Enterprise Content Marketing (Guide for 2025)

An enterprise content strategy is a digital marketing tactic that utilizes content production to attract prospective enterprise customers for a B2B business. Most commonly, enterprise focused companies that use content strategies to acquire MQLs (marketing qualified leads) and SQLs (sales qualified leads).

Key Takeaways

• Aside from trade shows and referrals, content marketing sits third as one of the top marketing tactics used by digital marketing teams to acquire SQLs (sales qualified leads).
• Planning an enterprise content strategy requires research in knowing what platforms and places your customers and prospects frequent, then planning topics and execution methods that directly align with ideas that will generate an audience and engagement for the "unaware" stage of the buyer journey.
• Turning a prospect from the "unaware" stage, where they have no idea that they have a business problem that needs to be solved, into a company aware prospect, where they are aware of companies that solve relevant business needs, is the primary goal of content marketing.

What is Enterprise Content Marketing?

Enterprise content marketing is a digital marketing strategic approach used by largeer organizations to create, distribute, and manage valuable and consistent content to attract, engage, and retain a defined audience (usually classified as ideal customer personas). The digital marketing technique focuses on delivering relevant and high-quality information that aligns with the organization’s business goals, enhances brand authority, and drives customer actions such as purchasing a product or service, driving customer loyalty, or driving customer advocacy.

Components of Enterprise Content Marketing:

1. Content Strategy: A well-defined contentplan that aligns with the organization’s objectives, target audience, and messaging.
2. Content Creation: The development of high-quality content such as blog posts, whitepapers, videos, infographics, case studies, and webinars.
3. Content Distribution: Utilizing owned channels (e.g., company website, email newsletters), paid channels (e.g., sponsored posts, ads), and earned media (e.g., social shares, press coverage) to maximize reach.
4. Analytics and Optimization: Tracking performance metrics (e.g., engagement, conversions) and refining strategies to improve effectiveness.

Characteristics of Enterprise Content Marketing:

• Scalability: Enterprises produce content at a much larger scale than smaller businesses, requiring robust tools and teams.
• Technology Integration: Use of advanced content management systems (CMS), marketing automation platforms, and analytics tools.
• Cross-functional Collaboration: The coordination among marketing, sales, customer support, and other departments.
• Global Reach: Content often needs to cater to diverse audiences across multiple regions and languages.

Goals of Enterprise Content Marketing:

• Build brand awareness and credibility around a set audience.
• Generate and nurture leads or SQLs.
• Support customer retention and engagement by staying a thought leader in the space they sell into.
• Drive revenue growth and customer lifetime value.

An enterprise content marketing strategy is particularly effective in sectors like technology, healthcare, finance, and manufacturing, where complex products or services benefit from in-depth content that educates and builds trust with potential customers.

Step 1: Planning an Enterprise Content Marketing Strategy

Prior to any enterprise content marketing investment, leadership should decipher how, when, and where their prospective customers “shop” for similar offerings. In addition, leadership teams should determine what types of enterprise marketing KPIs they’re looking to impact. For example, some teams may decide that they don’t necessarily have a direct revenue goal with their marketing efforts, rather, a brand awareness effort.

Want to skip this whole process? Consider hiring an agency that knows how to get a converting content engine for your enterprise business started quickly. Look at our services here.

Here’s what we should think about when we start putting together our plan:

Knowing where your prospects frequent

Knowing where our prospects frequent, usually in terms of platforms or publications, can help in placing marketing efforts and building a roadmap of where the marketing efforts will take place and what types of methods will be used.

For example, a common platform for enterprises to use for content marketing will be LinkedIn. Since many professionals frequent LinkedIn and use it as a source for staying in touch with industry changes, trends, and more.

Another common place that professionals frequent are niche newsletters or publications that stay abreast with the same industry changes. For example, if we were selling into the advertising space, we may want to try and get more published pieces on AdWeek or other publications where advertising agencies read.

Knowing how they gain interest in an offering

How our prospects gain interest in an offering is vital to understand. The question is: how does their buying journey begin and how does it end? Generally speaking, we can think of an enterprise content strategy very similarly to how a SaaS company or B2B company may think of it.

Related: Enterprise SaaS SEO Strategy (Guide)

Unaware

The unaware stage is when an enterprise prospect is completely unaware that they have a business problem that’s worthy of solving. For example, if we were selling into the commercial real estate field, our prospects might not be aware that they could have better tooling for managing their investments and getting more real-time updates on their properties.

However, our prospects might not realize this is even a problem or that something with their business could be improved. This is where content marketing can help.

Related: How to Measure SaaS Content Marketing (Guide)

Problem Aware

The core part of the content marketing strategy should be to take our unaware prospects and to make them aware. This is the most pivotal part of the strategy. Since this is when we can inform our market about what we know. And what they may not know.

In general, turning prospects into problem aware prospects is going to be the most critical function and desired outcome of our enterprise content marketing strategy.

Solution Aware

Shared along with the problem aware stage of our prospect, the solution aware prospect should start to realize that there is a solution out there. Whether they choose to act on it is where we can utilize the actual marketing site or landing pages to specifically motivate our solution aware prospects into becoming MQLs and SQLs.

Related: MQLs vs SQLs

Product/Company Aware

A key part of the product aware or company aware prospect is that they become more familiar with our brand name. This has compounding effects over time. For example, enterprise prospects most likely require multiple decision-makers to be involved in key buying decisions. Enterprise offerings are usually higher ticket value contracts. As a result, more brand awareness can increase trust and authority of a business to cause decision-makers to want to sign.

Knowing what KPIs or metrics we’re targeting

There are more than 41 metrics that an enterprise business can track from an SEO or content marketing strategy. Some of them are defined as the following:

Account metrics

• Account-Based Engagement from Organic Traffic: The total number of high-value accounts (e.g., enterprise clients) engaging via organic search. As determined by having audience and first-party data insights.
• Target Account Reach: Percentage of target enterprise accounts engaging with content via organic search. Determined by having audience and first-party data insights.

Pipeline metrics

• Pipeline Contribution: The total percentage of the sales pipeline attributed to having come from content marketing efforts.
• Sales Velocity: (Number of deals × ACV × Conversion Rate) ÷ Average Sales Cycle.
• Lead-to-Account Mapping: The number of organic leads matched to key B2B or enterprise accounts.

Buyer journey metrics

• Content Consumption by Buyer Persona: Which persona consumes driven content and how it influences their decision-making in becoming a contracted customer.
• Intent Alignment Metrics: Sessions and conversions segmented by high-intent keywords or queries. Usually determined by cohorts of content types and the information taken from the lead generation.

Localization metrics (if applicable)

• Regional Performance: Content performance broken down by their geographic regions (e.g., APAC, EMEA).
• Localized Pipeline Growth: Revenue or leads from specific territories. And calculated by overall pipeline count.

Advanced attribution metrics

• Multi-Touch Attribution for Organic: Contribution of organic traffic across different touchpoints in the sales funnel.
• Content Impact on Assisted Conversions: The number of conversions where incoming content traffic was part of the user journey.

Market and competitive insights

• Market Penetration: Content marketing efforts compared to overall market opportunity. Sometimes considered to be market share or share of voice.
• Contribution to Market Share: The percentage of overall market traffic captured via content marketing efforts.

Content metrics

• Content Efficiency Ratio: (SEO Revenue or Leads from Content) ÷ Content Costs.
• Recurring Organic Value: Looking at long-term value derived from evergreen content.

Customer retention metrics

• Retention Rate of Content-Acquired Customers: Calculated by looking at the percentage of customers acquired via content-related traffic that renew contracts or make repeat purchases.
• Churn Rate of Customers from Content Marketing: The percentage of content- customers lost over a specific period.

Being highly specific in the metrics that we want to be attributed to our campaign can be key in setting teams up for success.

Planning a paid media budget as part of your efforts

Using paid advertising along with your content marketing efforts can be a critical part of getting the ball rolling. For example, publishing on specific or private publications may require a sponsored editorial fee. Or building your initial audience on LinkedIn may require some "boosting" of content through their paid advertising tools.

Most commonly, a marketing department will have a set budget for content marketing and allocate at least 10-30% of that budget toward paid marketing fees that are associated with the content marketing efforts. These fees do not include PPC advertising, like through paid search marketing, since that's more closely related to advertising budget than it would be content marketing budget.

If your content marketing team is also managing the SEO channel, you may want to increase your overall budget for content marketing as enterprise SEO efforts can be more costly than simple advertising methods. And can take anywhere from 6-months to 12-months to have a complete payback period.

Related: SaaS Content Writing (Guide)

Step 2: Executing Your Enterprise Content Marketing Campaign

In the age of “content is king,” it can be challenging to get the attention of our prospects. The trick is simple: say something truly compelling and unique. Often, this may fall into the bucket of staying ahead of upcoming trends. For example, in the age of “AI is everything,” there may be a number of talking points that your prospects are interested in learning about.

For example, since we sell SEO services, we may want to discuss GPTSearch and how that’s going to impact SEO in the long-run. This would be a topic that’s ahead of the curve (usually where our target customers are) as well as establishes ourselves as a trustworthy source of knowledge about the space.

This the silver-bullet for any type of enterprise content strategy: engaging, educational, unique, and authority content marketing.

Start with a roadmap of topics

The first step in any content marketing strategy is deciding what topics you want to touch on. These can be pain points or focus areas. They don’t have to be individual post titles. They can simply be ideas.

For example, “AI” would be a focus area that you may want to touch on. Generating as many of these relevant opportunities as possible can be extremely helpful in deciding and crafting what you’re going to say in order to start building an audience.

Rank topics by how saturated they are

Ranking these topics is equally as important. Try not to limit yourself in what you think the topics should be. Wait until this stage to fully prioritize. For example, let’s say we were speaking about project management in the construction industry. “AI” would certainly be a talking point. However, “workflows” and “automations” may also be a strong potential talking point to use content marketing to build an audience.

Which of these three is more important? I would probably pick the AI topic first just seeing as there are more unknowns. The more unknowns that an unaware prospect may have, the more opportunity there is for them to lean on content marketing for the insights.

Related: SaaS Content Strategy (Guide)

Know your distribution channels

There’s going to be no surprise here, our favorite distribution channel is organic search (or SEO). Why? The channel is still extremely strong at building inbound demand. And most enterprise customers still use search tools to investigate information that they’re looking for.

For example, many of the enterprise customers that we sell into don’t go to LinkedIn or Facebook as their first destination to start performing research. They usually still go into search engines. As a result, we believe this channel is still the most valuable one to go after.

Knowing your distribution channels can help you decipher what and how you need to execute. For example, some of these would be considered distribution channels:

1. Google or SEO
2. LinkedIn
3. Private publications
4. Private newsletters
5. Niche forums
6. Reddit or Quora
7. YouTube

Related: What is SaaS Marketing? (Guide)

Pick your execution method (your actual content)

Your execution method (and what you decide to write or produce) is going to vary based on your distribution channel. For example, if we’re content marketing into YouTube, then our form of marketing is going to be video. Or if we’re trying to market content for SEO, then our primary method is probably going to be informational articles with extremely well-optimized content for search engines.

In short, with all of these data points, you should be able to start generating some actual topic and post ideas based on your initial survey of topic points that you wanted to discuss as well as your research for where you believe your prospects frequent (what platforms or places).

Enterprise Content Marketing Example

BrightEdge is an enterprise SEO tool that helps enterprise content marketing teams with their efforts. Brightedge is a software-as-a-service tool, however, relies heavily on demo schedules to bring in new customers and to secure long-term contracts and commitments. Their strategy is highly similar to what most enterprise businesses would want to execute.

I like them as an example since they pick their channels wisely. Primarily, they choose SEO as one of their primary content marketing channels.

SEO

We can see that BrightEdge is bringing in more than 40,000 qualified monthly visitors to their website using editorial content around trending topics.

LinkedIn

We can see that they do a pretty decent job of ensuring that there's posts going to LinkedIn. But from what I can tell in these examples, they're most likely getting most of their SQL growth from SEO. However, they have amassed a more than 127,000 follower count on LinkedIn through these content marketing efforts.

YouTube

While there are some videos on their YouTube channel, BrightEdge decided to focus on customer stories instead of focusing on content related to bringing in an audience. While this may be supportive to other marketing efforts, this can still work well. Customer stories may be a primary part of research when our enterprise prospect goes from being unaware to being company aware.