The 5 Primary Objectives of an Enterprise-Level Content Marketer Enterprise content marketers need to create a customer journey with their created content.
By Aaron Agius Edited by Dan Bova
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The numbers are in -- enterprise businesses are no good at content marketing.
According to Content Marketing Institute's latest report, only 28 percent consider their efforts effective. That's less than B2B or B2C content marketers reported, suggesting that enterprise businesses face some unique challenges when it comes to building an effective content marketing campaign.
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To help combat these challenges, here are five primary objectives content marketers should target when working with an enterprise-level business.
1. Staying organized.
Content marketing is a complicated task for businesses of any size, but enterprise marketers seem to have the most difficulty staying organized.
Only 31 percent of enterprise marketers actually have a documented strategy:
And fewer than half have a dedicated content marketing group. This likely poses major challenges for managing all the component parts of a successful content marketing campaign, such as:
- Setting goals
- Creating content
- Managing social media
- Promoting content
- Analyzing your efforts
Content marketing is a continuous process that only works well if all these tasks are consistently managed.
Building a team that's accountable for each task is an invaluable objective in making content marketing more effective in an enterprise environment. The team can develop and manage a documented strategy, which makes it possible to measure, adjust, and improve your efforts later on.
2. Marketing to diverse audiences.
Enterprise companies have more audiences to target than any other kind of business. The average number is six, but some target more than 10.
It's good that enterprise businesses are already making the effort to develop targeted content that suits many different tastes, but diverse marketing is still a major challenge in and of itself.
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Enterprise content marketers need to go beyond developing several buyer personas and creating a customer journey for each with their content. They also have to make sure their efforts are properly segmented, which is not an easy task with six or more audiences to reach. That's why it's important for enterprise content marketers to take advantage of various marketing and segmentation tools to create the most personalized experience possible -- for their whole audience.
3. Finding the right talent.
Gaps in knowledge and skills of the internal team, finding trained content marketing professionals, and producing a variety of content are all bigger challenges for enterprise marketers than other businesses.
Even major companies with a large pool of employees can't get optimum marketing results without taking advantage of the right outside talent.
Inbound marketers as a whole have been increasing their use of outside talent for their marketing content:
This is an important strategy that enterprise content marketers need to pay attention to if they want to overcome the gaps in knowledge of their internal team.
The right freelance or agency talent can provide a quick solution to the need to create a variety of content as well. Writers, designers, programmers, social media specialists and more can be found affordably online and the potential return on investment (ROI) can be high compared to retraining current employees or hiring new ones.
4. Communicating across departments.
Enterprise companies, much more than other B2B companies, say the lack of integration across marketing is a major challenge.
This issue makes sense considering the traditional structure of enterprise companies – departments are often siloed, making it difficult to effectively collaborate on marketing tasks. Content marketing requires close collaboration between diverse teams, such as:
- IT workers
- Writers
- Sales teams
- Designers
- Public relations
Communicating across departments is an objective that enterprise-level content marketers need to focus heavily on. The task becomes easier if:
- You put content marketing leaders in each department in charge of encouraging communication
- You make efforts to meet regularly and discuss your campaigns with employees involved
- You take advantage of marketing platforms and communication tools that simplify remote collaboration
5. Getting buy-in.
Enterprise B2B content marketers also struggle with getting buy-in/vision from people in charge in their organization.
This disconnect between the apparent value of content marketing and its adoption is also reflected in marketing spend based on company size:
The bigger the business, the less spent on inbound strategies. The fact that enterprise companies struggle more than other businesses to get budget and buy-in for content marketing makes sense if you consider what's involved.
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For a small business, it only takes one person understanding the value of content marketing to revamp the business strategy. When you're working with business executives who've spent their lives marketing outbound, on the other hand, getting buy-in and budget can be a challenge. Meeting this challenge should be a major focus for enterprise content marketers who want to have an impactful strategy.
The best way to do this is to demonstrate the benefits of content marketing for your business. Proving ROI is the most powerful way to get buy-in and unlock budget -- marketers who show ROI are more likely to secure bigger budgets year-to-year.
