A Go-to-Market strategy fuses together all of the elements that drive a business, such as marketing, content marketing, customer intel, and brand development and provides an action plan for how you can better reach your customers.
A solid Go-to-Market strategy heightens your market awareness and ensures you don’t waste a ton of money, time, and resources releasing a product to the market that just isn’t necessary. It helps you launch your product into a new market, reposition/relaunch your brand, or improve existing product sales.
NB: Remember, poor product-market fit and oversaturation can hinder a new product launch — even if the product is well-designed and innovative, so be sure to take this into account when putting together your Go-to-Market plan.
Throughout this step-by-step guide, we'll address certain steps that’ll help you and your marketing team appeal to your ideal customer, including:
- What is a Go-to-Market strategy?
- Driving factors in a Go-to-Market strategy
- Understanding your buyer’s journey
- Example Go-to-Market strategies
- How to improve your Go-to-Market strategy
But first, let's take a look at the five essential elements of a killer Go-to-Market strategy:
- Market definition: Which markets will you be targeting when selling the product or service?
- Customers: Who is the target audience/target market, and what do the demographics look like within these markets?
- Distribution model: How do you intend on delivering the product or service to the customer?
- Product messaging and positioning: What is being sold and what is its unique value or primary difference when compared to other products or services in the market?
- Price: How much should the product or service cost for each customer group?
What's inside this guide?
Whether you're bringing a product to market this quarter or next year, learn from the best for when the time does come with this selection of presentations, templates and guides to help you through your next GTM project.
Part 1: presentations
- Insight to installs: how art.com leveraged customer insights to deliver stellar go-to-market results
- Disruptive Go-to-Market strategies for exponential growth
- Go-to-Market strategies: the bread and butter of product marketing
- The challenges of global Go-to-Market strategies
- Enterprise Go-to-Market for AI-driven automation
- A Go-to-Market strategy to win in the market
- 4 steps to sharpen your Go-to-Market focus with customer segmentation
- Go-to-Market best practices and strategies
Part 2: templates
- Product launch tier framework
- New product project planner
- Internal roadmap template
- Launch checklist
- Product roadmap framework
Part 3: Go-to-Market guides
- Product launch and land: answering the what, why, when, and how
- Using your product to accelerate growth: a product marketers guide to product-led growth
- How to incorporate the voice of the customer into your product marketing strategy
- How to improve your conversion funnel without changing your product
- The art of not launching a product
There's plenty more where this came from. 👆
Unlock it all in here. 👇
Product Marketing Alliance
Go-to-Market strategies unpacked
More often than not, product marketers own the Go-to-Market (GTM) process, since it depends heavily on cross-functional management, extensive knowledge of the product, and analysis of the market.
But what exactly is a Go-to-Market strategy and why do you desperately need one?
What is a Go-to-Market strategy?
A Go-To-Market strategy pulls together all of the elements that drive a business, such as marketing, customer intel, and brand development and provides an action plan for how you can better reach your customers.
A well-executed GTM strategy enhances your market awareness and ensures you don’t waste a ton of money, time, and resources releasing a product to the market that just isn’t necessary.
Having a solid strategy in place means you know:
- Who your market is
- How good your market timing is
- The best place for your product
Every product and market is different and as a result of this, every GTM strategy is unique, however, they do usually include a business plan identifying a target audience, a market plan, and a sales strategy.
Lawrence Chapman
Charley Gale
Charley Gale
Benefits of a Go-To-Market strategy
Prioritizing a Go-to-Market strategy can massively improve your organization, products, and customer relationships, here are just a few benefits:
- Reduces the time it takes to get a product to market
- Reduces the financial risk of a failed launch
- Delivers the best experience to customers
- Sets out a clear plan and direction for all teams
- Sets out a clear path for growth
Developing an effective GTM strategy can be daunting, but trust us it’s more than worth the time and effort you’ll put in.
Driving factors in a Go-to-Market strategy
- Value proposition: Why does your product have a competitive advantage over market alternatives? Why does your customer base choose your product over what’s already available?
- Positioning: Where does your product fit in the market? How do you want people to perceive you in relation to your competitors?
- Distribution model: How do you plan on delivering the product to customers
- Customers: Who are you selling to? Who is your target customer?
- Channels: Where do your target customers buy? Where will you promote your products?
- Price: How much will the product cost? What pricing strategy will you use?
How to create a Go-to-Market strategy
Consider your customer
The first step in preparing your GTM strategy is to figure out who will be making the final purchasing decisions and why they will be purchasing your product. According to Harvard Business Review on average there are 6.8 people in every organization making purchasing decisions for a single sale.
These people make up the buying center.
It should be noted that some of the titles below might take on more than one role.
Initiator: Shows initial interest or starts the buying process
User: The person who’ll be using your product
Influencer: Convinces other members of the org they need the product
Decision maker: Gives the final purchase approval
Buyer: Owns the budget
Approver: Usually someone in the C-suite who gives final, final approval and pushes the initiative on a larger scale
Gatekeeper: Someone who gets in the way of a product being approved for purchase
Once you’ve identified their job titles, you’ll need a deeper understanding of their roles, their objectives, and most importantly their pain points. Arming yourself with this information allows you to create a GTM strategy that offers solutions and addresses each of their requirements.
You’ll also be using this research to create effective messaging, utilizing buyer personas, which brings us to our next step...
Emma Bilardi
Messaging
Once your buyer personas are completed, you’ll need to take your accrued information and turn it into market messaging.
Like the example below.
This process needs to be repeated for each of the titles we listed above (gatekeeper, influencer, decision-maker, etc.).
If you want to learn more about messaging, check out this article we prepared earlier.
Emma Bilardi
There’s also a guide to messaging tools available below, perfect for helping you develop a distinguishable brand voice.
Lawrence Chapman
Test your messaging
Once your messaging has been finalized, take it for a test run. Think long and hard about where your audience is, are they more likely to visit LinkedIn? Is Instagram more their speed?
Look at where your conversions are low and take your money elsewhere. Try something new on Twitter, test out Facebook ads, if you’re not gaining traction, move on and try something new.
Understand your buyer’s journey
With your personas and messaging set, you’ll need to look closer at your customer’s journey, from both perspectives - the buyer’s and your company’s in order to tailor your marketing efforts.
The top of the funnel is the awareness stage - they know a little about your product but are nowhere near ready to make a commitment. The content you create at this stage needs to grab and hold their attention from the get-go. It could be a clever blog post, video, or whitepaper.
The middle of the funnel is the consideration stage. This prospect may have downloaded an eBook you offered for free through your website, they have a problem your product can solve and they’re considering it.
The bottom of the funnel is the decision stage. The prospect is so close to a decision it’s palpable, they may just need a gentle nudge over the finish line in the form of a free trial.
Every company divides the buyer’s journey differently, with marketing usually taking ownership of the top of the funnel, however, once a lead reaches the decision stage, it’s the sales team’s time to shine.
Lawrence Chapman
Example Go-to-Market strategies
Fitbit Smart Coach
You know FitBit, the manufacturer of those activity trackers that look like smartwatches, well a few years ago the company launched Smart Coach, a premium service and personal training app, that integrates with the user’s FitBit.
Their GTM strategy started with simple, attainable objectives, including:
- Building brand awareness
- Increasing subscription revenue
- Improving the subscription attach rate
Launching the “Get More With FitBit” campaign which involved using both paid and owned channels to reach the target audience (FitBit’s users).
Paid channels included retargeting display ads that directed potential customers to a landing page.
They also used push notifications, social media accounts, and newsletters to reach their target customers.
The result: The company earned $192 million in revenue.
Upscope
Upscope is an interactive screen-sharing service.
They could have easily been just another standard screen-sharing program, targeting the usual suspects. But with a solid GTM strategy, they leveraged the live chat wave, targeting those who would need it the most - customer service advisors, technical support, and onboarding specialists. They focused on one universal pain point - the annoyance of setting up screen sharing.
Bryony Pearce
Learn more about GTM Strategies and access a range of resources, templates, and frameworks, like the one below in our member’s area. Already a member?! Awesome! Everything you’ll need is all in one place, at your fingertips.
Access this complete toolkit - and more - right here. 👇
Product Marketing Alliance
How to improve your Go-to-Market strategy
Metrics play a fundamental role in improving your Go-to-Market strategy and refining your sales process; implementing a suitable system will improve your sales team’s performance.
Key performance indicators (KPIs) like conversation rate, sales volume, and time can help you establish whether you're hitting your goals, and assess where your sales team needs to improve.
Moreover, metrics will also enable you to analyze ways to lower your customer acquisition cost to optimize your profit earned per customer and reduce your sales cycle.
The shorter the sales cycle, the quicker you can nurture buyers through the sales funnel, keeping existing buyers happy, and attracting new customers to supplement your inbound figures. This approach has all the makings of an effective business model, as customer retention is maintained, whilst churn is kept under control.
Also, seek input from your buyers when improving your GTM strategy. For example, case studies are often used to provide insights into your unique value proposition from a buyer’s perspective.
This not only serves as a powerful tool for your salespeople, but you can also distribute words of endorsement across your marketing channels, improving your SEO and visibility in search engines in the process.
Learn the fundamentals of Go-to-Market strategy
Our Go-to-Market Certified: Masters course will give you all the information and knowledge you need to up your GTM game.
Delivered by Yoni Solomon, Chief Marketing Officer at Uptime.com, this course provides you with everything you need to design, launch, and measure an impactful Go-to-Market strategy.
By the end of this course, you'll be able to confidently:
🚀 Grasp a proven product launch formula that’s equal parts comprehensive, repeatable, creative, and collaborative.
🧠 Gain the expertise and know-how to build and tailor an ideal product blueprint of your own.
🛠 Equip yourself with templates to facilitate a seamless GTM process.
