A go-to-market (GTM) strategy is a must-have for any company or organization launching a new product or service. It’s a comprehensive plan that helps you define your ideal customers, coordinate messaging, and position your product for launch. In addition, having a GTM strategy in place can help keep all critical business units aligned on the same plan. This allows you to meet market needs and effectively iterate on your product.
In This Article:
Who needs a go-to-market strategy?
Why do you need a go-to-market strategy?
What are the different types of go-to-market strategies?
Six steps to building a go-to-market strategy:
- Defining your ICP
- Researching your competitors
- Developing your messaging
- Setting targets
- Choosing your tactics
- Providing feedback
Who Needs A Go-To-Market Strategy
If you find yourself in one of the following three situations and you’re an individual or company in the B2B space, you need a GTM strategy:
- Launching a new product in an existing market
- Launching an existing product in a new market
- Testing a new product’s market for growth
Why You Need A Go-To-Market-Strategy
A go-to-market (GTM) strategy is essential to help businesses make informed decisions about their products and services. With the correct information, companies can identify competitive opportunities and differentiate themselves against competitors, build scalable inbound and outbound models over time, and develop marketing tactics to help them achieve their goals.
Without gathering the necessary information for a GTM strategy, however, most new product launches are doomed to fail because assumptions are often made about the market need for a product or service without taking the time to research it first. Taking the time to craft a go-to-market strategy can be the difference between success and failure.
Different Types Of Go-To-Market Strategy
There are two main types of GTM strategies—product-led and sales-led. Let’s look at what each type of approach entails and how they can be used in tandem to create an effective GTM strategy.
Product-Led GTM Strategy
A product-led GTM strategy uses the product as the primary tool for acquiring and retaining users. This approach utilizes the power of word-of-mouth marketing by providing so much value in the product that it creates its own demand. By offering products that solve customer problems, increase user engagement, or save time, users will become loyal customers and evangelize your brand without additional marketing efforts.
The key to success with this approach is to create a product that offers highly valued features by your target audience. Additionally, it should be easy for users to understand how to use your product and upgrade their packages if necessary. Finally, you need to ensure there is enough ongoing support available so that users always have someone readily available who can answer their questions and provide assistance when needed.
Sales-Led GTM Strategy
On the other hand, some companies prefer a sales-led approach whereby marketing plays an integral role in creating interest in the company’s products or services by utilizing content marketing and demo forms. Once these prospects have been identified, salespeople reach out directly, intending to convert them into paying customers. This approach requires significant resources, including an experienced sales team who can develop relationships with potential customers to close deals quickly and efficiently.
6 Steps To Building A Go-To-Market Strategy
Crafting a go-to-market strategy is a dynamic process that requires strategic thinking. Use the following six steps to get started on developing your GTM strategy:
Defining your ICP
An ideal customer profile (ICP) describes your perfect customer for a specific product or service — someone who can find massive benefits from your offer while giving back enough value to make your business profitable. This could be through revenue, referrals, insights, and testimonials.
Creating an ICP is essential for businesses that want to maximize their sales potential and simplify their marketing strategy. It helps you identify target markets most likely to buy from you, understand what drives them as customers with specific preferences, and determine which products or services they will find most useful. Ultimately, this allows you to tailor your message and approach so that it resonates with the right people at the right time – leading to increased conversions and, ultimately, more profit.
To develop an ICP, you need to know your ideal customers, where they work, and their daily challenges. Once you’ve gathered this information about your ideal customer base, it’s time to start crafting your profile based on three key elements: demographics (age/gender/location, etc.), psychographics (personality traits), and technographic (preferred technologies). By understanding these three elements of your target market in detail, you can create powerful buyer personas that will guide all aspects of your marketing strategy moving forward – from messaging to ad targeting and segmentation strategies.
Researching your competitors
It is essential to understand the existing market landscape and assess what your competitors offer and how they add value to position your product or service effectively.
A great place to start assessing what your competitors offer is the G2 reviews page. Here you’ll get an overview of the products and services available in the market and their features and functionalities. Filtering by relevant business segments will help you determine what customers like and dislike most about competitor platforms and what would resonate with your ideal customer profile (ICP).
It’s also vital to consider macro-trends such as global economic shifts, technological advancements, changing consumer behaviors, and political developments that could impact your launch now and in the future. Meanwhile, micro-trends—smaller, localized trends—like regional or cultural preferences should also be considered when developing a GTM strategy. Understanding these trends can help inform decisions on pricing, design, target audience, and marketing channels for maximum reach.
Developing your messaging
Developing effective product messaging that resonates with your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) is crucial when marketing a product or service. This means understanding their pain points, ambitions, and the language they use to describe them.
The first step is to take the time to understand your ICP’s language concerning its pain points and ambitions. You can do this by reading case studies and G2 reviews about your product or similar products. This will help you understand the words and phrases your customers use when describing their experience with related products so that you can build your messaging around them.
Once you understand what language resonates with your ICP, it’s time to consider how your competitors position their product offerings. Spend some time reviewing their websites, ads, and other marketing materials they might have out there. Understanding how they position themselves will help you figure out what makes yours unique and how you can differentiate yourself from them – this is called a Unique Selling Proposition (USP).
Now that you understand your ICP’s language and competitor analysis, it’s time to put together a brief for executives that outlines the key takeaways from these two steps compared to the current messaging on your site. This will help executives clarify where improvements need to be made for your product message to resonate better with potential customers.
Once you have gathered all the information outlined above and created a briefing document for executives, organize a call with key company members to set the new messaging in stone. During this call, discuss each element of the brief thoroughly, so everyone is on board with any changes needed for the message onsite to communicate effectively with potential customers.
Setting targets
Outbound
Growth teams need to be data-driven to succeed. Clear models must be established from the available capacity and budget to develop a successful growth strategy. This will allow you to make informed decisions on your team’s goals and objectives, ultimately increasing your chances for success. Let’s look at how you can create a data-driven growth model that works for your team.
When building a data-driven growth model, it’s essential to start with the basics. For example, if you have two outbound SDRs (Sales Development Representatives) working on your launch, review their average output and response rates to estimate the number of meetings each rep will book. Next, use the meetings booked/opportunity rate to inform your reps’ targets. From here, factor in an average opportunity to close rate (we suggest starting at 25%). Doing this will give you an idea of the pipeline you can expect from those reps. With this information, you can build out full-funnel pipelines and map data-driven targets and sales goals your representatives work towards each month.
To ensure accuracy when creating these models, use closed/won deals instead of open opportunities or even opportunities in progress. Closed/won deals are more likely to represent actual outcomes for the organization than available options or those in progress that may not pan out into real ROI for the organization over time. Additionally, use historical data from past campaigns or initiatives when possible, as this ensures accuracy when making predictions about future performance or results.
Marketing
When creating a successful go-to-market (GTM) strategy, one of the most critical considerations is balancing inbound and outbound marketing efforts. Achieving this balance allows you to measure your efforts’ efficiency and success while balancing cost and lead generation. Let’s look at how to start your GTM strategy off on the right foot with a 50/50 split between inbound and outbound efforts.
When creating your GTM plan, estimating your cost-per-lead (CPL) is essential. This will help you determine how much budget you need for each component of your plan. These predictions will be different for content and paid direct demo requests. You can use conversion rates from past campaigns or industry benchmarks as a guide here. This will help you determine how much budget you need to hit the same number of opportunities as outbound strategies traditionally offer.
Once you have set up your GTM plan with an estimated CPL, predicted conversions across funnel stages, and an appropriate budget for both content and paid advertising initiatives, you can analyze the effectiveness of your plan by measuring the return on investment (ROI). Both sides must work together towards success – if one side isn’t performing, it could mean that something needs adjusting or changing altogether.
Choosing your tactics
To reach your ideal customer profile, you must use a range of tactics in tandem, including:
Data
Quality data is essential for targeting the right people, and a range of B2B data providers can help you get this information. These providers collect data from various sources such as surveys, public records, social media accounts, and other reliable sources to ensure accuracy in their reports. With access to quality data, you’ll have all the necessary information to target the right people for marketing your products or services.
Marketing Strategy
When making your GTM strategy plan, start with an offer and look to adapt it to different lead sources. For example, offering a free trial of your product or service is one way you can draw potential customers in and make them more likely to purchase from you in the future. Additionally, BOFU campaigns should be prioritized as they provide quick wins and key learnings for your business which will help inform further decisions about marketing efforts.
Content Plan
Content marketing requires keyword research using robust tools like Ahrefs or SEMrush so that your website appears near the top of search engine results pages (SERPs). This will increase visibility, resulting in increased web traffic and lead generation. Leveraging our comprehensive guide on building a B2B content marketing strategy can also help optimize your content creation process by providing tips on researching topics related to your industry, creating engaging content around those topics, and distributing it across multiple channels, such as social media platforms or email campaigns.
Partnerships with Similar ICP Companies
Finally, partnering with similar Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) companies will get you in front of the right people through initiatives such as joint webinars, virtual events, white papers/eBooks, guest blogging & content sharing. Utilizing these strategies helps build relationships and introduces new potential buyers who may need to learn about your business otherwise due to lack of exposure online or offline.
Providing Feedback
The GTM strategy you develop is only as good as the team executing it. To make sure that your key learnings are effectively actioned, it’s crucial to establish a feedback loop between marketing, sales, and product development. To do this, individuals must be held accountable for different aspects of the strategy and report on their progress in regular meetings. This helps to identify obstacles collectively and land an ICP that better serves prospective customers.
When creating a feedback loop between marketing, sales, and product development teams, there needs to be accountability at every stage. This starts with marketing which needs to clearly define objectives and KPIs that will act as benchmarks for success along the way. In addition, the roles of each individual involved should be clear from the start so everyone knows who is responsible for what. Having established responsibilities makes it easier to track progress throughout the process.
When setting up these responsibilities, remember that there will likely be overlap among various teams, which can help drive collaboration between departments during different stages of the process. It can also help create more effective results when teams work together rather than relying solely on one person or department for all things related to strategy execution.
Once roles have been established, and KPIs have been set, regular meetings should occur between all team members involved to review progress against those KPIs and goals set forth by marketing at the start of the process. These meetings should review any issues that may have arisen since the last meeting and any successes achieved during that time frame. During these meetings, each team should provide updates on their specific tasks related to strategy execution, including any progress they’ve made towards achieving those goals or any new ideas they may have come up with since the last meeting took place (if applicable). Other teams can then use this information to adjust their strategies or plans based on what has been shared by different departments during the meeting.
Go-to-market strategies are essential for any business looking to make waves in their industry by launching products or services effectively in their desired marketplaces. By creating detailed plans for every step of their launch process from start to finish, businesses can ensure that all departments within their organization are working together towards one unified goal—to provide quality products and services to customers at optimal cost efficiency while also taking advantage of potential opportunities in the marketplace along the way. With careful planning and preparation through a go-to-market strategy, any business has what it needs to be successful in its efforts!
If you’re looking for help with developing your go-to-market strategy, we’re here to help.
