Enterprise marketing: Strategies, challenges, and success stories

Enterprises must also manage bloated technology stacks and deal with large amounts of (usually) siloed customer data.

To overcome these challenges, most enterprise marketing teams need to navigate three key problems:

• How to align marketing strategy with corporate goals. Every marketing task whether it’s a social media campaign, content marketing effort, or a multinational advertisement, should contribute towards the broader objectives of the company.
• How to manage and analyze large volumes of customer data. This data, when properly harnessed, can bring essential insights into customer behaviors, preferences, and trends.
• How to maximize marketing spend, efforts, and return on investment (ROI). This often comes down to making processes — like launching and analyzing marketing campaigns — as fast, efficient, and data-driven as possible. 

Put simply, enterprise marketing is about navigating the complexity that comes with scale and making the most out of the vast resources and broad reach of large organizations.

In this guide, you’ll learn what enterprise marketing is, its particular challenges, and useful strategies. You’ll also learn what to look for in enterprise marketing software and explore real-world success stories.   

Enterprise brands like Vodafone, Adidas, Samsung, Philips, and Coca-Cola use Insider to increase their marketing ROI by personalizing customer experiences, building and automating cross-channel campaigns, and much more. To learn more, visit our website or schedule a demo with our team.

What is enterprise marketing?

Enterprise marketing is a strategic approach — consisting of diverse, multifaceted, and multichannel strategies — used by large-scale organizations to drive revenue in different markets by expanding their customer base and retaining existing users. 

Enterprise marketing strategies usually involve coordinated efforts across different departments within an organization. Their objective is to create a unified and consistent customer experience that aligns with the organization’s brand values and marketing goals.

3 characteristics of enterprise marketing

Marketing at enterprise-level organizations differs from traditional marketing in three main ways.

Scale and diversity of operations

Enterprises typically work across multiple countries and regions. They also cater to a more varied customer base, encompassing different demographics, preferences, and behaviors.

This requires strategies that not only have global appeal but are also adaptable to local cultures, languages, and market dynamics. 

The coordination of diverse team members and stakeholders is essential for the success of this endeavor. This adds layers of complexity to operational processes and necessitates a balancing act between global oversight and local expertise.

Lastly, large enterprises typically offer a wider range of products or services that cater to various market segments. This requires more intricate strategies to effectively communicate the benefits and features of each product line to the right audiences.

Channel diversity and integration

Small-business marketing often focuses on two or two channels due to budget constraints and limited experimentation capabilities. 

In contrast, enterprise marketers leverage a wider array of channels across digital (like social media, email, SEO, and PPC) and traditional media (such as television, radio, and print). This broad spectrum allows enterprise businesses to reach diverse and widespread audiences.

Besides using multiple channels, enterprise markets must also ensure these channels work together cohesively. This means the messaging and branding are consistent across digital and physical platforms, creating a unified brand experience.

Data-driven decision making

Enterprise-scale companies have access to vast amounts of data from various sources like customer interactions, target market research, sales transactions, and social media analytics. This is much more extensive than the data typically available to small-business marketing efforts. 

Enterprises typically have to use sophisticated analytics tools to understand and track customer interactions across all channels. This enables them to create more targeted and effective campaigns. For example, data collected from in-store purchases can be used to deliver more personalized online experiences and vice versa.

The biggest challenges of enterprise marketing

Due to its inherent scale and complexity, the four challenges below are all too common to enterprise marketing.

The complexity of tool integrations

Large-scale organizations typically accumulate a diverse set of enterprise marketing tools and legacy systems, including customer relationship management and lead scoring tools, digital analytics platforms, email and SMS software, and so on. 

Integrating these tools is vital for gaining a holistic understanding of customer behaviors and preferences. However, integrations often require tons of resources, effort, and engineering hours.

With complexity also comes increased financial costs around procurement, implementation, and maintenance. Many enterprises respond to these costs by moving to integrated marketing platforms that streamline their marketing operations. This has the additional benefit of being more time-efficient, as marketers don’t have to constantly jump between different systems.

Managing complex, manual processes

Once a company’s market presence expands to a certain scale, so does the sheer volume and diversity of tasks needed to serve those markets. These range from high-quality content creation and distribution across multiple channels to the personalization of marketing messages for different customer segments.

For instance, a digital marketing team might start by manually segmenting audiences for different enterprise marketing campaigns. However, that task becomes increasingly laborious and prone to errors as the customer base expands. Similarly, launching campaigns across various touchpoints — like email, SMS, and social media — requires significant time and effort for large businesses.

To address these challenges, many enterprises gradually adopt various marketing automation solutions. These technologies can improve workflows by automating repetitive tasks such as data collection, audience segmentation, and even certain aspects of content creation (e.g., generating subject lines or entire social media posts).

Allocating resources properly and measuring ROI

Marketing is a domain offering a multitude of channels and tactics, so pinpointing where to allocate money, time, and effort becomes a strategic endeavor. The challenge lies not just in selecting the right channels and tactics, but also in balancing the investment in each to maximize returns.

Decisions around allocation often involve a thorough analysis of both the market and the organization’s past performance metrics. A deep dive into data can reveal insights about which channels have historically yielded the best ROI, where the target audience is most active, and what types of content resonate with them.

However, for enterprises, it’s also important to align resources with the company’s broader strategic goals. 

For instance, if the aim is to expand into new markets, more resources might be directed towards experimentation and developing new strategies, even if their current ROI is lower compared to established ones. Conversely, if the focus is on strengthening brand loyalty, then efforts could be channeled into customer engagement and retention strategies.

Serving distinct local markets

A major challenge for enterprises lies in tailoring messages to resonate with diverse local cultures and consumer preferences, all within the framework of a unified brand voice and identity. 

The complexity is compounded in an omnichannel environment, where consistency across various platforms — from websites and social media profiles to in-store experiences — is of the highest importance. Customers in different regions expect personalized, timely, and relevant interactions, demanding a marketing strategy that is both globally coherent and locally adaptable.

The key to success is the ability to balance global branding with local market engagement. Utilizing data analytics and customer feedback can help in understanding each market’s unique characteristics and boost brand awareness by ensuring that marketing efforts are culturally relevant and resonant. 

5 proven enterprise marketing strategies for improving revenue, efficiency, and ROI

Below, we’ll explore five tried-and-tested enterprise marketing strategies that can help large organizations personalize the customer experience, automate campaigns, and work more efficiently.

Unify your customer data

Successful enterprise marketing management requires a good view of the customer journey, which is impossible with disjointed customer data. An appropriate solution for this is to centralize your data in one place using a unified data repository such as a customer data platform (CDP).

CDPs allow marketers to aggregate their customer data, as well as understand and predict customer behavior and preferences with greater accuracy. 

By amalgamating data from various touchpoints — social media interactions, purchase history, website visits, and more — CDP creates a rich, multi-dimensional profile of each customer. For example, Insider’s enterprise CDP overcomes data silos and creates accurate, 360-degree customer views.

Insider’s CDP offers integrations with over 100 offline and online data sources (including content management systems, analytics tools, email marketing platforms, and more) allowing you to incorporate everything from online behavior to in-store transaction details and email correspondence into a unified customer profile. 

This benefits enterprise marketing teams by:

• Providing valuable insights into customer behavior.
• Generating a single source of truth for customer data.
• Making it easier to evaluate the impact of marketing campaigns and calculate ROI.

Insider’s global, experienced support team can guide you through the data integration process, helping you connect the right sources for a smooth implementation. That’s why our platform has always been noted for its ease of setup, ease of use, and support quality.

Consolidate your marketing stack

The key to efficiency in enterprise marketing is to use as few solutions as possible for your marketing programs and workflows. This is where unified marketing platforms are so valuable.

With a unified platform, marketing teams can efficiently create and deliver connected campaigns with minimal need to toggle between different point solutions. 

A unified platform also reduces the financial burden of subscribing to multiple solutions, offering a more cost-effective and manageable solution for your marketing needs. In other words, the more you can consolidate your tools and channels, the more you can reduce your total cost of ownership (TCO) of your marketing stack. 

For example, Insider provides a centralized platform where you can create, oversee, and automate campaigns across 12+ native channels. This eliminates the need for multiple channel-specific tools, each with its own set of login credentials and user interfaces.

Insider’s platform is flexible, so you can only use those channels or capabilities that you need to, at any one time. This can be useful if you take a phased approach to implementing Insider by starting with one or two channels (e.g., email and on-site) and expanding to others over time.

Leverage AI for automation and personalization at scale

AI’s ability to process and analyze millions of data points allows businesses to deliver content that resonates with individual preferences across a vast customer base. This technology goes beyond traditional analytics and automation solutions by utilizing complex algorithms to uncover hidden patterns in customer behavior, preferences, and engagement.

For example, Insider’s personalization engine (and its AI algorithms) can match every user with relevant content, messaging, and product recommendations, thus personalizing every touchpoint in a customer’s experience. 

Insider also lets you bring 12+ channels under a single platform and use one solution to personalize all touchpoints, including:

• Your website and mobile app. Insider can show personalized product recommendations to every user on your site or app, based on their interests, needs, and preferences. It can also personalize other elements of the site like banners, pop-ups, categories, and more.

• Email and SMS. Insider lets you easily build customized emails and SMS messages that include various personalized elements like items from a shopping card, recently purchased items, and AI-generated product suggestions. In addition, you can easily include recipients’ birthdays, names, and other dynamic content in your SMS and email marketing.

• WhatsApp. You can use WhatsApp to send personalized messages based on the products and services visitors and potential customers have shown interest in. For example, you can send price drop alerts for items visitors have previously browsed, special shopping event reminders, loyalty program alerts, wishlist item availability, and more.

• Push notifications, chatbots, and much more.

Architect, Insider’s customer journey orchestration tool, ties together all these personalized touchpoints into a cohesive customer experience. It also leverages essential AI-based capabilities, like:

• Next Best Channel Predictions, which determines the optimal touchpoint for engaging each customer. This feature delves into historical behavior patterns and selects the communication channel where each customer shows the highest likelihood of engagement, be it through email, push notifications, SMS, WhatsApp, and so on. 
• Send Time Optimization (STO), which sends each message at the time recipients are most likely to engage with it. For instance, if data reveals that a customer typically engages with emails during evening hours, STO will send your email to arrive in their inbox precisely during this window. 
• A/B Test Winner Auto-Selection, which autonomously identifies and steers users towards the most successful A/B test variant, as determined by your chosen metrics. This removes the need to manually monitor and adjust A/B test outcomes. Instead, Insider’s machine learning algorithms discern the optimal strategy on your behalf.

Insider also offers another AI tool that can automates segmentation, customer journey creation, and content generation called Sirius AI. Sirius AI’s generative AI capabilities can help you:

• Generate campaign copy and images. Sirius AI can create engaging subject lines, body copy, and images in seconds. You only have to provide a simple text prompt with your end goal.

• Discover profitable segments 30x faster. You can speed up the segment processes by simply giving Insider a text prompt and letting our platform generate segments for you. 

• Build or autocomplete complex journeys. Insider can generate entire customer journeys based on your end goal, like, driving more conversions, preventing churn, and so on. You can also use it to autocomplete journey paths in a way that maximizes engagement and conversions.

What to look for in an enterprise marketing platform

An enterprise marketing platform is a comprehensive suite of tools and technologies designed to support the marketing efforts of large-scale organizations, with the aim of improving the customer experience, increasing efficiency, and maximizing marketing efforts and budget.

Although there’s no platform that’s right for every team, in our experience the three criteria below are essential for enterprise companies:

• Having a comprehensive suite of features — like personalization, omnichannel campaign management, automation, and analytics — all under one roof. This enables you to simplify your marketing activities (e.g., on-site campaigns, inbound marketing, social media marketing, and so on) and reduce the costs associated with maintaining multiple tools. This unified approach also makes it easier to ensure consistency in your marketing efforts.
• Using sophisticated AI and personalization tools to tailor marketing efforts to individual customers across every touchpoint. This means the platform should analyze customer data in real-time and allow for the dynamic customization of content, messaging, and product recommendations 
• Break down data silos by integrating data from various sources to provide accurate, 360-degree customer profiles. The platform should also feature robust data analytics tools, capable of processing and interpreting large volumes of data to extract actionable insights. By bridging the gap between different data sources, enterprise marketing platforms can streamline your marketing processes and enable data-driven decision-making.

Examples of successful enterprise marketing via personalization and automation

We’ve now covered the theory behind enterprise marketing, so it’s time to get practical. Below are three success stories in which Insider helped enterprise marketing teams solve key problems, drive revenue, and improve their ROI.

Vodafone increases conversion rates by 159% and gains 6x ROI

Vodafone is a leading telecommunications company in Europe and Africa. It operates in 21 countries, with over 300 million mobile customers and 30 million global customers.

Their marketing team was looking for ways to enhance the company’s cross-channel marketing strategy and test new channels. 

That’s why they collaborated intensively with Insider’s regional growth specialists to develop highly refined, AI-driven customer segments using various traits, behaviors, preferences, and more.

These segments facilitated the creation of tailored customer experiences across key channels for Vodafone, including on-site, email, web push, and Facebook. Insider’s expertise was instrumental in assisting Vodafone in executing a comprehensive multichannel marketing strategy.

In the end, Vodafone was able to dispatch timely and relevant communications, maintaining consistency across all targeted segments. This strategic approach improved Vodafone’s conversion rates by 159% and helped them achieve a 6x ROI.

You can read about their challenges and strategies in the complete case study.

Dover Saddlery achieves 29x ROI and generates $2M in incremental revenue

Dover Saddlery, a premier equestrian retail chain, specializes in a wide array of horse tack, stable essentials, and equestrian attire. Committed to delivering world-class services and products since its inception, Dover Saddlery embarked on a strategic endeavor to completely change and personalize its customer engagement. 

Insider’s expertise in helping enterprises deliver individualized customer experiences was crucial. 

First, our CDP helped Dover Saddlery better understand its audience and create more accurate customer segments. From here, Dover Saddlery’s team started using Insider’s web personalization features to deliver engaging experiences across their site.

For example, they used InStory to deliver Instagram-like stories on their site. Besides engaging customers, this simple tool helped the team save resources by enabling them to repurpose Instagram content, rather than wait for lengthy design cycles from their internal design team.

Overall, Dover Saddlery was able to generate:

• A 29x ROI.
• A 5% increase in conversion rates.
• $2 million of incremental revenue via personalization.

You can find the complete case study on our website.

Slazenger gains 49x ROI in only 8 weeks

Slazenger is one of the world’s most established sports brands. With over 150 years of experience, the company is well-known for stylish sportswear covering cricket, tennis, swimming, hockey, golf, and much more.

Their marketing team sought a cross-channel solution to enhance customer engagement and boost their martech stack’s ROI. Impressed by Insider’s success stories and offerings in partner satisfaction and technical support, they chose our platform. 

The company’s main aim was to tailor customer experiences across various channels, focusing on precise user segments with contextually relevant messages. Insider’s platform proved pivotal, especially Architect — our journey orchestration tool. 

Architect enabled Slazenger to build automated journeys for all sorts of use cases, including discount and cart recovery campaigns. These journeys also spanned across a variety of channels, including on-site, email, push notifications, and SMS. 

The result was an astounding 700% increase in customer acquisition and a 49x ROI in just two months. For the complete details, check out the case study on our website.

Elevate your brand with Insider: Unify, streamline, and personalize at scale

Insider’s enterprise marketing platform enables marketers to simplify complexity, work more efficiently, and improve key metrics like conversions, revenue, and acquisition costs.

Our platform allows you to:

• Easily integrate with your existing solution providers and martech stack.
• Consolidate your marketing tools, optimize your processes, and make the most of your time, energy, and budget.
• Boost conversion rates, customer engagement, and overall revenue by tailoring every message, ensuring they reach the appropriate audience through the most effective channels and at the ideal times.
• Use a multifaceted platform that supports a wide array of channels, including on-site interactions, email, SMS, WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, and push notifications.
• Work with an experienced global support team that will assist in setting up the platform and guide you in fully leveraging its capabilities.
• Leverage ready-to-use templates for any use case, ranging from lead generation and new customer acquisition via gamification to orchestrating automated journeys for cart abandonment and cross-selling across different channels.

Insider has helped over 1,200 global brands streamline their marketing efforts, improve revenue, and ROI,  and make the most out of their efforts and budget.

Click here to schedule a demo and see how Insider can benefit your business.