In charge of marketing or business development in an enterprise-level business? 

One thing is certain: you need a different approach to reach prospects at different stages of the marketing journey. 

The old way — banner ads — barely moves the needle in Customerland anymore. 

People want something they can relate to, that feels less like an ad, and more like a solution. 

The way out?

Launching an enterprise content marketing campaign. 

To understand how this works and how it can help you connect with your audience, let’s dive into what enterprise content marketing is, why it’s important, and how to create an effective strategy.

What is enterprise content marketing?

Enterprise content marketing is the process of creating and distributing relevant content to capture and retain a big business’s target audience. 

It’s similar to traditional content marketing but the difference is the scale at which it’s done. In enterprise content marketing, you’re producing and promoting content for unique, diverse audiences all at different stages in the marketing funnel and different marketing channels. 

Basically, you’re trying to reach more people. 

As such, the resources you need will be different, including the size of the content team. 

You’ll need a team of SEO experts, content writers, researchers, graphic designers, and videographers, to mention a few, all working together to produce authentic content pieces that position the company as an industry expert. 

Now, you’re probably wondering why enterprise content marketing is even a thing, when a typical big business is already likely to be a household name that ranks highly on search engines.

Why try to fix what isn’t broken? 

Keep reading to find the answer.

What are the key benefits of enterprise content marketing?

To start, it helps your brand stay relevant and gives you a competitive edge. 

In today’s business space, customers’ needs are evolving and they’re looking for solutions to solve them. If your brand can’t resolve their pain points, they’ll quickly move on, to brands that can help them. 

When you consistently publish content that does meet their needs, on the other hand, you become a brand they can’t do without. 

And here’s what you get in return:

• Increased brand awareness: You’d think that as an enterprise, everyone would know about your brand, right? Er, not really! You may be surprised how many people have still never heard of it. 

This marketing strategy puts that right. You create unique, authoritative content that solves people’s challenges and they start spreading the word about your brand. 

It’s true. A survey by the Content Marketing Institute showed that 92% of enterprise marketers currently leverage content marketing to build their brand awareness.

• Enhanced customer engagement: If your audience sees content they need, they tend to ‘like’ it, comment and leave feedback, and share it with others in their network. 
• Higher conversion rates: Because you’re targeting people across different demographics who need solutions to their problems, you have better chances of reaching people willing to buy your product or service, which increases your conversion rates. According to a report by Clutch, a B2B research and review site, 82% of people bought a company’s product or service after interacting with its content.  
• Enhanced thought leadership: Publish original material (trend reports, how-to guides, best practices, etc.) over time and people will tag your brand as a thought leader in the industry. Take the SEO toolset, Ahrefs, for instance. They’ve got several high-quality resources on SEO, making sure that most people think of them when search engine optimization is mentioned.   
• Better lead generation: A report by the Content Marketing Institute (CMI) shows that many brands use content marketing to generate leads. About 87% of B2B marketers surveyed say it’s what they do.  

How does it help you do that? By being helpful, of course. Prospects and customers are willing to provide their contact information in return for quality information. Think of the number of times you’ve handed over your contact details to gain access to a premium newsletter.

• Improved SEO rankings: Patrick Stox, co-writer of Ahrefs’s SEO Book for Beginners and product advisor at Ahrefs said, “There’s a misconception that big enterprise websites rank for everything. They definitely have an advantage, but they still have to figure out what content to create and put in the work to rank.”

That’s where content marketing comes in for enterprises. You get to create high-quality content that people spend time (dwell time) reading on your site and that in turn, helps boost your rankings on the search engine results page (SERP).

• Increased customer retention: Consistently creating helpful content will make people see the brand as an organization committed to their success and growth. As such, they’re likely to keep buying from you. 

So this content we’ve gone on and on about, will any kind do or are there specific types for enterprises?

That’s what we’ll chat about in the next section. It’s a breakdown of different content types used in enterprise content marketing.

What are the different content types for an enterprise content strategy? 

There are several types, from research posts to infographics, but here are some of the most popular options:

1. Blog posts

Blog posts are articles that are typically published on a company’s website. They cover a wide range of topics for audiences at different stages of the sales funnel. 

You can use blog posts to:

• Educate your audience on the best solutions to their pain points. 
• Share product updates or how to use a particular feature in your product.
• Show comparison with other solutions.
• Simplify complex subjects like we’re doing now. 

Here’s an example of what an educational long-form blog post looks like:

They provide our audience with valuable resources that can help inform their business plans or strategies.

Now, these posts can be short-form or long-form. They’re effective either way as a survey by CMI showed that about 93% of enterprise marketers use short-form articles in their strategy while 72% use long-form articles. 

2. Podcasts and webinars

Podcasts are audio discussions where you share insights on different topics with your audience. You invite subject matter experts or industry leaders to chat about trends and people listen at their convenience.

This content type is fast becoming popular because it allows the audience to engage with it on the go.   

Statistics also show that 61% of people want to check out a brand’s site after listening to its podcast and 61% want to purchase its product or service. 

Webinars are similar to podcasts but this content format lets people participate in the conversation in real time. It’s like FaceTime with the facilitators and other participants where they can ask questions and get insights. 

3. E-books and white papers

These are educational materials that let you give the audience detailed information about different topics, trends, concepts, or products. Just like this whitepaper about unpacking the creative power of AI in marketing:

With these content formats, you can dive more into the topic compared to a blog post. Plus, it positions you as an industry thought leader.

Is it effective? Yup, 62% of enterprise marketers say they’ve used these formats as part of their content strategy in the last 12 months.

4. Email newsletters

This content format lets you engage with your audience more personally. 

That’s why 87% of marketers use newsletters to distribute their content.

You can use it to send follow-up messages to leads who almost cleared out their cart but logged off, recurring customers, or visitors who just signed up for a report. 

Email newsletters also allow you to close sales and retain customers. 

5. Case studies

Don’t think that just because you’re an enterprise people will be impressed and will automatically trust you. Even with enterprises, people still want to know if you can really help them overcome their business challenges.

They want to see if and how you’ve helped others so that they can tell if you’re the right fit for them. 

Case studies are one of the best ways to do this. They let you show prospects what you can offer them, with proof. 

The audience sees another party's problem, the solution or approach you used to solve it, and the results they experienced. 

This way, potential customers are more confident about doing business with you. 

Here’s a stat supporting case studies: 79% of enterprise marketers include this format in their content marketing efforts, making it the third most popular content type among marketers. 

6. Video content

Using video content in your marketing campaigns is no longer an option, it’s a necessity. 

Your audience loves it and it’s easy to share. That’s why 94% of enterprise marketers have consistently tagged it as their fave content format.  

Videos allow you to tell captivating brand stories, show detailed product demonstrations, and educate the audience.

It’s also why video-sharing apps like YouTube and TikTok are some of the most popular social media platforms out there. 

Enterprises that leverage this content type conveniently position themselves as industry leaders that people consult for guidance.  

Take Hubspot, the CRM software, for instance, which started posting videos on YouTube two years ago. 

Image Source: YouTube

Now, their 242 videos average 5k views each and they’ve got over 100k subscribers. Most of their videos are basically how-to guides, helping people solve their challenges. 

7. Social media content

Most of your audience already spends time on social media platforms. As such, producing content for social media is a good way to reach them and connect with new audiences. 

You can also use it to announce new products or features and increase brand awareness 

This social media content can include infographics, short videos, tweets, and even customer testimonials. 

8. Interactive content

Then, there’s interactive content, a format that encourages more engagement from the audience than others. 

This content type moves people from passively reading or watching the content to actively interacting with it. So, they're clicking, hovering over elements to access hidden content, or responding to a quiz instead of just reading. 

Basically, it’s like all the other types of content but this version requires people to be involved for an immersive experience. 

Here’s an example of this content format:

In this example, viewers scroll horizontally and click different elements to experience the content.

Now you’re probably wondering if people enjoy stuff like this. Don’t they prefer to just read through it?

Well, they used to … but not anymore. A 2022 report by Mediafly showed that interactive content now gets 52.6% more engagement than static content. It also gets more shares than traditional content.

Up next, let’s see how to develop a content strategy for your enterprise campaigns.

How to develop an enterprise content marketing strategy

Building an enterprise content marketing strategy has to be well thought out. You need to study the audience, plan every piece of content, and ensure it’s actually solving people’s needs.  

To help you get started, we’ve outlined different steps you can follow below.

Let’s dive into them one after another. 

Step 1: Map out your plan

This first stage involves brainstorming your overall content goals, how to align the content to achieve business goals, and ensuring the content captivates the audience. 

Here’s a breakdown of how to map out your content plan:

Define your goals using the SMART framework. That means ensuring the goals are: 

• Specific — what do you want to achieve? How do you want to achieve it? Who’s responsible for it? E.g., increasing the number of leads and customers by launching a targeted social media and/or email marketing campaign. 
• Measurable — how do you track the goals as you progress? E.g., increasing leads and customers by 50% by launching targeted social media (Instagram, LinkedIn, TikTok, and Twitter) and/or email marketing campaigns. 
• Achievable — can you achieve the set goal? Do you have the available resources to pull it off or do you need to refine the goal? 
• Relevant — what impact will it have on the enterprise company? E.g., because social media is a good avenue for increasing awareness, launching a campaign there will boost leads, while email marketing will help close deals. 
• Time-bound — when do you want to begin (allow enough time so that everyone involved can get on the same page with you) and how soon can you reasonably expect to start seeing results?

Identify your target audience. Do you know who your ideal customer is? If you don’t, one way to define them is to interview existing customers. Ask relevant questions about their pain points, demographics, interests, and more to help you understand their needs. 

Alternatively, you can use Google Analytics if your site is connected to it. Visit Report on the dashboard and click User > User Attributes > Overview. 

There, you’ll see existing users by age, gender, language, location, and other relevant info about the audience.

Run a content audit and competitor analysis. Outline the pain points (using the user interview from earlier) your audience faces against existing content to see if it’s solving their problem. You can use Ahrefs’s content audit tool to list the content pages on your site. 

Click on the Bulk export tab then export “Internal HTML URLs, status code 200.” This will crawl your site and outline all your content pages. Then copy and paste the content pages into a spreadsheet and crosscheck them against the client’s challenges. 

You also want to see if existing content meets people’s search intent so you can repurpose or update the content. 

In analyzing your competitors, the goal is to check what brings them success, use it as your benchmark, and replicate it in your organization. 

You can use Semrush’s market explorer to identify competitors in your industry. Just select the Find Competitors option, input your domain, and click on Research the market. Once you know who they are, look at their content efforts. 

You want to subscribe to their email campaigns to check their newsletter copy, listen to their podcast, or read case studies to get familiar with their approach and style. 

Decide on the content formats you want to produce including content types, and distribution channels. Use the audience’s challenges and interests from the know-your-audience interview as a guide here. Create content around their needs and publish it on channels where they spend the most time. 

Define key metrics to measure the content’s performance. Here are some metrics you can track to know if your content marketing campaign is effective:

• Web organic traffic: The number of people who visit your site and their demographics. 
• New users: The number of people who visit the site for the first time during a given period. 
• Bounce rate: How many people visit one page on your site before checking out.
• Cost per lead (CPL): How much it costs to get a new lead.
• Sales qualified lead to lead conversion rate: The percentage of incoming leads more likely to convert to qualified leads. 
• New user activation: To measure the number of users who started using your product or service. 

After laying this foundation, you can move on to the next step…

Step 2: Topic and enterprise SEO strategizing

Put together an SEO team to help build topic clusters to target different aspects of your product or service. 

Let them run on-page (e.g., meta descriptions or header tags), off-page (e.g., link building), and technical SEO audits (e.g., redirecting duplicate pages) to ensure the site is optimized for search engines. 

In addition to that, here are some best practices to follow:

• Identify general terms that refer to your product or service and build content around them for the different stages of the marketing funnel. 
• Target both short- (e.g., enterprise marketing) and long-tail keywords (e.g., best enterprise marketing solutions) to ensure you’re capturing people’s attention at every turn. 
• Ensure your homepage and other key pages like product landing pages have the keywords embedded.

Step 3: Content production

This is where you take the user’s pain point and keywords the SEO team researched and turn them into content pieces. 

A good place to start here is to create guidelines as to what the right content should look like for the brand. 

It’s basically an outline of what your visual and written content should look like across all marketing channels. What are the brand colors to use? Font style and typography? Content voice or tone?

After that, you need to: 

• Create briefs for people who’ll create the content. 
• Set up a review-and-approval process to ensure the content is aligned with the brand’s guidelines.

So who’s responsible for this stage? Several professionals such as:

• Content marketers in charge of creating guidelines, researching the audience, creating content calendars, and brainstorming to ensure content hits the mark.  
• Content writers to help you produce informative and educational content for blogs, case studies, whitepapers, and more. 
• Copywriters for creating copy for email, landing pages, social media, and ads that can propel people to take specific action.
• Designers who produce appealing graphic and web designs in line with the brand’s guidelines.
• Videographers to help you produce video content for all media channels.

You can also leverage digital tools like Ceros in content production. It’s a platform dedicated to producing interactive content. 

Once you log in to its Studio tool, you import written or visual content to the platform and add interactivity. There are also templates available that can help you create content more quickly. 

Step 4: Content distribution

Next, get the content you’ve created in front of your audience. 

To do this effectively, circle back to your audience research and identify channels customers spend most of their time on. That’s where you should be posting more. 

If they spend time on Instagram, refine the content for the platform and share it there. 

Alternatively, look at the goals you set. 

If you want to close sales, for instance, target emails as the channel on which to distribute the content. 

Step 5: Tracking and measuring performance

Remember the metrics we mentioned in Step 1? 

Here’s where you need them, to know whether or not you’re reaching your goals.

In addition to that, here are other key performance indicators to track:

• Click-through rates (CTR) to know if the audience is clicking on your ad links embedded in social media content, emails, and other content formats.
• Gated content downloads. This metric lets you track if people are downloading premium content resources where you asked for their details in exchange. 
• Keyword rankings on search engine results pages (SERPs) to know if you’re being considered an authority on a topic and are meeting the search intent for the keyword. 
• Content channels that bring in the most leads and website traffic. 

Now to track your campaign’s performance, you need the right tools. Check the list below for some options to use. 

• Ceros Analytics for tracking interactive content and mapping out touch points the audience interacts with the most. 
• Google Analytics to track web traffic, its source, and demographics.
• Semrush’s Position Tracking for monitoring keyword rankings on Google’s search engine. 

Since we’re talking about tools, let’s give you a breakdown of software to help with your enterprise content marketing efforts.

Software tools to use for enterprise content marketing 

While human professionals are super important in content marketing, having the right tools can help save time and streamline your workflow.  

These tools include:

• Ceros: Your interactive content maker. Want to produce and publish content that leaves your target audience coming back for me? Ceros is the tool that makes that happen. You only need to find a template relating to the content you want to create and it’s show time. 
• Social Champ: Social Champ tags itself as a powerful social media management tool for agencies. It allows you to create, schedule, and publish content across different social media channels. You can also use it to create a calendar and monitor your campaign’s performance.  
• HubSpot: An all-in-one marketing tool, HubSpot offers several features that help brands grow their businesses. It has a customer relationship management (CRM) feature to collect and manage data from the sales team and customers. There’s a content management system too for designing personalized web pages for customers. And other tools to help you close deals. 
• Ahrefs: Ahrefs provides resources to up your SEO game, from keyword research to competitor analysis, site auditing, uncovering content ideas and link-building opportunities, and tracking your rank on the SERPs.
• Visme: This is a visual design tool that helps create videos, social media graphics, data visualizations, and other design-related content. It also has an AI tool for generating images and templates to get started.
• WordPress: WordPress is a popular tool that functions as a content management system, a website builder, and a publishing tool. It can help manage and edit web content pages and optimize them for search engines. 
• GetResponse: With GetResponse, you can run an email marketing campaign from start to finish. It lets you generate emails for the campaign, set up autoresponders to engage customers in your absence, and design landing pages to collect leads. 

***

You know launching an enterprise campaign isn’t all rainbows and sunshine.

We’ve shown you how to get started but there’s a good chance you’ll run into certain challenges. Let’s discuss some of them and their solutions.

What are common challenges in enterprise content marketing?

Here are some pitfalls you could experience when running a campaign: 

Reaching the right audience

The key to a successful enterprise content marketing campaign is creating content that resonates with your audiences and meets their needs. 

But the truth is, that can be difficult because of the constantly changing customer interests and policies that different distribution platforms (e.g., Google’s search engine) roll out regularly. 

Solution? 

First, you need to understand your audience (using the steps we mentioned earlier), create a customer persona, and segment the audience according to people’s needs, preferences, and shared characteristics. 

Secondly, do a bit more research on the different segments so you’re very clear about their wants. 

Then, you can create content that meets their needs. 

Maintaining quality and consistency

As an enterprise, you’ll agree that consistently producing high-quality content can be a hassle. 

You’re either hopping from meeting to meeting, battling with high-ups to release funds for the department, or dealing with new internal policies. 

All that plus the constant pressure to publish something can lead to inconsistent content quality. 

Solution? 

• Create a brand guideline that covers content quality policies and reflects the brand’s image. 
• Outsource the content creation process to a third-party marketing agency. 

Measuring ROI and proving value

Sometimes, it can be difficult to identify what piece of content ultimately resulted in sales. 

It’s understandable because there are several touchpoints on the buyer’s journey. So, determining which touchpoint closed the deal can be difficult. 

But if you can’t do that, you’ll have a hard time convincing stakeholders to invest money in content marketing. 

Solution? 

• Set clear goals and metrics/KPIs to track. We explained how to do this earlier. 
• Leverage analytics tools to monitor how the audience interacts with different content types. 
• Track and analyze performance on different distribution channels separately. In other words, track email marketing, social media, blog posts, etc. differently. 
• Integrate campaigns with CRM tools to track efforts and calculate the return on investment (ROI) for your campaigns. 
• Include qualitative feedback like customer survey responses to reveal how effective the campaign has been. 

Internal alignment and collaboration

Sometimes, there’s just no alignment between different teams in an organization. 

The sales team isn’t willing to share customer insights because the marketing team is hogging all the attention.

Or there’s just some weird beef going on. 

But one way to ensure the content marketing campaign is effective is for everyone to work together. 

Here are some tips to help you do that: 

• Host joint planning sessions with other teams. This way, everyone can chip in and ensure cross-departmental collaboration.
• Share content performance data with everyone so they can see the results of their hard work. 
• Set and share the content marketing vision with the different teams to ensure everyone understands why you’re investing in content.
• Recognize individual and team efforts by celebrating their contributions to success. 

Remaining relevant

Your audience’s needs change frequently. So you have to be relevant if you want to create content that stands out. 

You want to be a source they turn to when their needs or interests change.

Here’s how to do that:

• Constantly monitor industry trends, emerging tech, your competitors, and customer preferences to stay updated.
• Engage with your audience frequently through surveys, online communities, or feedback to monitor their evolving pain points. 
• Try out new content formats to improve your reach. That could mean setting up a Thread profile or starting a podcast campaign to cater to different audiences. 

With that, we can now bring this guide to a close.

Over to you!

As you go on to begin this journey, understand there are two types of content expressions.

The kind that instantly creates a connection with your audience and the one that slowly builds a connection. 

Which one would you rather go for in a marketing campaign?

The instant connection one!

And to do that, you need Ceros. 

It’s the kind of tool that creates content that sparks an instant connection with your audience. They see your content and they’re starstruck, wanting to come back for more. 

Book a demo with Ceros now if you want to have an experience like that.