Your go-to-market strategy combines all the key elements that drive your business; sales, marketing, distribution, pricing, brand awareness, competitive analysis, and more. It provides a strategic action plan that clarifies how to reach your target customers and better compete in your marketplace. Go-to-market strategies can be applied to new product launches and existing products and services.
What are the benefits of a go-to-market strategy?
1. Reduce costs associated with failed product launches
We’ve all heard the saying, “If you fail to plan, then you should plan to fail.” With product launches, it is acutely accurate. By planning every detail that you can ahead of time, you’ll more likely experience fewer mishaps, helping you stay closer to your ideal budget.
2. Ensure an excellent customer experience
Part of your go-to-market strategy includes developing your messaging and aligning to one comprehensive view as a team. As a result, customer experiences should be seamless and impeccable.
3. Establish a path for growth
Your go-to-market strategy does not just include how you will get your product to the market. When you integrate your long-term goals into your plan, you also establish a path to lead you to those goals. Developing a comprehensive go-to-market strategy is an investment in time and resources, but it can help ensure your organization is aligned on the path to success.
Steps to creating an effective GTM plan
Know your goals and what you need to get to those goals. Ideally, your goals are set in alignment with your company vision.
Three key questions to answer:
What are the objectives of this go-to-market plan?
What is your timeline?
What is your budget?
1. Assess the market you’re launching in
Do competitive research to identify the key players in the market. This will help you identify gaps that are currently unexploited in the market.
Use your competitive market research to understand your competitors’ strengths and weaknesses. Read reviews about their products and assess what works well and is not. These become pain points to which your product and messaging can address.
When assessing your own position or the position of your competitors in your market, the SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats) analysis helps identify action items.
Questions to answer:
Which markets have the most significant and urgent pain?
Where are there gaps in the market?
Who are your competitors?
What is their strength?
What is their weakness?
What does your product offer as a solution?
Are there any threats that can work against your success in the market?
2. Identify your target audience
A critical step to a go-to-market strategy is identifying your ideal customer. Create buyer personas to target your product and messaging better. Identify who you would expect to be buying your product(s) and what their life might be like. Then, conceptualize when and where they will make their purchases and what information will help them decide.
Questions to answer:
Who is your ideal target customer?
What are the biggest challenges they are facing in their role or organization?
What publications, community forums, blogs, or events interest them?
How do they view and collect information?
3. Leverage your customer insights
The better customer insights you have, the better your likelihood of executing a successful go-to-market strategy. A great way to collect insights is by interviewing internal stakeholders within your company to understand better what customers are telling them. This includes, but is not limited to, customer service representatives, your sales team, and client-facing employees.
Questions to answer:
What are your customers saying?
What is common feedback received, and what are the themes within that feedback?
What is not being addressed, and what is actively being worked on?
How can you improve?
4. Define your brand positioning and your offering
Brand positioning is all about how you will position yourself against competitors in the market and what makes your brand stand above the other options. Your brand positioning should drive the creation of your marketing strategy and messaging and, thus, your product launch.
Remember your buyer personas and company mission when developing your positioning for your product launch. Everything should connect, as each component directly represents your organization as a whole.
Questions to answer:
What needs do your target customers need to solve?
Which features in your offering best address these needs?
How will customers use it?
What makes your product or solution different from others in the marketplace?
How are we elevating our brand/company with this new product/solution?
5. Identify your Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)
KPIs will be the metrics used to identify success in your go-to-market strategy and should be aligned with your objectives and sales goals. For a product launch, an important KPI will be conversions, most likely indicating that a purchase has been made. Conversions can represent multiple different activities defined specifically by your organization.
Keeping track of your KPIs will help you assess how your product launch is tracking against your goals and will also indicate areas in need of improvement.
Questions to answer:
What KPIs will we use to measure success?
Do the KPIs align with my company’s short or long-term goals?
What milestones need to be reached along the way for success?
What marketing resources do I need?
What marketing resources do I have readily available?
Conclusion
Preparing your go-to-market strategy is critical to launching a successful product or service. Of course, this plan will need revisions and tweaking along the way as your product or service grows and develops. Throughout the process, though, asking the right questions and finding complete answers will be vital in developing your holistic go-to-market strategy.
