Enterprise content marketing involves creating and sharing relevant content to attract, engage, and retain an organization’s target audience.
When enterprise content marketing is done well, it can drive tons of leads, conversions, and, ultimately, revenue. In addition, it can help with things like brand perception and awareness.
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.
Even with all the advantages that enterprise companies have related to the strength of their domain, as well as personnel and resources, they struggle to use SEO effectively to get more traffic.
Scale, complexity, politics, lack of strategy, lack of processes, and red tape make content marketing for enterprise companies more difficult than it is for smaller companies.
Here’s how to approach enterprise content marketing.
In enterprise organizations, it can be hard to find your way around, navigate the political landscape, and compete for resources. Don’t expect miracles right away. It can take a while to get traction. Here’s how to make progress.
Show off your successes
After you have some initial success, show that off repeatedly. Do the whole dog and pony show. Eventually, you’ll find advocates for your work and teams who want to work with you to repeat that success. Replicate your success with other teams or business units and show them off, too. Build momentum one win at a time, and eventually most of the organization will be bought in.
Also, try to get involved with any training initiatives the company may have. This way, you can showcase the success you’ve had and educate others on what to do at the same time.
When doing reporting and showcasing wins, try to show revenue generated or as close as you can get to revenue. Revenue, SQLs, MQLS, etc. It’s what executives care about, and you’re more likely to get attention.
Get promoted
As you move up higher in the org chart, it gets easier to make progress. There will be more money available, and it’ll be easier to get buy-in from executives. At a point, things typically start to get centralized, and you may see things like Centers of Excellence (CoE). As standards and processes are written, it’s easier to have everyone follow best practices. This should lead to more success and an easier time getting more buy-in. Every company seems to go through similar transitions in their SEO maturity.
Create enterprise SEO scorecards
Another tactic you can use to get things moving is to create scorecards for different product teams or different business units to showcase how each is improving across different metrics. This can help you identify areas that need additional help or may need some persuasion to get things moving. I describe how to do this in more detail in the Enterprise SEO metrics & reporting article.
Integrate with other teams
One way to get more buy-in is to show people the bigger picture. Communicate with other teams to integrate with them and then show everyone how that leads to more business success.
For instance, the paid team would love to re-market to the people who landed on your organic pages. The social team can help promote your content. If you can show execs the whole picture of how teams can help each other to grow the business, then you’ll get buy-in and resources easier. You can also ask them to help promote your content on their channels.
Align with business goals
It can also help if you can align with business goals. Pushing content around products or services the business wants to grow is a great way to get attention. Many companies have some kind of top 20 / top 50 project where they have specific things they want to push and grow. Start there, get the attention of the folks at the top, and you’ll have an easier time growing your enterprise content marketing program.
Final thoughts
There’s so much at stake in enterprise SEO and so many opportunities. Just keep pushing and building momentum one win at a time. When a company and its people finally get behind SEO, they can dominate an industry.
If you have any tips, enterprise SEO experiences you’d like to share, or questions, let me know on X or LinkedIn.
