How to use a marketecture in B2B marketing
Examples from Crowdstrike, Zuora, Atlassian, and more
When you create marketing materials, does it answer the simple question “what do you actually do?”
I don’t mean to sound arrogant. I ask myself this question all the time.
Whether it’s a sales pitch or a product page, you don’t get much time to explain what your business does or why your audience should care, so you have to make your point and get to it quickly. A great tool for this in B2B marketing is a marketecture.
A marketecture is a simple visual graphic that summarizes your company’s capabilities, products, or services. A prospect of yours should look at this graphic and within seconds have a high level understanding of what you do as a company, and why they might care.
It’s an exercise in storytelling and organization. Even if you don’t use a marketecture yourself, your company has key “use cases” that you market/sell, a suite of products or services, strategic verticals or personas that you focus on. The marketecture is just another tool for you to tell a cohesive company/platform story.
Do you need one? Who am I to say. But I do find them useful, if nothing else to break up walls of text on different types of collateral. But I’ll say this, if it feels like your company has way too many things that could be organized into a visual like this, then it could be a red flag that your prospects are overwhelmed or confused when they visit your website or other materials. On that note, I’ll use Crowdstrike as my first example.
Crowdstrike
You can see the interactive web version here.
This is pretty convoluted. But Crowdstrike is a fairly large company with tons of products, so they did a decent job of packing a lot of products and concepts into one visual. Clean visuals. Easy enough to navigate different sections. Feels comprehensive.
Zuora
I originally found this in “The Greatest Sales Deck I’ve Ever Seen”, article by Andy Raskin - it’s worth reading.
The simple layout makes things easy to follow, and instead of using illustration they use photography in the background to make it visually interesting. The headers give you a quick understanding of their core capabilities, and you get the sense that each area has a ton of meaningful supporting products and features in each area.
Atlassian
From Atlassian’s platform page:
I found Atlassian’s approach interesting because they are a textbook definition of a “multi-product” company with Jira, Confluence, Trello, etc., and yet not a single specific product is mentioned on their marketecture. This might be the right choice, because not only is it more focused on the “why” of their platform, but it avoids a complicated jumble of products (see Crowdstrike above).
Rippling
From Rippling’s platform page:
Rippling’s marketecture is well done. Even as someone who isn’t in human resources, it’s clear that they have a set of core platform capabilities, which power two disparate product/solution categories, with easy to understand products/features under each. It’s also a visually-interesting graphic but not over-engineered. If you actually visit the page, it even moves and is interactive. Neat.
Procore
From Procore’s platform page:
The substance of Procore’s marketecture seems thought out the right way – it includes core platform capabilities, app market place, key product areas e.g. preconstruction, and even included personas. You get a good sense of the breadth and depth of their platform. The visual presentation is just a bit awkward – it’s not sure whether it wants to be 2-D or 3-D.
Zenput
From Zenput’s platform overview page:
At Zenput our team attempted to incorporate a few different angles into the marketecture:
Solutions: Food Safety, etc.
Teams/Personas: Headquarters, Stores, Field
Value Props: Communicate, execute, improve
Core capabilities: SOP Rollouts, Task Management, etc.
Trying to do too much? Maybe. But does it answer “So what do you actually do” in a comprehensive but fairly simple way? I believe so.
Where is a marketecture used?
On your website – home page and/or platform overview page
In sales pitch decks as a standalone slide. Sales reps can use it to summarize the company’s capabilities, and as an opportunity for “discovery” with their prospect, which area captures their interest or aligns with their priorities the most
In one-pagers / sell sheets – you might have different versions for your various solutions, industries served, etc., and depending on how detailed you like to get, the marketecture is a way to tell your whole platform story without taking up 10 pages.
Have you seen any visuals like this from other companies that stand out to you? Please share I’d love to see them.