What Is Marketing Enablement? | An Ultimate Guide

Nalin
Founder & CEO
4
min read
August 4, 2023

Managing a marketing team without an effective plan hurts every department’s performance.

Each day your team must make important decisions about content, budget, messaging, and lead generation goals with limited time, struggling to process complex data in spreadsheets and reports.

Your marketing could be much more effective if you had the right tools and resources.

But how does it differ from both sales enablement and customer experience management?

Worry not. We’ll be diving deep into B2B marketing enablement: its definition, importance, and benefits of having a strong marketing enablement strategy.

Let's begin with a basic definition.

What Is Marketing Enablement?

Marketing enablement is a systematic method of creating processes to improve collaboration among departments with different roles. It involves ensuring that marketing teams have the technology they need to be as productive—and effective—as possible.

In other words, it’s about giving your marketing team what they need to do their job better.

Marketing enablement can help businesses save time and money on their marketing campaigns by providing a plan for planning, executing, measuring, and improving all marketing efforts.

How Does Marketing Enablement Work?

Marketing enablement allows for clear alignment between the goals of CMOs, CROs, salespeople, and other customer-facing teams so that all are on the same page regarding customers.

It provides a cohesive strategy and process framework that helps companies create the right content in the right channels and at the right time. Moreover, it helps you to identify and implement the tools that allow your team to measure their performance against key metrics and goals.

It further includes,

  • Creating and delivering the right content in the right format for each customer journey stage.
  • Considering both the buyer and seller perspectives and all touch points influencing buying decisions.
  • Giving salespeople the information they need to answer questions about products and services.
  • Marketing content to relevant campaigns by coordinating efforts among teams.

Also find out: What makes SaaS marketing unique

Tools and Technology Used in the Marketing Enablement Process

Here are some of the tools and technologies used in the B2B marketing enablement process:

1. Marketing automation software

Marketing automation software automates the boring and repetitive tasks involved in marketing. This includes lead nurturing, personalized advertising, and social media marketing. With these tools, you can scale your marketing efforts without compromising on personalization.

Hubspot, ActiveCampaign, and Klaviyo are some of the popular marketing automation software.

2. Customer Relationship Management Software

Customer relationship management software (CRM) lets you have a unified record of all the interactions that happen between your sales team, customers, and prospects. By bringing together all your customer data under one roof, CRMs help the marketing team know and serve their customers better.

Some popular CRMs in the market are Hubspot, Close, and Salesforce.

3. Content Management Systems

Like its name, content management systems (CMS) help you manage the content on your website without a coder’s help. This includes landing pages, blogs, and other types of content on your website. 

Webflow, WordPress, and Ghost are examples of popular CRMs.

How To Implement Marketing Enablement in Your Organization?

When setting up a marketing strategy, it is best to base it on the company's overall strategic plan. If a company wants to make itself more product-driven, its marketing efforts should reflect that change.

Strategies for B2B marketing enablement can be divided into phases, which you should follow to create a more effective system.

Here is a step-by-step process for implementing marketing enablement to increase performance and ROI.

1. Define your goals.

Defining your goals for B2B marketing enablement is an important first step in the process. This helps you identify what you hope to achieve with marketing enablement and ensures that your efforts are aligned with your overall business objectives.

Be specific when setting your goals and ensure they are realistic and measurable. For example, rather than "improve marketing efficiency," you might set a goal of "reduce the time it takes to create and launch a new marketing campaign by 25% within the next six months."

This specific, measurable goal allows you to track your progress and measure the impact of marketing enablement on your business.

It's also important to ensure that your goals are aligned with your overall business objectives. This helps ensure that your marketing enablement efforts are supporting the organization's overall goals, not just focused on isolated initiatives.

Some examples of B2B marketing enablement goals might include:

  • Increasing the effectiveness of marketing campaigns by 10%.
  • Improving the efficiency of marketing processes and acquiring 10 more leads.
  • Increasing the quality and quantity of leads generated.
  • Reducing the time it takes to create and launch marketing campaigns.
  • Enhancing the skills and knowledge of the marketing team through training and development.

Also, check out: Growth marketing strategies

2. Identify the needs of your marketing team.

Marketing is a complex and fast-moving field, so your marketing team will always have new needs. A marketing enablement program is only effective when it addresses your team's specific needs.

You need to understand their challenges and identify what they need to succeed. If you don’t do this upfront, it will be difficult to get buy-in from your team and make changes that will have a lasting impact on performance.

Some examples of tools and resources that might be useful for marketing teams include

  • Marketing technology: Many marketing technologies can help teams automate tasks, track and analyze data, and manage campaigns more effectively. This might include marketing automation software, CRM systems, analytics platforms, or social media management tools.
  • Training and development: Providing training and development opportunities for your marketing team can help them stay up-to-date on the latest marketing trends and techniques and improve their skills and knowledge.
  • Access to data and analytics: Marketing teams rely on data and analytics to make informed decisions and measure the effectiveness of their campaigns. Providing your marketing team access to accurate and relevant data can help them make more informed decisions and optimize their efforts.
  • Collaboration and project management tools: Collaboration and project management tools can help marketing teams work more effectively together and manage projects more efficiently. This might include tools like Asana, Trello, or Slack.

3. Define your target audience and perform competitor research.

When it comes to marketing, knowing your audience is crucial. You need to know what they want, how they behave online and offline, and their pain points. This will help you create content that resonates with them and market products that solve their problems.

You’ll need to define your target audience, which could be a specific persona. This will help you understand their needs, goals, and interests so that you can tailor your marketing efforts accordingly. You should also perform competitor research to see what they are doing well and where they may be missing opportunities.

This will give you insight into the strengths and weaknesses of their marketing strategy.

4. Develop and implement a plan.

Based on your goals and the needs of your marketing team, create a plan for implementing marketing enablement.  

Your plan should include a timeline for implementing marketing enablement and a budget for any necessary marketing tools or resources. It's also important to clearly define roles and responsibilities for implementing marketing enablement, including who will be responsible for managing the process, coordinating with different teams and departments, and tracking progress.

Having a well-developed plan in place will help ensure that your marketing enablement efforts are organized and effective and will make it easier to track progress and measure the impact of your efforts on your business.

If you are all set with the plan, you can start with the implementation process.

5. Optimize your website for lead generation.

Most of your marketing efforts will be focused on getting people to your website. If your website isn’t optimized for lead generation, you will miss out on many potential businesses.

Ensure that your site is easy to navigate, offers value-based content, and provides contact information so people can reach out.

Moreover, consider embedding an interactive product demo to help people understand what your product or service does. This will make it easier for prospects to make a purchase decision.

A great example is Toplyne; they have created an interactive demo with Storylane and embedded it on their website.

This helped them to boost their conversion rate by 20%.

Storylane allows you to create an interactive product demo in minutes as it has a drag-and-drop interface that makes it easy to create an interactive demo.

6. Measure and evaluate.

Regularly track your progress and measure the impact of marketing enablement on your business. This will help you identify areas for improvement and optimize your efforts.

When you use an interactive product demo, you can check how your prospects interact with it from Storylane.

Doing this will create an opportunity for you to track their activities and create a marketing message that resonates with them.

Still not sure how to do it? Talk to our experts at Storylane Now!

Marketing Enablement Vs Sales Enablement 

Both marketing enablement and sales enablement are related yet different concepts. Marketing enablement is a method of streamlining your marketing strategies to nurture leads effectively. On the other hand, sales enablement is about providing the right tools and resources to help salespeople sell better. But the bottom line of both these methods is to serve your buyers better.

Benefits of Marketing Enablement.

There are multiple benefits of marketing enablement. Here are some key benefits:

1. Improved efficiency and productivity.

By providing your marketing team with the tools and resources they need to be more effective and efficient in their work, marketing enablement can help improve the overall productivity of your marketing efforts.

2. Enhanced skills and knowledge.

Training and development opportunities for your marketing team can help them stay up-to-date on the latest marketing trends and techniques and improve their skills and knowledge. This will improve the quality and effectiveness of your marketing campaigns.

3. Better decision-making.

By providing your marketing team access to data and analytics, marketing enablement can help them make more informed decisions and optimize their efforts. It will also improve the transparency of their decisions, which can help you gain greater buy-in from other teams within your organization.

4. Increased ROI.

By providing your marketing team access to data and analytics, marketing enablement can help them make more informed decisions and optimize their efforts. This can help improve the quality and effectiveness of your marketing campaigns, improving your return on investment (ROI).

5. Improved collaboration and communication.

Marketing enablement will improve collaboration and communication within your marketing team, as well as between other departments. This can help ensure that all efforts are aligned and better integrated into the overall business strategy.

Moving forward with an effective marketing enablement strategy.

Marketing enablement is a critical component of any effective marketing strategy. It can help you drive higher customer engagement, improve the quality of your marketing campaigns and increase your ROI. By implementing an effective marketing enablement strategy, you can help your team be more productive and efficient, ultimately leading to better results.

Even though you generate quality traffic to your website, the way you showcase the value of your product can make or break your investment. This is where Storylane comes in.

It helps you create interactive product demos that help you showcase the value of your product compellingly and engagingly. These demo videos are perfect for marketing your product or service on social media, email campaigns, and landing pages. In addition, they can be used as part of an onboarding process to help new customers learn how your offering works.

Want to see how you can maximize your conversion rate with the help of an interactive product demo? Schedule a free demo now.

Q. What are the benefits of marketing enablement?

Here are some of the benefits of marketing enablement:

  1. Improved efficiency and productivity
  2. Enhanced skills and knowledge
  3. Better decision-making
  4. Increased ROI
  5. Improved collaboration and communication
"Previously, there was scope for error and we’ve gone from a process that could be time consuming and painful to a process that’s super quick."
—CHRIS LANCASTER, SUPPLY CHAIN PROJECT
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"Previously, there was scope for error and we’ve gone from a process that could be time consuming and painful to a process that’s super quick."
—CHRIS LANCASTER, SUPPLY CHAIN PROJECT

"Previously, there was scope for error and we’ve gone from a process that could be time consuming and painful to a process that’s super quick."

—CHRIS LANCASTER, SUPPLY CHAIN PROJECT

Stay ahead of the sandbox curve with a superior demo environment
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