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As a marketer, you know just how important it is to harness a strategic approach to delighting customers and driving the business forward. More than basic advertisements and outreach, marketing activities need to be adaptable based on your given industry and what you learn from customer interactions.
You may believe that enterprises, with their size and resources, are more effective with marketing. But enterprises can learn a lot from startups. These newer, smaller companies have an ingrained agility that allows them to respond to current trends and pivot quickly when necessary. These benefits can be game-changers in helping them scale.
This guide covers lessons enterprises can learn from startups to improve their enterprise marketing strategies.
What Is an Enterprise Marketing Strategy?
First, let's define enterprise marketing strategy. This kind of strategy supports the company in all things marketing, from establishing the right content channels to identifying the target audience to tracking key marketing metrics. These parts work together to help the enterprise attract the right people and get more business.
Enterprises often have a large internal marketing team made up of content creators, designers, and strategists who create marketing content and manage the company's different channels. An enterprise-level marketing strategy is necessary for companies to build brand awareness, establish long-term customer relationships, and drive revenue.
But the catch is to effectively review and shift this strategy when the need arises. While enterprise marketers have more resources at their fingertips, including team members and funds, it's not always easy for enterprises to keep their marketing goals aligned with the business's mission or respond quickly to changes in customer needs.
Believe it or not, these challenges can be addressed with a few lessons from startup marketing.
What Can Enterprises Learn from Startups?
Think of an enterprise as a huge cargo ship. It takes a lot of time and effort to turn the ship to respond to changes in the environment. On the other hand, a startup is more like a speed boat that can adapt and swerve quickly when required. This is one of the biggest advantages startups have when creating a winning marketing strategy.
For example, in startup culture, it's usually impossible to plan more than one quarter in advance. The market changes so rapidly for startups. Market demand pivots, and customer sentiment shifts. Startups need to react fast to those changes to stay relevant and keep growing.
This is an important differentiator that enterprises can learn to embrace. While it's not always possible to have that kind of agility, enterprise marketers can still think in those terms to improve their strategy and stand out.
Weighing Long-Term Content Planning With Agility
In practice, enterprises need to be intentional about implementing bits and pieces of startup strategy to create more well-rounded marketing campaigns. Building agility begins with harnessing the company vision and addressing changing market demands.
Company Vision and Your Marketing Brand
Most functions of a startup are handled by the founder, at least initially. Founders and early business leaders have a clear long-term vision for the company, driven by their passion for the industry or product. This is why founders are really good at:
- Framing the business as driven by passion
- Aligning long-term planning with the vision
Everything throughout the startup links back to that overall vision and mission. Branding closely aligns with that purpose, and all marketing content then webs out from there. The vision applies to each and every channel to create a consistent voice and presence.
The good news for enterprises: If you talk consistently about your mission and vision and the problem you're solving for your customers, you'll ensure that vision won't get lost in the size of your enterprise.
Market Demand and the Ideal Timeframe for Content Planning
Enterprise marketers are usually thinking steps ahead and planning months in advance. However, you can take a play from the startup playbook in terms of reacting to changing market demand.
Incorporate a process that allows for quick responses. You want your team to be able to pivot when demand changes. This means thinking about the future with your content calendar, but also leaving room for regular reviews and shifts in your plans. Pay attention to short-term swings that impact your ideal customer.
Where Do Enterprises and Startups Meet Marketing-Wise?
Enterprises and startups aren't all different when it comes to marketing. Here are a few places where the two marketers meet.
1. Know Your Target Audience Inside and Out
"Know thy customer" is the foundation of marketing, no matter the business size. Marketers should be obsessed with customer personas and identifying the ideal customer. Who is coming to your website? Who is becoming a paying customer? Which potential customers are you not reaching? Why?
Implement more robust strategies to dig into that target audience. For example, the startup Fellow, an AI meeting management platform, encourages its marketing team to watch discovery calls to learn about new customers firsthand.
You can also harness platforms like LinkedIn to learn about the market and what ideal customers care about. Follow what they're posting about and what their day-to-day struggles are.
2. Funnel Your Audience's Needs Into Marketing
When you can pinpoint your ideal customer and practice empathy to uncover their desires and struggles, you can then funnel those needs into your marketing initiatives. This practice allows you to respond faster to any changes they may be going through so you're ready to pivot when the ship needs to change course.
This is also where the sales department comes into play. Align goals and information from the sales team to inform the enterprise content strategy and figure out what customers really need at a given moment. This starts with better collaboration and cross-functional communication.
3. Align Your Internal Teams With Regular Cross-Functional Communications
All organizations need a commitment to collaboration and cross-department communication. This means relying on better communication tools and holding regular meetings.
The goal is to bridge any gaps between departments so that all teams understand what's going on with customers. Meetings can allow team members to share customer wins and stories. It's important to celebrate small moments and wins.
For instance, the Fellow team has a customer insights channel in Slack. Any team member can share a customer story or lesson learned so the whole organization benefits from that information. Everyone needs to consistently hear about the customer to drive successful marketing.
Another strategy Fellow relies on is internal marketing. If your own team isn't excited about what you're doing, the outside world won't be excited, either. Enterprise-level companies should practice marketing to internal teams about their new initiatives and valuable content, showing how it all aligns with the company's vision and customer needs. This helps improve enterprise marketing communications as a whole.
4. Document Processes and Marketing Efforts
The Fellow team recognizes the benefits of platforms that boost collaboration. They want the entire company to know what marketing is up to, including what's working and what isn't.
Documentation is key for any team, but especially for remote teams. The more delegation and teams you have as an enterprise, the more inevitable silos become. But having documentation avenues and a process in place for sharing wins and communicating improves cross-functional collaboration.
This is important for enterprises. Startup teams have the ability to contact anyone they need at any time. Everyone is aware of who owns what, and there's not a lot of red tape to get information. There's more collaboration.
Large-scale businesses usually don't have as many opportunities for collaboration. They have to get more creative to ensure documentation and communication remain strong and effective.
Fuel Your Enterprise Strategy With Lessons From Startups
Enterprises may focus more on the long-term vision and have a hard time pivoting when the market shifts. Startups are much more agile, but may not have the complete team and resources they need to lean fully into marketing, especially when trying to scale the company.
The goal is to find the best of both worlds. Enterprises can learn a lot from the cross-functional collaboration startups depend on, in addition to the flexible mindset required to respond to market demand.
Breaking down silos by communicating regularly, celebrating wins across departments, and sharing customer successes can all help that collaboration. Larger companies must also strive to align all marketing decision-making with the organization's greater mission and vision.
Level Up Your Marketing Content With Compose.ly
Any modern business knows just how important digital content is to connect with people. When you need a better, more strategic approach to your content, the B2B enterprise marketing team at Compose.ly can deliver.
Our experts cover all aspects of your enterprise digital marketing strategy needs, from email to enterprise content marketing to SEO. We provide the enterprise-level marketing intelligence your team may be missing.
Take a look at our on-demand webinar on what enterprises can learn from startups. Work with Compose.ly today to find out how we can help you improve your enterprise marketing strategy and access professional writing services.
