How to Create an Enterprise Content Strategy

Driving growth for a business includes a number of varied strategies. One of which is enhancing its online presence—a progressively more important aspect of businesses given just how much the digital-first world has developed and dominated the market. Developing an effective enterprise content marketing strategy is one of the best ways to foster this growth. 

An enterprise content marketing strategy extends beyond traditional marketing efforts. Intent on a holistic approach, this tactic involves targeting multiple channels to engage a broad audience and maintain a consistent narrative across all platforms. Achieving the best results requires a solid brand identity and numerous methods across different platforms. 

What is an Enterprise Content Marketing Strategy?

Designed to meet the complex needs of large-scale organisations, enterprise content marketing takes on a tailored approach. By incorporating a variety of content forms across multiple platforms, it aims to engage target audiences throughout every stage of the sales funnel. The goal is to create content that raises brand awareness, drives conversions, and fosters a higher customer lifetime value (LTV) while supporting long-term business objectives. 

The Importance of Strategic Planning

Businesses can use strategic planning and an enterprise content strategy to ensure that every piece of content they create will directly support important outcomes and objectives. These can range from customer engagement to generating leads and driving revenue. Utilising this approach allows companies to use resources more efficiently, enhance the effectiveness of content produced and maintain uniformity across all platforms. This, in turn, results in boosted brand recognition and fosters increased trust between a business and its customers. Strategic planning turns content into a powerful tool that assists in meeting strategic business objectives and key performance indicators (KPIs). 

Crafting Your Enterprise Content Strategy

Foundational to the success of any marketing team is creating and developing an effective and robust enterprise content strategy. Your team can use this tactical framework to orchestrate content marketing efforts that connect and resonate with your audience. 

The process begins with three critical steps: defining your precise marketing objectives, understanding your audience, and conducting a thorough content audit. 

Step 1: Define Your Goals and Objectives

The first step in developing a successful enterprise content strategy is clearly defining your marketing team’s goals. Whether increasing search visibility, improving keyword rankings, or enhancing customer engagement, having clear objectives will guide content creation while ensuring all efforts align with the company’s needs.

Here is a list of suggested goals and objectives:

• Enhance Brand Consistency: This can involve the development of company-wide guidelines for internal and external use. From typography to naming conventions, tone of voice, logos and more, brand consistency is incredibly important to developing an identity that resonates. Additionally, ensure your brand is consistently marketed across all platforms for a uniform and clear message that ensures a cohesive user experience. 

• Align Content with User Intent: All content must align with different user segments' specific needs and intents. Addressing a customer’s concerns at various customer journey stages can increase the likelihood of product or service purchases and LTV. 

• Boost Content Engagement: Increasing the time users spend interacting with your content is a great way to establish a consistent audience. This involves enhancing the interactivity of your content or refining storytelling elements found in blogs, social media posts and electronic direct mail content (EDM). 

• Enhance Lead Quality: Rather than simply increasing the number of leads you generate, striving for improved lead quality is a great way to grow your company’s long-term revenue. This can be achieved by creating content that attracts more informed and engaging prospects at various funnel stages. 

• Expand Brand Reach: Expanding your brand’s reach will help you target new demographic segments or expand your geographical market. This can be achieved through tailored content campaigns, often conducted through social media channels. 

Employing these objectives or similar goals can help align your enterprise content strategies with broader marketing and business targets. This ensures that each piece of content you produce serves a precise purpose in your company's overarching aims.

Step 2: Analyse Your Target Audience

Understanding your target audience before implementing your marketing strategy is important. This step involves analysing customer data to develop customer personas. Customer personas often represent what a typical customer looks like, their intentions, and what devices they may use. These personas can help you create relevant content on the correct platforms that truly connect with your audience, address their intentions and challenges, and successfully guide them through the sales funnel. 

Step 3: Conduct a Content Audit

Reviewing your business's previous content is a great way to identify gaps and opportunities your new strategy can capitalise on. Audits help evaluate the performance of your current content and determine what can be repurposed or updated to meet your marketing goals and better match your audience’s search intent. 

Implementing Your Strategy

Once the groundwork for your enterprise content strategy has been laid, the focus can move to implementation.  

Creating Relevant Content

Now that you’ve developed your enterprise content strategy, the next step is to produce content that addresses the needs of your audience at every stage of their journey. From informational blog posts to engaging videos and in-depth white papers, each piece must provide value and enhance the user’s experience. 

SEO Community and Search Engines

Search engine optimisation (SEO) is a cornerstone of creating content that ranks well organically. It involves using particular keywords to improve search visibility and aligning content with the audience’s search intent to boost organic traffic. 

For example, if your target audience is enterprising organisations, you could take the keyword ‘enterprise organisations’ and write organic blog content focusing on this topic or a niche within it. This can ensure that your business’ content organically ranks higher when someone uses a search engine like Google for that keyword (and other related phrases). Which, in turn, can generate more leads for your business. 

Leveraging Multiple Channels and Platforms

Distributing your content across multiple platforms is a great way of cross-promoting your brand and maximising the reach or impact of each piece you produce. This helps ensure you’re on the same page as your audience, regardless of where they spend their time online and on what devices they engage with your brand. Social media, email marketing, and your main website can greatly contribute to maintaining a cohesive brand voice and message across all platforms. 

Measuring and Adjusting

Tracking how your newly developed content performs through KPIs is key to ensuring your new tactics and strategies have achieved their goals. Analysing metrics such as page views, conversion rates, and engagement levels will provide valuable insight into what content works and what doesn’t. This helps your content developers adjust their approach to producing better content in the future and allows your strategists to change certain plans to account for these learnings. 

Enterprise Content Strategy Checklist

1. Strategic Planning

• Define clear marketing objectives.

• Ensure all content aligns with broader business goals.

2. Define Goals and Objectives

• Develop company-wide guidelines for brand consistency.

• Align content with user intent across different segments.

• Focus on boosting content engagement.

• Aim to enhance lead quality.

• Work on expanding brand reach.

3. Analyse Your Target Audience

• Collect and analyse customer data.

• Develop detailed customer personas.

• Identify the platforms and media your audience engages with.

4. Conduct a Content Audit

• Review existing content for relevance and effectiveness.

• Identify gaps in current content offerings.

• Determine content repurposing opportunities.

5. Create Relevant Content

• Develop content for all stages of the customer journey.

• Ensure content provides value and enhances user experience.

6. SEO Community and Search Engines

• Utilise strategic keywords to improve search visibility.

• Align content with the search intent of your target audience.

7. Leveraging Multiple Channels

• Distribute content across multiple platforms (e.g., social media, email, main website).

• Maintain a cohesive brand voice and message across all channels.

8. Monitoring and Adjusting

• Track performance using Key Performance Indicators (KPIs).

• Analyse metrics such as page views, conversion rates, and engagement levels.

• Make necessary adjustments based on performance data.

9. Continuous Improvement

• Regularly update and refine content strategies.

• Stay adaptable to changes in market conditions and audience preferences.

•  Consider external expertise, like content strategy agencies, for specialised content needs.

This checklist will help keep your strategy on track and ensure it’s planned, implemented and continuously improved. 

Fostering Continuous Improvement

Enterprise content strategies are dynamic components of your overall marketing strategy that require continual adjustments. Through analysis and an agile approach to content creation and distribution, you can ensure that your business’s content stays relevant and continues to meet the evolving needs of your company and your audience.

Some businesses may require assistance with such strategies from an agency that specialises in certain forms of content, like G Squared. By outsourcing, you can ensure that a dedicated team will handle the logistics of these enterprise content strategies and help lay a strong foundation for sustained business growth in the digital world.