What is solution marketing and why should you care?

Few things are harder in our business than convincing technical founders that they need to do more than just explain what their product is. They need to explain what customers can do with the product. By framing your product in terms of actual, useful use cases (“solutions”), you paint a picture for your prospective customers of how your product fits into their business and developer workflow.

Solution marketing is in addition to positioning. Positioning is the essential component that places your product or service in a distinct category in the prospect's mind. For example, the difference between "A hosted environment for Javascript applications" and either "The easiest way to get started building and hosting JavaScript applications" vs. "The high-performance, scalable environment for building and maintaining your mission-critical JavaScript applications." In this case, positioning takes a product and distinguishes it in such a way that customers self-select whether it is of interest to them.

Solution marketing takes this further and applies your positioning to use cases. Suppose we chose the latter positioning in the example above, the one aimed at customers with mission-critical applications. We could then articulate a series of solutions such a customer might want to build and host, such as company or infrastructure dashboards, e-commerce applications, data pipelines, and so on.

Positioning tells a customer that they should keep reading. Solutions tell a customer that you are the thing they were looking for all along.

Without solutions to guide customers, marketing teams place the cognitive load on the customer to make the leap to how they should use the product. Yes, our market is software developers, and most software developers are adept at taking a box of LEGO and turning it into a masterpiece of some kind. But that's not what software developers want to do when they're searching to solve a problem. They don't want a box of LEGO, they want a fully formed solution.

Solution marketing enables us to meet developers on their own terms, answering questions that are top of mind for them.

The power of solution marketing

When you anchor your go-to-market and sales processes around solution marketing, you are building an outreach program that reduces cognitive friction and helps developers very quickly understand how you can help them solve their most pressing needs.

Within my ACES framework (Awareness, Conversion, Expansion, Systems), solution marketing will make you much better at both Awareness and Conversion. Awareness because you will be able to reach customers with a much more focused message. And Conversion because your customers will see that you get them and want to explore your product or service further.

But solution marketing is also a powerful organizing principle for your entire marketing team. It's such a powerful principle, that I recommend even marketing teams in early stage startups focus on it. Many founders believe that by picking a handful of solutions, they are limiting the appeal of their product. The act of understanding who your customers are (the Ideal Customer Profile) and how your customers will use your product doesn't limit your options. On the contrary, solution marketing gives you an opportunity to focus your efforts, test hypotheses, and move forward with real data to back your next set of decisions.

This hypothesis takes the form of:

• Your Ideal Customer Profile: the type of company or developer that would benefit most from your product or service. This includes, industry segments, company size, budget for developer products similar to yours, ideal title of a decision maker, and other technical qualifications related to your product (e.g., the type or amount of data they currently store, the cloud provider they currently use, the programming language, framework, or ORM they currently use, and so on.)
• The type of problems they currently face that your product or service will help solve (and which will be financially lucrative for you to solve for them)
• The kinds of solutions they currently employ (including, they "build it themselves") and why they may be deficient
• Their ultimate goal when solving the problem (e.g., save costs, reduce headcount, faster time to market, etc.)

I like to think of solution marketing as a Christmas Tree. You spend a good chunk of effort hypothesizing your Ideal Customer Profile and the solutions they're most interested. You then begin to layer in all the "ornaments"--experiments-- that will help you prove or disprove your hypothesis.

Each of these experiments is an opportunity to support your case that you are the solution to the problem in question.

Your solution hypotheses will also form the basis for your sales enablement plans, giving your sales team clear customer targets, clear messaging, and clear assets with which to present your product or service to customers. When you lack a strong solution focus and instead fall back on a product focus, you are putting a lot of unnecessary pressure on your sales team to react to customer needs and position your product on the fly.

Focus on one solution at a time. Identify a use case that you believe will matter the most to your company. Build the Christmas Tree, and accumulate data throughout your experiment. Find the right combination of messaging, content, and creative execution that converts for you before moving on to the next one.

So, with that, let's talk about the ornaments on the Solution Christmas Tree--the seven essential tactics you need to implement to drive better customer conversion.

Tactic 1: Starter Kits

A Starter Kit is a bundle of resources that helps a customer get started building a solution. This is the primary solution marketing asset for my teams. These resources can include, but are not limited to:

• Pre-built code for a functioning end-to-end application that solves a clear customer problem
• Sample data with which to test out the sample application
• Documentation on how to get started and use your product/service along with the Starter Kit to build the application
• Additional content (follow the principles I lay out for producing your content) related to the Starter Kit
• Suggestions for what to do next once the Starter Kit is fully implemented

Starter Kits are a fantastic Solution Marketing tool. They enable you to run sales outreach campaigns, ad campaigns, build supporting content (explainer videos, how-to videos, tutorial videos, and so on), and align events and community marketing.

Building Starter Kits takes time, but they are immensely powerful. Say you're at an event speaking to customers who have problems that you've defined in your various solution hypotheses. You meet Jane at your booth and she describes her problem. You give her a demo, listen to her concerns, take her contact information, and let her know that you'll be following up with sample code she can use when she's back in the office. Sure enough, your Starter Kit helps you continue the conversation with this prospect, who is qualified because she has a problem identical or very similar to the one you've laid out in your hypothesis.

Starter Kits give customers a running start when using your product and they shorten the time before they see value in your offering.

Ideally, you want one Starter Kit for each "use case" or solution you highlight on your website. Remember, as I highlight above, focus on one solution at a time.

Tactic 2: Solution web pages and landing pages

Your homepage and product pages are going to focus on your positioning. But you also need web pages that take your core positioning and reframe it in terms of the solutions you offer customers. Lots of companies like to up-level these solution pages into industry vertical or horizontal pages. For example, "Solutions for the Financial Services Industry" or "Solutions for Internet of Things".

When I create these solution pages, I do a few very important things:

• Use a hero graphic that people in the vertical/horizontal industry will immediately associate and identify with.
• Build supporting content that proves that I know about this vertical/horizontal by using the lingo, colloquial phrases, terminology, and acronyms unique to it throughout the page (and all solution content). When a customer reads these pages, they feel heard...they know they're in the hands of someone who has done the research into their industry and its unique peculiarities, whether it's end-user demands, regulatory requirements, or something else entirely.
• Identify existing customers of mine who fit the target solution (see Case Studies, below).
• Link to the Starter Kit and associated documentation.
• Create and link to a dedicated Slack/Discord or Forum channel in my community for questions from people in this industry.

In effect, you are creating a one-stop of all your content that someone in your target market will be able to sift through to arrive at the answer that you are the best equipped and positioned company to solve their problems.

Beyond the solution web pages, I also like to create streamlined landing pages for paid ads, which we will discuss in a moment. Remember, good landing pages have no site chrome (header, footer, navigation) and one singular call-to-action, which will likely be "Try for Free" or something similar if you are a Product-Led Growth company.

Tactic 3: Case Studies

When you build your Ideal Customer Profile, it is almost assuredly based on your current best customers. If you have 5-10 awesome customers and a big enough target market, chances are there are 500-1000 more customers very similar to them.

Social proof is powerful. Work with your existing customers on case studies that tell their story, support your solution hypotheses, and can be used as part of social media, paid acquisition, and sales outreach campaigns.

Tactic 4: Benchmarks and calculators

Earlier, we discussed how a core component of a solution hypothesis is the customer's goal. What quantifiable thing are they trying to achieve? You should be prepared with benchmarks or calculators that provide objective proof that you can help the customer achieve their goals.

Are they trying to go to market faster? Come up with a calculation that shows, using both numbers the customer can fill in and numbers your case study participants from the previous step can support, how your solution makes teams more productive. Whether you're trying to prove performance, time, or money, you can come up with a calculation of some kind that helps prove your point.

Tactic 5: The rest of the marketing mix

Every aspect of your marketing mix can be made better with a solution focus. We spoke briefly about events, but solution marketing enables you to be more discerning about which events, which tactics at those events, which booth execution, and so on, make the most sense for you. No more guesswork.

You align the ship around your solution marketing approach and in so doing, you have clear, direct, and actionable messaging for each customer.

Tactic 6: Advertising and digital marketing

This is where the real magic happens and where everything comes together. Once you're satisfied with your content, you're ready to take the next big step.

When customers visit your website and seek out a solution page, they have self-selected themselves into the subject category of your page. For example, suppose a customer comes to your site and visits the "Solutions for Financial Services" solution page. In that case, that is very high signal and there's a pretty high likelihood that they are interested in this subject.

You want to start retargeting customers who hit your solution pages with dedicated content on social media that entices them to return to your site:

• Take your Starter Kit content and record short, technical videos for developers.
• Feature your case study customers in Tweets with branded creative.
• Turn your benchmarks and competitive analyses into infographics.
• Promote events where you will be present in the near future.
• Build animated GIFs to highlight points you've made in your Starter Kit.

You will then build landing pages for each solution, and that will be the call-to-action from the retargeting ads. If they click-through, keep retargeting and altering your ad creative until the prospect signs up.

Tactic 7: Product integration

Last, but certainly not least, is product integration. Now, marketing tactics are often easy and relatively inexpensive to produce. Changing product is probably the most expensive tactic on the menu. But, if you're seeing traction out of your marketing campaigns, then consider making product changes to onboard customers from certain categories of solutions and get them to see value as quickly as possible.

Summary

Solution marketing is a powerful tool with which to drive focus across your organization. It also helps align work streams in marketing so that all effort accrues to multiple goals and enable you to test several hypotheses simultaneously.