Leveraging a Marketecture Solution When One Product Isn’t Enough

The key to successful messaging is to be audience-centric – crafting and building messages according to buyer needs (rather than the products you have to offer). But to get closer to addressing buyer needs, we sometimes need to leverage more than one product or service in a portfolio. While you’re cobbling together pieces of the product or service portfolio to meet that need has been the precedent at many organizations, you might see that it’s time to consider building a marketecture solution.

Oftentimes, when people begin thinking about building solutions, they think about integrated, holistic solutions (read: complex and hard to build). While an integrated solution can be extremely powerful and compelling for the right audiences, it’s not the only way forward – especially when building an integrated solution requires resources and time that you may not have. In cases where you’re approaching a new market segment, but don’t yet have a fully developed offering, a marketecture solution can be an extremely useful tool to address a market without the resources needed for more comprehensive solutions.

A marketecture solution provides a wrapper you can use to envelop multiple disconnected offerings and propel a go-to-market strategy. This wrapper allows you to directly connect buyer needs with a relevant solution. And because messaging that resonates with buyers is key to becoming audience-centric, a marketecture solution can provide the veneer that brings an offering together that connects with buyers.

There are several things to keep in mind when creating a marketecture solution:

• Identify your target segment. Typically, a marketecture solution is used in industry marketing to market to a specific industry segment that is not uniquely served by one of your products or services. Thus, identifying that relevant segment (e.g. financial services, healthcare, small manufacturers) that you want to target is an important first step in marketing a marketecture solution. Understanding the value of that segment can provide the insight needed to determine if a marketecture solution will be effective.
• Align your internal stakeholders. One of the keys to making your marketecture solution work is ensuring alignment among senior leadership, marketing, sales, product and service teams. Misalignment can result in market confusion or even strategic failure if various teams choose to go their own way and continue marketing or selling without coordination. And while product teams don’t necessarily need to build new products, they should be aware of how their products are being packaged.
• Navigate measurement. A marketecture solution, like any solution, demands measurement to ensure that it’s performing well. However, because the marketecture solution is a wrapper around other products and services, it doesn’t lend itself to being easily tracked. Segment attributes can be a good way to track the marketecture solution from lead to close.

A marketecture solution can be a compelling way to address unique market segment demands that aren’t being met by a single product or service in your portfolio. Watch the Solution Marketing Pathway Demo to learn more about how teams can move from a product to solution focus and become more audience-centric.