Enterprise Content Marketing: The Guide to Building a Plan

When marketing gets too overwhelming, keeping things in perspective is important. Every wildly successful SaaS unicorn — from Toast to Miro to monday.com — began their journey as a startup, navigating the challenges of scaling up with a scrappy approach to growth. 

At the early stage, content marketing is often an ad hoc process spread across founders and early hires, focusing on core tasks like product launches and brand building. Founders do LinkedIn brand-building, engineers are subject matter experts, and everyone pitches in for website quality assurance.

But as seed money and revenue continue to climb, these companies can’t rely on leadership and internal subject matter experts contributing on the content front. 

Enterprise-scale content marketing is the solution. 

In this piece, we’ll walk through the transition that growing SaaS brands need to build an enterprise content marketing engine. 

Understanding the Enterprise Content Marketing Production Process

Enterprise content marketing refers to the processes, platforms, and personnel that large companies use to achieve their content goals at scale.   

For SaaS companies, the goal for any piece of content is to move your customer towards a desired action — whether it’s downloading an eBook, subscribing to a newsletter, or signing up for a freemium account. At the enterprise level, this journey starts by creating content that will appear across thousands of different SERP pages and other channels. 

Getting massive amounts of content to show up in suitable digital spaces involves strategy, planning, production, distribution, and analysis.

It’s important to remember that it’s not a set-it-and-forget-it approach — enterprise marketing teams constantly move through each of these five stages to ensure content brings in new leads.  

Let’s take a look at these stages. 

Step 1: Strategy Phase

Strategy is the foundation that supports any good content marketing campaign. It’s where you outline how you’ll create different types of assets to achieve goals like user acquisition, brand enhancement, or educating your audience on a new product category. 

The phase begins with the content strategy — the overarching blueprint for the content’s role within the organization — and progresses to the content marketing strategy, which focuses on executing content to engage and convert audiences. 

(You can learn more about the difference between content strategy and content marketing strategy here.)

You connect the dots between these two strategies with the following steps:

• Goal Setting: Identify what your company wants to achieve through content, from enhancing brand visibility to driving conversions to building topic authority in your niche.
• Audience Analysis: Understand your target audience and their needs, preferences, and behaviours to craft relevant and resonant content.
• Content Audit: Assess your existing web content to identify gaps in topic coverage and opportunities for content optimization.
• Competitor Analysis: Analyze competitors’ content strategies to identify market trends and benchmarks for success.
• Develop a Content Model: Outline the types of content you’ll produce, considering search intents, formats, themes, and distribution channels.
• Define Your Content Experience: Ensure the content journey aligns with user expectations and your marketing channels.
• Establish Metrics and KPIs: Select the SaaS metrics you’ll use to track you’re content’s impact.

The content strategy that works best for your brand is highly dependent on your niche. If you operate in a crowded, well-established industry, you’ll have a different content strategy than a company in a growing niche like AI video generation. 

For example, the project management and CRM niches are quite saturated. So, companies like monday.com, Zoho, and HubSpot must invest more in mid-funnel and bottom-of-the-funnel (BOFU) content that differentiates their product from competitors. Meanwhile, Synthesia should focus on content that educates the market about AI video generators’ value to businesses since their niche is newer and rapidly growing. 

For a deep dive into creating your enterprise content marketing strategy, listen to Create Like the Greats podcast episode, or check out the video below. 

Step 2: Enterprise SEO and Topic Planning

A startup SaaS brand might have to manage SEO across a few web pages. That number grows into the hundreds as the company grows to an SMB or midmarket brand. But this is still a drop in the bucket compared to enterprise companies. 

An enterprise company has to juggle on-page, off-page, and technical SEO best practices across thousands of pages. This gargantuan scale amplifies the complexity and importance of strategic planning and meticulous monitoring.

Targeting the right short- and long-tail keywords with quality content is a powerful strategy to drive traffic and conversions in SaaS. Just take a look at these keyword stats from some of the leading brands across different niches: 

Identifying the search terms that refer to your core product or service is a key first step. 

Make sure that your homepage and high-intent landing pages contain these terms throughout the header, page copy, and meta attributes. Then, you can use other tactics like pillar pages or topic clusters to build out your SEO moat around a larger section of relevant SERPs. 

As you saw above, NerdWallet has over 21 million organic visitors monthly. They’ve captured such a large amount of organic traffic by taking the typical funnel strategy and replicating it across several different topic clusters that target a different part of their product suite. 

The beauty of enterprise SEO is that you can deploy several strategies to target important terms and snatch valuable SERP real estate from the competition. 

If you want to learn more about how other SaaS companies use enterprise SEO to drive growth at the enterprise level, check out some of our case studies and resources: 

• Optimizing pages with footer links
• Applying international SEO practices
• Creating a glossary section or learning center
• Investing in video content for YouTube SEO

Step 3: Enterprise Content Production

In the production phase, companies use the tactics outlined in the strategy and content planning phases and transform them into engaging content pieces ready to captivate audiences. 

The transition from an abstract keyword to a tangible content asset involves several steps of content creation, including: 

• Development of brand guidelines for written and visual content
• Detailed creative briefs that target specific keywords
• Rough drafts that connect keywords to search intent
• Polished final assets that have gone through an editorial process

The enterprise content production stage needs more than just a content marketer to ensure assets resonate with the target audience and stand out in competitive SERPs at scale. These key roles include:

• Copywriters: Experts in creating compelling, action-oriented copy that drives engagement and conversion across landing pages, email, and social.
• Graphic and Web Designers: Visual artists who bring concepts to life, enhancing the appeal of content through eye-catching graphics and user-friendly web design.
• Video Production Teams: Storytellers who specialize in creating the dynamic video content increasingly favoured by online audiences.

A Clearbit report from 2023 provides surprising insight into the median size of B2B marketing teams — they’re smaller than you think: 

Considering that these teams are responsible for all the content marketing phases on this list, not to mention other key projects, it’s not surprising that many enterprise companies outsource the content creation phase. 

Enterprises turn to freelancers and contractors to scale content production without compromising quality. This flexible workforce offers a wide range of expertise, allowing companies to tap into specialized skills on demand. The rise of freelance content creators will enable enterprises to adapt swiftly to market demands and content trends.

Moreover, generative AI technologies present a new frontier in scaling content production. Many companies are exploring how AI can augment their content creation workflows, from generating initial drafts to optimizing content for SEO. 

This innovative approach accelerates production timelines and opens up new possibilities for personalized and diverse content offerings.

Step 4: Content Distribution

Content distribution is at the core of every successful enterprise SaaS brand’s content marketing strategy. It’s a stage frequently neglected or misunderstood by many in the industry, leading to stellar content going unnoticed. 

Ross Simmonds, Foundation CEO, and distribution expert, constantly hammers home the importance of getting your content in front of audiences through effective distribution channels. He even wrote a book about it. 

Book coming soon.

And I know…

Its. About. Time. pic.twitter.com/1V4o1tOIGE

— Ross Simmonds (@TheCoolestCool) January 21, 2024

A comprehensive content distribution strategy includes several key components:

• Popular social media platforms like LinkedIn, X, and Instagram offer a direct line to existing and potential customers.
• Community-based platforms like Reddit and Quora offer users a chance to discuss topics in-depth and with anonymity. 
• Email marketing helps nurture and qualify leads from gated assets and newsletter subscriptions. 
• Video content on platforms like YouTube and TikTok cater to the growing consumer preference for visual learning and entertainment.
• Paid advertising across search engines, web displays, social media platforms, and even physical spaces to increase traffic. 

Of course, there are many more ways to get your content to readers. One of the unfortunate things about enterprises is that they can get stuck in the process loop and forget to experiment with other channels. 

If you want to see some SaaS companies and thought leaders doing well on the distribution front, look at these 10 content distribution ideas. 

Ross has put together a comprehensive distribution checklist to further guide enterprises in perfecting their content distribution. Check it out here and learn how you can drastically increase the ROI of content investment with distribution. 

Step 5: Reporting and Analysis

SaaS marketing departments are constantly vying for more budget — even at the enterprise level. This makes effective reporting and analysis strategic imperatives. It’s not enough to flaunt vanity metrics like page views; enterprises require actionable insights directly correlating with business outcomes.

• Keyword rankings, for instance, signal authoritative prowess in relevant topics, indicating that the content is well-aligned with search intent. 
• Click-through rates (CTRs) offer a glimpse into the audience’s engagement, pinpointing content that successfully piques interest. 
• Resource downloads act as indicators of lead generation potential, especially when gated content nudges prospects deeper into the sales funnel.
• Leads generated and sales influenced or directly resulting from content engagement are the ultimate testament to content marketing’s ROI. 
• Conversion rates spotlight the efficacy of copy and calls-to-action (CTAs), revealing the content’s ability to shepherd prospects through the buyer’s journey.

As you can see, there are many different metrics to measure success in the content marketing funnel. You’ll need a specific stack of tools to measure the most important stats, like customer acquisition cost (CAC) or cost per lead (CPL). 

For example, a new customer might have interacted with a blog post, gated asset, and email blast before moving through to a demo call with a sales rep. Using a combination of Google Analytics, your CRM, and a sales enablement platform, you can see how site visitors turn into leads and customers. Most importantly, you can determine how much it costs to get them there! 

To accurately gauge marketing’s contribution to revenue in a B2B SaaS setting, monitor the revenue from marketing-acquired customers and the expenditure on these efforts. Tracing the acquisition costs of specific customers back to the TOFU blog post or paid ad landing page can help you more accurately determine marketing-specific revenue wins. 

Learn How the Enterprise SaaS Leaders Build Their Content Marketing Engines

There may be five stages to enterprise content creation, but there are endless ways to execute them — not to mention tools to help you get the job done. 

What’s important is that you start with the content strategy stage and identify the specific marketing assets you can use to guide site-curious visitors down the funnel toward conversion. Then, you follow through with executing that strategy and measure your results so that you can identify wins and changes needed. Rinse and repeat.

At the Foundation Lab, we dissect the content marketing strategies and tactics leading SaaS brands use to help with everything from rebrands to product conversions. From Toast to Carta to OpenAI’s competitors, we do weekly deep dives that help you learn what works and what doesn’t. 

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