retention and comprehension, as our brains are wired to process information more effectively when it is presented visually.
Polls and Quizzes
Polls and quizzes aren’t the first things you think about when planning your enterprise content strategy, but they do have their place. This is a type of content that you can use to interact with your target audience. This interactive content promotes audience participation.
You have quite a bit of leeway with polls and quizzes.
You can ask your audience about their problems, their understanding of the solutions available in the marketplace, and what techniques they’ve tried (if any) to address their pain points.
You also have the option of distributing them everywhere: on your website, social platforms, and in your emails to your target audience.
How to Create an Enterprise Content Marketing Strategy in 7 Steps
Curious about adopting a content marketing strategy at your own Fortune 500 company? Our team has helped various large-scale companies make sense of content by implementing a number of campaigns for them. Here’s what we’ve learned and what enterprises like yours should do to be successful.
1. Determine What Part of Your Website Your Team Owns
Anyone at a big corporation understands that there’s always intra-organization competition for getting their specific product promoted or pushed, especially on places like your blog, which has a specific publishing schedule and may even be managed by a totally separate editorial team.
So before you commit to any enterprise content marketing material, ensure that you actually have an area of your website to publish this content to, especially if you’re going to plan content over the long term, on a regular basis. This could be a separate landing page for your product or simply an agreement with the stakeholders of your editorial team to allow you to publish product-led content to the company blog at a consistent cadence.
2. Pick the Right Content Management System (CMS)
Your enterprise team has a few choices for the CMS you’ll work with. Your choices include:
To pick the right one for your organization, it comes down to priorities. It has to be user-friendly, streamlining the content publishing process, particularly if you have a big content calendar with lots of articles to publish. It should also be flexible, letting you use various templates, work with different content types, and integrate with other tools in your company tech stack. Finally, your CMS needs to scale with your organization as you continue to grow.
You’ll know you’ve found the right CMS when it streamlines your content workflows as you grow your content strategy’s scope.
3. Design Your Content Plan
Get your product team together with your marketing team and do the following.
Conduct a comprehensive content audit: Begin by evaluating your existing content to understand what has been published, its performance, and gaps in the current strategy. Then, define your objectives and target audience. Next, move on to keyword research. Perform keyword research to identify the most relevant and high-performing search terms in your industry. This will help you optimize your content for search engines and attract organic traffic.
4. Create Your Content
At this stage, you need to generate high-quality content based on your content plan and make sure it aligns with your brand voice, objectives, and desired audience engagement. This may involve writing, designing, recording, or outsourcing content creation to a content marketing agency. Decide on the types of content that support your objectives and engage your target audience. Consider using a mix of written articles, videos, infographics, podcasts, and social media posts.
5. Distribute Your Content on Numerous Channels and Promote It
Choose the appropriate channels to distribute your content, such as your website, blog, social media platforms, email newsletters, or industry publications. Develop a content calendar that outlines your publishing schedule and indicates the topics, formats, and distribution channels for each piece of content.
Optimize and promote your content: Optimize your content using SEO best practices to increase its visibility in search engine results. Promote your content through social media advertising, email marketing, influencer collaborations, and other relevant tactics to reach your target audience effectively.
6. Analyze Your Campaigns and Results
Monitor and analyze your enterprise content’s performance. Constantly monitor the performance of your content with analytical tools. Track key metrics like website traffic, engagement, conversions, and social media shares to evaluate the success of your content strategy. Use this data to make informed decisions, refine your strategy, and enhance future content planning and execution.
Good tools to use are Semrush, Ahrefs, Moz, SE Ranking, and Mangools, along with your in-house Google Search Console and Google Analytics 4.
7. Use the Right Enterprise Marketing Tools
For our context here, enterprise marketing tools are the project management tools that your organization relies on to move your content marketing projects forward smoothly, so that everyone on your team and beyond is on the same page and sees, in real-time, what the status of your progress is.
Some examples of phenomenal tools your organization needs to keep your content marketing streamlined are:
Frequently Asked Questions
Getting marketing campaigns off the ground at your enterprise can be a tricky and confusing endeavor. That’s why we’ve collected some of the most frequently asked questions that decision makers and product teams normally have, so to settle your doubts.
Q: How Much Does an Enterprise Content Marketing Campaign Cost?
A: Your enterprise content marketing campaign’s cost comes down to a number of variables. How big is your budget? What do you want to achieve? Are you keeping your campaigns in-house, or are you partnering with a third-party vendor like an agency?
A broad is range is anywhere from $5,000 to $100,000 per month for your enterprise company. Keep in mind that the important metric is the possible ROI of each campaign, not how much you’ll have to invest to get it going.
Q: Does Content Marketing Work Better for Enterprises?
A: Yes, content marketing is tailor-made to empower enterprises to succeed in building relationships with their leads and customers by nurturing them with helpful content. Due to large-scale companies’ broader and larger target audience, the use of content to connect with and educate their prospects is a smart strategy that will yield results. With competition in your industry so fierce, the creation and distribution of well-thought-out content on a consistent basis can be the game changer to set your brand apart from the rest of the pack in your niche.
Q: Who Should Lead an Enterprise Content Marketing Strategy?
A: Your content marketing strategy will likely be led by a product marketing manager, a product marketing lead, or a number of stakeholders at your organization, including SEO strategists and the editorial specialists working on content material. It could even be a joint effort by several people at your enterprise, just as an outside third party, like a digital agency or vendor, could also contribute substantially to guiding the direction of your strategy.
Make Content Work Powerfully for Your Enterprise
Enterprise companies enjoy a tremendous amount of potential when it comes to using content to educate, engage, and nurture their target audience. The sheer size and influence of their brands make the use of content a no-brainer. Thing is that many enterprises fail to take advantage of this sheer potential, unfortunately.
With different product teams sometimes competing with each other for marketing budget—as well as the lack of expertise in your company—it can be a hassle to create and execute on a well-thought-out enterprise content marketing plan. To reach the full potential of content marketing, there has to be a strong commitment from your decision makers to make it happen.
If you’re in need of a content marketing agency to help you devise your enterprise content marketing strategy, then reach out to us today. Contact The Glorious Company today for a no-obligation consultation and estimate.
Any questions? Keep the conversation going by leaving a comment below.
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