Helping companies and customers connect authentically to drive long-term business relationships.
In today’s IT market, disruption is either a growth trajectory that creates new business opportunities, or a debilitating challenge that can close a company’s doors. This constant disruption drives software companies to continually innovate to solve business problems through technology solutions.
Whether you are buying or selling software, business executives and sales leadership teams all have one thing in common…they all care about their customers. But does your company’s marketing model that same story?
Here’s just a small taste of the usual marketing fare:
- “Secure the Future. Help customers secure the mission-critical systems of today so they can continue serving as the infrastructure of the future.
- “ABC cloud platform provides organizations with the capability to record chemical structure and the synthesis of target compounds.”
- “Inspire audiences with a platform trusted by millions.”
- “Experience the most streamlined, integrated, and powerful ABC software that allows you to easily connect all the moving parts of your business in one cloud-based platform.”
In these real-time examples of traditional marketing for software solutions and platforms, companies lead with how technology works and what it can do, not the problems it solves for businesses and its overall impact. What if we talked about a football game or concert only in numbers? The conversation could sound something like this:
Hey, I have killer concert tickets for this weekend. Wanna go? The bands playing are a combined weight of one thousand two hundred and fifty pounds. There’s about 104 million cubic feet of space in the stadium, too! And reports say the barometric pressure should be around 30 millibars. So, you in?
Nope, that’s a hard no. The stat-heavy talk is both confusing and boring. I wouldn’t want to go near that concert, and potential customers don’t want to purchase similarly confusing technology—no matter how good it is.
What marketers should be doing is letting customers know they care about their business challenges and that they can solve them. Marketing should start and finish with the customer as the focus, not technical jargon or speeds and feeds.
Today, digital marketing is all about building momentum around touch points or “moments” in time to support a customer’s buying journey – NOT just executing shiny one-off tactics. A go-to-market strategy must include a mix of target messaging, custom content, events, campaigns and digital selling efforts all focused on meeting customer needs. This strategy starts with knowing what customers care about most and proving that you can be trusted to solve their problems. This is what I call “model marketing,” which shifts customers and their concerns to the center of the marketing strategy, not adding them in as an afterthought.
Where Does the Customer Fit in Your Marketing Strategy?
Is your company’s marketing plan modeled after your customer’s needs? If it isn’t, limited trust develops, and business relationships won’t evolve. The model marketing approach used at Marchitecture is bigger than just marketing technology. It aims to build customers for life as we focus on things that are important to the entire customer landscape so everyone can benefit from what technology has to offer.
Marchitecture works with software companies to find their voice, so they don’t get left behind in all the noise of digital disruption. We’ve been helping companies create thought leadership roles for years, and we can help yours too.