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Common Marketing Challenges Faced by Enterprise Organizations
All businesses, regardless of industry and size constantly strive to improve and innovate their product lines, look for ways to attract top talent to stay ahead of the competition and try to reduce costs to increase their profits. However, enterprise organizations, in particular, face a unique and wide range of challenges when looking to ultimately grow their revenue, and, yes, marketing initiatives are directly tied to this success.
Let’s take a look at three of these marketing-related challenges commonly faced by large organizations:
1. Digital Asset Management
The situation:
Typically speaking, with a larger organization comes more employees, business locations and miles between everyone involved. This distance and additional cooks in the kitchen, so to speak, makes managing marketing material across the entire organization challenging. Moreover, this marketing material needs to be pre-approved, dynamic, customizable and accessible at a moments notice to be truly impactful.
The challenge:
The larger an organization, the less technical knowledge there appears to be on enterprise-level software outside the IT department. Consequently, those in the marketing department are not familiar with how to customize local digital marketing for a particular branch of the company or a particular franchise location. Location-specific marketing materials have to perform two core functions: one, they reinforce the brand standards; and two, they are personalized enough to build a deeper connection with a local population.
A possible solution:
One way to resolve this problem of creating specialized marketing materials for a corporation's separate locations, branches, or stores is to use a third party solution for digital asset management. A great option on the market is MarcomCentral. MarcomCentral gives your workforce access to approved branded assets and customizable templates to reduce one-off requests and free up valuable creative time for the corporate marketing department.
2. Project Scope Creep
The situation:
Enterprise level organizations often have many ongoing marketing projects simultaneously underway in different areas of the country. These can quickly run over budget and cost more than originally planned if not carefully monitored.
The challenge:
Well-run marketing launches require managers to have a clear understanding of schedules, time zones, projects, and teams. It’s quite easy for things to slowly slide out of control when there are different marketing launches in different areas of the country. This results in one or more projects costing more and taking longer than originally planned.
A possible solution:
Through the use of cloud computing and robust collaboration software, everyone can be kept on the same page. As a result, tasks will be completed on time and within budget, communication will be transparent for all members of a team, and collaboration and file sharing is routine and predictable.
3. Managing Franchisees
The Situation:
Many enterprise level businesses are franchisers with franchisees coming from all walks of life, business backgrounds and parts of the country. As a result, each brings a different set of franchise-specific goals and expectations to the table.
The Challenge:
The biggest challenge faced by franchisers is how to establish and maintain strong communication with a diverse group of franchisees in order to build a strong relationship. Since a large franchise often deals with hundreds of franchisees, it can be difficult to for marketing departments to address a wide range of franchisees' unrealistic expectations. For instance, many naïve franchisees assume that they should be able to get rich fairly quickly after joining a franchise. While a franchisor may have worked out all the details of the business ranging from product selection to daily operations, economic conditions and the franchisees own work ethic and customer relations has a lot to do with how successful they can become.
When a franchisor's marketing department, for one reason or another, does not communicate effectively, trust breaks down on both sides. The franchisee may feel that the franchisor has hidden agendas and that the franchise itself is something of a scam. Similarly, the franchisor may believe franchisees are failing to deliver a professional level of service to customers to protect the brand name.
A possible solution
By sponsoring conferences, meetings, and networking events, as well as conducting surveys, a franchisor can get insights from franchisees on any misunderstandings they have on how to build their business operations. If there are any misunderstandings on how a franchise works to serve its franchisees, the franchisor can then communicate how things really work.
Technology can also be used to address the issue of poor or broken communication. For instance, weekly or biweekly video conference calling can be used to help smooth over any communication conflicts.
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