How to Build an Enterprise Content Marketing Strategy that Drives Revenue (+ Costs Involved)

An enterprise content marketing strategy can attract new leads and boost conversions. The cost can range between $5,000 and $30,000 per month. Copy the steps we use to build one for your organization.

Here, you’ll find:

• What is enterprise content marketing?
• What does it cost?
• How to build an enterprise content marketing strategy
• What are the most common types of enterprise content?

With the right content strategy, enterprise-level businesses can reach potential customers at every stage of the marketing funnel. Then guide them through the buyer’s journey toward conversion.

Below, we’ll dive into the strategies we use to help large organizations create tailored, targeted content for their audiences.

What is enterprise content marketing?

Enterprise content marketing is an approach large-scale organizations use to develop and deliver unique content to their target audiences.

Since enterprise businesses have different goals and resources compared to their small business counterparts, they have to adapt their strategy to deliver content at scale.

What is the cost of enterprise content marketing?

The typical cost is between $5,000 and $30,000+ per month, or between $50k and $500k for a fixed one-time project. The cost of enterprise content marketing depends on the needs of the company.

For instance, you can expect to pay more for developing and maintaining content for a 5,000+ page website compared to producing just 10 pieces per month for a blog.

How to build an enterprise content marketing strategy

To get the most out of your enterprise content marketing efforts, create an intentional, data-driven content strategy. Let’s walk through the process of building an enterprise content marketing strategy step by step.

1. Hire the right content marketing team
2. Conduct a content audit
3. Research your competitors’ content
4. Find SEO keyword opportunities
5. Map out content for all stages of the funnel
6. Create a content calendar
7. Build content marketing processes & workflows
8. Create high-quality content
9. Publish and promote content
10. Measure and analyze results

1. Hire the right content marketing team

Startups, small businesses, and solopreneurs can get away with not having a digital marketing team. But enterprise brands must have the right content marketers to create content at scale and maintain quality assurance throughout the process.

“Working with an experienced team that’s been there and done that is key to a successful content marketing plan for enterprise companies,” says Sam Yadegar, HawkSEM CEO.

“In the competitive world of digital marketing, the content marketing specialists working with you need to have an in-depth knowledge of your products and services and be able to communicate this to your audience clearly. This is how you make your company stand out and increase ROI.”

And that’s what we did for eThink, an open-source learning management system. Using our proprietary tech, ConversionIQ, and holistic content marketing approach, we helped eThink increase its site traffic by 250%.

Who do you need on your content marketing team?

Your company may need to hire many different positions for enterprise content creation and management, each with different titles and responsibilities.

In general, these are the skillsets you need:

• Content ideation and strategy: Content strategists and content marketing managers are often tasked with developing and implementing the overall content strategy while researching and ideating content.
• Content writing: Written content is a vital part of your content strategy. Hire content writers and copywriters who can research and write high-quality content across channels.
• Editing: Editing for grammar and messaging is an important part of keeping your content error-free and consistent across channels. This can be done by an editor, content strategist, or content marketing manager.
• Optimization: Any SEO-driven content must be optimized for search engines. An SEO specialist or content manager often does this, but if they have the right expertise, a content writer can also do it.
• Content design: Content design goes beyond creating visual content like videos and infographics. In addition to graphic designers and videographers, you may need to hire a UX designer and web developer.
• Content management: Whether you hire generalists (content marketing manager) or specialists (email marketing manager, social media manager, etc.), you’ll need team members to manage content across channels from ideation and creation through promotion and repurposing.
• Analysis: Your team needs people who can track performance, analyze the results, and make recommendations for improvement. This can be done by content managers, marketing analysts, and/or SEO analysts.

Depending on the size of your team, your company may also need to hire for senior-level management roles like Director of Content Marketing and/or Creative Director. These positions drive the vision for content marketing and design across the organization.

Hiring in-house vs. agency

Once you decide who the key players are on your content marketing team, decide whether to hire them in-house or outsource some of the work. There are a few approaches to hiring.

Some enterprise companies hire full-time, in-house employees to handle the day-to-day content marketing responsibilities and then outsource special projects to agencies or freelancers. Other enterprise companies may hire a few key players in-house who manage content processes while outsourcing the bulk of their content creation to contractors or agencies.

Outsourcing to B2B content marketing agencies fills in the skillset gaps in your team. Rather than hiring a specialist for every area of your content marketing, you can hire an agency with a whole team of specialists. This allows you to get the support you need without the time and money that goes into finding, hiring, training, and managing more employees.

2. Conduct a content audit

Before your team creates new content, start by auditing existing content. A content audit can identify:

• Gaps in your content marketing strategy
• Pieces of content that can be reused and repurposed
• Content that needs to be updated
• Content that needs to be optimized
• Pieces of content that should be retired

While auditing existing content, create a database or hub where your team can document all existing content assets. This will be useful when looking for content on specific topics to share with the sales or customer support teams. It also makes content repurposing faster and easier.

Here’s an example of what a content audit spreadsheet may look like from Semrush:

Source:semrush.com

Your content audit should also include an enterprise SEO audit. Audit off- and on-page SEO factors to identify areas for opportunity and improvement.

3. Research your competitors’ content

Analyzing competitor content gives you unique insights into the strategies and tactics competitors use to reach, engage, and convert a similar target audience. Seeing what works and doesn’t work for your competitors can inform your content strategy.

For example, your company has been looking for more interactive ways to engage with potential customers. While researching competitors, you find two of your major competitors have a lot of success with webinars. This may inspire you to test out webinars.

A competitor content audit is less about copying what your competitors are doing and more about seeing what your target audience responds to best. Not everything your competitors do with their content will work for your business, but you may get interesting ideas.

4. Find SEO keyword opportunities

Content marketing and SEO go hand-in-hand. One of the best ways for an enterprise company to keep up with competitors is by finding keyword opportunities it can rank for to drive more organic traffic to its site.

While doing keyword research, look for relevant keywords with higher search volume and lower keyword difficulty. You can also look for keywords your competitors rank for to find even more opportunities to get ahead with search engine optimization.

Use content marketing tools like Semrush to identify keyword gaps. Just enter your domain and the domains of your competitors to see how you stack up in terms of search rankings for relevant keywords.

5. Map out content for all stages of the funnel

Content Marketing Institute found that top-performing enterprise marketers stand apart from their peers by crafting content based on the stages of the buyer’s journey.

That’s because when you create content tailored to each buyer’s journey stage, you’re giving the audience in that stage exactly what they need to move forward and further down the funnel.

The buyer’s journey stage will impact the format of your content and content topics. For example, buyers in the awareness stage are just becoming aware of their pain points and may not understand how to articulate their challenges.

Educational content like whitepapers and podcast episodes helps buyers better understand their problems.

This infographic is an excellent resource for identifying which types of content work best during each stage of the buyer’s journey:

6. Create a content calendar

After mapping the content formats and topics across the buyer’s journey, create a content calendar. This tool organizes and tracks new content marketing campaigns across channels.

Enterprise companies have to plan for and keep track of a high content volume. Content calendar software like CoSchedule helps the marketing team organize content by marketing campaign and channel.

This type of software is also collaborative, allowing multiple team members to work within the same calendar. It even offers features like posting directly to social media channels and WordPress and a system for content approvals from stakeholders.

7. Build content marketing processes & workflows

According to Content Marketing Institute, one of the greatest content marketing challenges for enterprises is internal communication among teams and silos (64% struggle with this).

Building and documenting enterprise content management processes and workflows keeps everyone on the same page regarding content marketing.

Many enterprise businesses have decision-makers who must review and approve content before publishing it. This might include a subject matter expert who checks the content for accuracy, a legal team member who makes sure the content meets the company’s legal requirements, and an editor who reviews the content for messaging and brand voice.

Your content marketing team must develop an approval process to ensure that every piece of content is reviewed and approved by the necessary parties before publication.

That approval process could look like this:

• The writer delivers content to the subject matter expert (SME) to check for accuracy.
• The SME checks the content for accuracy and leaves any comments needed for revision.
• The writer then revises the content based on the SME’s comments and sends it to the editor to review for grammar and brand messaging.
• When the editor’s review is finished, they’ll send it to legal for review.
• Legal sends the approved piece back to the editor to publish.

[Could include a graphic visually depicting the process above]

With so many different assets in different stages of content creation, enterprise businesses rely on defined processes and workflows to maintain efficiency and promote clear communication. Enterprise content teams can also use automation to keep these workflows running smoothly.

8. Create high-quality content

Once the team has created a content marketing plan, it’s time to implement it. From LinkedIn posts to landing pages, each piece of content should be written in the company’s brand voice so that it all sounds like one organization.

In addition to aligning with the company’s messaging, effective content is also:

• Well-researched with reputable sources
• In-depth on the topic
• Engaging for the target audience
• Formatted for easy consumption
• Optimized for search engines
• Demonstrating expertise

Don’t be afraid to use different media types within one piece of content. For example, you can embed videos and include graphics in your blog posts to make them more engaging.

9. Publish and promote content

It doesn’t matter how great your content marketing is if no one can see it. Once you publish using your content management system (CMS) or scheduling tool, it’s time to promote the content.

Content promotional strategies can include sharing a blog post on social media to using PPC ads to get more ebook downloads. The best promotional strategy will depend on the goals and audience for the content marketing campaign.

Here’s a great example of social media content promotion from Shopify:

10. Measure and analyze results

Enterprise marketing teams need to track, measure, and analyze content performance regularly to evaluate the effectiveness of content marketing campaigns.

The metrics you measure will depend on the key performance indicators (KPIs) you’ve identified for each piece of content. For example, if you’ve written SEO-focused blog posts to increase your visibility on search engines, you may use SEO keyword rankings as a metric.

On the other hand, if you’ve created a social media campaign to attract new customers, you’d likely measure conversion rates.

What are the most common types of enterprise content?

Enterprise brands typically use a variety of tactics and channels to deliver tailored content to their audiences across the globe. Here are the most common types of content large businesses use to reach their target audiences.

• Social media content
• Email marketing
• Blog posts
• Videos
• Case studies
• Webinars

Social media content

No enterprise B2C or B2B marketing plan is complete without social media marketing.

Consumers use social channels to learn about and interact with enterprise brands. In fact, 76.1% of Internet users report using a social media platform for brand or product research.

Spotify is an ecommerce company that uses social media to share more about the artists on its platform. This allows potential customers to gelearnhe product while helping current customers get the most out of their Spotify subscription.

Email marketing

On average, for every $1 marketers spend on email marketing, they make a return of $36. With a stat like that, it’s easy to see why enterprise brands leverage email marketing content to reach, nurture, engage, and sell to their audiences.

Nike is just one example of an enterprise brand that uses email marketing as part of its ecommerce content marketing strategy. This popular shoe brand uses email marketing to update customers about new products and promotions, helping drive site traffic and conversions.

Source:fetchprofits.com

Alt-text: Nike enterprise email example

Blog posts

Blog posts are great for SEO and educating your audience on important industry topics throughout the sales funnel. And, it’s an effective channel for long-form content. Some content marketers report strong results with blog posts that feature guides, ebooks, and gated content.

Patagonia uses its blog to share stories about sports, culture, and the planet—topics that appeal to their ideal buyers. This is a great example of an enterprise business using content marketing to educate and entertain its audience rather than merely talk about its products.

Videos

Video is a popular form of content across audiences. It’s also ideal for communicating complex ideas and helping potential customers understand how a product or service works. One survey showed that 93% of consumers said video helped them make a purchasing decision.

Microsoft is an enterprise company that uses video to share tutorials on their products and thought leadership in their industry. This type of video marketing attracts new customers and retains current customers by helping them get more out of the tools they’ve already purchased.

Case studies

Case studies are the best way to show potential customers how your products or services can help them. Rather than discussing potential benefits, case studies zero in on actual customer results, which go a long way in showing the transformation enterprise companies offer.

In fact, one thing that sets the most successful content marketers apart from the rest is their use of case studies (73% of successful content marketers use them).

Salesforce offers an excellent example of SaaS content marketing in action using case studies. The enterprise software brand has a whole website page dedicated to its customer success stories. Each customer story has its own post that shares the customer’s challenges, goals, and results using Salesforce.

Webinars

Webinars aren’t just for SaaS marketing. Many B2B enterprise businesses use webinars to educate customers and drive new leads. According to the ON24 2023 Webinar Benchmark Report, 92% of webinar attendees say this format is a valuable way to learn more information.

HubSpot uses webinars as part of its enterprise content marketing strategy. These webinars show how to use HubSpot and educate its audiences on topics they find important, like AI marketing and digital advertising.

The takeaway

Creating and publishing content at scale presents many unique challenges. However, with a solid content marketing strategy, any enterprise business can build a content engine that fuels its organic marketing efforts.

Whether you want support with a special project or need to fill a skillset gap in your content team, partnering with an experienced content marketing agency can ensure your company implements every aspect of its content strategy.

HawkSEM would love to be your enterprise company’s agency partner. Reach out to learn how we can support you.