Launching a new service or product is an exciting but tricky phase. It’s filled with possibilities, but also the need for careful planning – timing, and strategy are crucial.
Succeeding in this endeavor also requires the ability to attract the right audience.
As we embark on this journey, let’s dive into the world of product launches to make sure your venture starts off on the right foot with impact and finesse.
Explore the Go-to-Market strategy concept.
What Is a Go-to-Market (GTM) Strategy?
A Go-to-Market (GTM) strategy is a strategic plan developed to position your new service or product for launch.
Within this plan, you’ll identify your target audience and coordinate messaging to reach them effectively. Additionally, the GTM strategy is used to determine the distribution channels and generate demand for your product or service.
In summary, your GTM strategy should encompass:
- Target audience profiles
- A comprehensive marketing plan
- A well-crafted distribution and sales strategy.
To put it simply, a GTM strategy serves as your roadmap for introducing a new service or product to the marketplace.
It offers a detailed guide to help you establish your position and outperform your competition.
Is It Important to Have a GTM Strategy?
The short answer is: most definitely. Without it, you might target the wrong audience, enter the market at the wrong time, or struggle to stand out in a crowded market.
The benefits of a GTM strategy are numerous. When done correctly, it can:
- Reduce launch costs
- Speed up time-to-market by prioritizing tasks
- Increase revenue potential
- Enhance brand identity and recognition
- Provide a competitive edge
Furthermore, achieving alignment across the organization and delivering value to customers is essential.
Alignment is crucial, ensuring everyone in your organization is well-informed and moving in the same direction. Review your established business goals to ensure your launch strategy aligns with and even exceeds them.
As for customer value, a well-developed GTM plan builds trust with customers, boosting brand image and customer loyalty.
When to Create a Go-to-Market Strategy
With any launch, you need a go-to-market strategy, regardless of whether you are a new entrepreneur, a start-up, or an already established company.
Examples of when you need a GTM strategy include:
- Launching a completely new product or service.
- Entering a new market with an existing product.
- Relaunching your brand.
- Introducing a new feature or component for an existing product.
- Launching a new business or new company branch.
Go-to-Market Strategy Essentials
As we said before, a GTM strategy serves as a roadmap to align various aspects of the business toward common goals. The core elements of a GTM strategy include market research, product positioning, and customer engagement.
Market research involves identifying your ideal customer and market. You want a comprehensive knowledge of the marketplace, your target audience, and how your product or service fits.
Product positioning guides how to address your target customer’s pain points with your product. Understand these pain points to tailor your content, engage potential customers, and drive purchases.
Customer engagement strategies must increase engagement with your new product or service. Identify where your audience seeks information, the best ways to engage in each channel, and create relevant content to entice interaction.
Why Internal Alignment Matters
Launch success depends on how well the organization understands, embraces, and collaborates to execute the strategy. So, internal alignment is crucial.
Every team member should comprehend business goals, know the plan, and understand how to execute it. Effective internal communication is paramount to prevent miscommunication that can lead to mistakes and missed deadlines.
To be effective and avoid wasted effort, establish clear channels for internal communication, monitor them regularly, and adjust when issues arise. Internal alignment ensures a smooth launch and helps your organization stay on track.
How to Create a Go-to-Market Strategy in 7 Steps
Your GTM strategy is the roadmap, showing you where to start and the end destination you have in mind. On the internet, you can usually find templates to help you with the planning process.
In general, the answer to how to build a go-to-market strategy includes the following steps:
- Identify your target audience
- Conduct Competitive Research
- Discern Your Messaging Strategy
- Create a Roadmap for the Buyer’s Journey
- Devise a Tailored GTM Content Marketing Plan
- Collaborate with Sales and Customer Service Teams
- Outline Marketing Objectives and Track KPIs
1. Identify and Understand Your Target Audience
Identifying and understanding who your target audience is will drive your marketing strategy and the approaches you take before, during, and after the launch.
A target audience is a specific group of consumers or businesses who share certain characteristics or features and can be identified through customer segmentation.
Start by asking who will benefit from your product or service. In other words, who experiences the problem or pain point that it will solve?
Once identified, get to know them. What are their pain points, problems, needs, wants, and interests? What are they willing to pay out for solutions?
To drill down even further, create buyer personas or ideal customer profiles.
In addition, if you are a B2B, you will want to identify the buying center or decision-makers for your target audience.
2. Conduct Competitive Research
You need to determine a way to stand out from all the noise and capture the interest of your target audience.
Competitive research, then, is your friend. Identify who the top competitors are and analyze each one.
Sources for this include:
- Product portfolios or service offerings.
- Capability statements.
- Presentations to the marketplace.
- Accomplishments.
- Competitor websites, newsletters, and social media postings.
- Annual reports.
- Pricing structure.
- Content strategies.
- Social media strategies.
- Content engagement (likes, shares, comments).
- Customer reviews.
Determine what your competitors lack in the way of offerings and marketing strategies.
Use this information to carve your own strategy and even add additional features to what you offer so you can differentiate yourself.
3. Discern Your Messaging Strategy
Messaging strategies allow you to:
- Communicate what your company stands for.
- Convey the value of your product or service.
- Show how your offering is different from your competitors or other businesses.
- Identify the problems you solve.
- Build emotional connections with customers.
- Position a product or service as the best solution.
To start, ask yourself:
- What objectives do you wish to achieve with your messaging?
- Which keywords are associated best with your product, service, or company?
Once defined and crafted, incorporate your messaging into everything you do, from slogans to press releases to marketing materials.
For example, your message might be something like “Delicious snacks with none of the guilt.”
Position your product or service as THE solution to your audience’s specific problem or pain point, a solution not currently offered by anyone else in the marketplace.
4. Create a Roadmap for the Buyer’s Journey
With inbound marketing, you first understand your target audience and then create your strategy to meet customer needs along the buyer’s journey.
For your GTM Strategy, you must create a roadmap to address each stage of that buyer’s journey for maximum impact.
The three stages are:
- Awareness
- Consideration
- Decision
By understanding the buyer’s journey and each stage along the way, you are better able to predict the actions and behavior of your customer.
With this knowledge, you can create a roadmap, anticipating questions and preferences for each stage.
Strategize various ways to tap into your already existing customer base. This approach can save you time and money, build more trust, boost customer loyalty, and improve customer relationships and retention.
5. Devise a Tailored GTM Content Marketing Plan
Creating a content marketing plan for your GTM strategy comes next. Determine the best ways to promote your launch, then generate the content to get you there.
A few hints include:
- Incorporate your unique messaging.
- Personalize your approach.
- Use storytelling techniques to connect with your target audience.
Examples of content types to consider using include:
- Blog posts
- Videos
- Social media postings
- Interactive content
- eBooks
- Webinars
- Demos
- Free trials
6. Collaborate with Sales and Customer Service Teams
Marketing doesn’t work in a vacuum, and with a launch, you want everyone to be on the same page.
Collaborate with your sales team, identifying distribution and sales channels. Devise pricing and sales strategies to go along with the launch.
A GTM strategy also involves collaboration with your customer support team to ensure an overall good experience for customers.
7. Outline Marketing Objectives and Track KPIs
Establish key performance indicators (KPIs). Monitor these KPIs and adjust your strategy when warranted. Never remain rigid in your approach if your audience is telling you something different.
The most common metrics to track include:
- Customer acquisition costs.
- ROI of your sales strategy (cost per dollar of sales expense).
- Conversion rates.
- Length of sales cycle.
- Customer lifetime value.
The Role of Content in a Go-to-Market Strategy
Now that you’ve identified your target audience and chosen your approach, it’s time to focus on creating content that attracts, enchants, engages, and drives traffic to your brand.
In the realm of content marketing, the first step is to identify the right keywords. However, the content surrounding those keywords truly captures your audience and converts them into customers.
Content creation serves at least two critical purposes: building brand awareness and engaging with your target audience. By consistently delivering relevant and helpful content tailored to a specific audience, you raise brand awareness and encourage repeat visits.
Further, your content can provide ways to better engage with your ideal customer, whether it be through relevant website content, blog posts, or social media.
To optimize your content strategy, diversify your content types. Understand your target market and audience preferences to determine the most effective content formats. These options range from traditional blogs to engaging videos, informative eBooks, and more.
Specific ways to increase customer engagement with your content include:
- Blog posts on desired topics
- Social media posts that provoke likes, comments, or shares
- Interactive content that provides them with relevant information and provides you with data to better refine your approaches. Interactive content includes polls, questionnaires, calculators, and more.
Your content marketing strategy, then, will be an essential part of your overall GTM plan. If you lack the team, time, or confidence to create this all-important content, reach out to the professionals on WriterAccess.
Find experienced writers on this user-friendly platform to create what you need to attract, engage, and win customers over during your launch and beyond.
Go-to-Market Strategy Examples
To help you in your quest to craft an effective Go-to-Market strategy for sustainable growth, consider the approach of the following three B2B companies.
Oatly
When Oatly, a Swedish company, decided to expand its products into the US market, competition wasn’t a factor because oat milk wasn’t yet on the must-have list of American consumers.
For the GTM strategy, they chose to forego the ad route and instead go directly to the retail coffee shops frequented by their targeted audience.
The goal was to introduce the product at the precise moment customers were ready to buy a coffee or other hot beverage, letting them try it for themselves.
Within a year, between 2017 and 2018, revenue increased ten-fold, fueling an oat milk craze across the country.
Cognism
Cognism, a SaaS company, is all about verifying contact data for customers, so they can be more efficient in their business development efforts. To launch its new addition to the marketplace, Diamond Data®, the company focused on showing how it adds value to customers.
In addition, they sweetened the offering by including an option for customers to ask for verification of contacts on-demand, responding within a 48-hour timeframe.
In other words, they identified particular pain points of the target market, focused on them, and created a GTM strategy that spoke directly to customer value.
Baggu
Baggu decided to enter an already crowded market, introducing its reusable bags to a wide audience.
The launch required a unique GTM strategy with its messaging revolving around sustainability.
In addition, the company collaborated with influencers, such as Jamaican artist Joonbug, to turn the otherwise boring product into a functional yet stylish fashion statement, using Instagram as the main marketing channel.
Upscope
Upscope offers technically-oriented customers an interactive screen-sharing resource unmet by competitors and identified IT specialists, support, and onboarding teams as their target audience.
The shared pain point of this audience was the difficulty of attempting to share screens as they walk customers, employees, or even prospects through discussions involving technical matters.
Focusing on that issue, Upscope showed how their solution solves this, making the process much easier and more efficient.
At the heart of their GTM strategy was their content, both on their website and blog.
Fitbit Smart Coach
Activity tracker manufacturer Fitbit already had a following when it launched its personal training app designed to integrate with the Fitbit devices.
Messaging revolved around the slogan “Get More with Fitbit.”
One of the first steps of its GTM strategy, however, was to establish objectives. These objectives included building brand awareness, increasing subscription revenue, and boosting subscription attach rate.
Acorio (now NTT Data)
Prior to becoming part of NTT Data, Acorio was determined to strengthen its positioning with a go-to-market strategy that utilized research and data to help boost its credentials.
The company divided the insights gleaned from this research and data, separating them according to how they related to key decision-makers, and then created targeted content.
Create an Effective GTM Strategy for Your Next Launch With WriterAccess’ Help
Creating a successful Go-to-Market strategy offers numerous benefits. Not only does it provide the essential roadmap for your organization, but it also plays a pivotal role in shaping the content that draws, engages, and converts more customers.
That’s where the WriterAccess team comes in. With our expertise, you can unlock these advantages and more.
Sign up for a free 14-day trial today to explore how our writers or teams can contribute to the seamless launch and long-term success of your new product, service, or brand. Discover the difference we can make in your go-to-market strategy.
