Go-to-market strategy for an effective marketing of your organisation

A go-to-market strategy widely known as GTM strategy is an action plan that is devised step-by-step to successfully launch a product in the market. A GTM strategy specifies the route how a company will reach out to its target audience and potential audience to achieve its ultimate objectives and competitive advantage. Generally, a good GTM strategy identifies the target audience, includes a proper marketing plan and outlines an appropriate sales strategy. The main objective of a GTM strategy is to deliver a product or service to the end customer while considering the factors such as pricing and distribution.

As each product or service differs from the other, the GTM strategy for each product or service should be devised separately identifying the problem and positioning the product as a solution for that. It is somewhat similar to a business plan although a business plan operates on a broader scale and considers more additional factors as compared to a GTM strategy.

In simpler terms, a GTM strategy is a roadmap of how a company introduces a product to the market. It measures the viability and success of a solution by predicting its performance based on market research, prior examples and competitive data. These strategies can be and are created for a new service or a new product or for a new branch of your company or maybe even for an entirely new business.

Creating a GTM strategy helps your business to clarify the “why, how, when, which and what” for a range of events including the current status, launch, re-launch or even engagement of a product or service to give a complete understanding of who the product is for, how to build a proper interaction and engagement with the customer and how can they be convinced to buy or product or service.

Why do you need a go-to-market strategy?

Unless you form a thoroughly planned go-to-marketing strategy for your product or service, despite putting in great amounts of effort, time, money and resources your project is bound to fail. When you align your GTM strategy effectively to establish a timeline to ensure each stakeholder meets the defined milestones and outcomes, your business heads towards an attainable path to market success.

A relevant example of the same could be the world’s one of the biggest brands Apple. When Steve Jobs launched the game-changing iPhone back in decades before 1980, he led one of the biggest flops of the brand: the Apple Lisa computer.

Although having some of the best graphic technology of its time, only 10000 units of Lisa was sold. According to critics, Lisa’s misleading ads, insanely high price and a low processing power attributed to its failure.

Hence, while you’re developing something new, it’s of crucial importance that you also formulate a GTM strategy that’s customised enough to fit into your budget and affect your buyer persona. Having a GTM plan can help you prevent a couple of mistakes and oversights that can be considered while launching new products. Also, poor product marketing and oversaturation can lower the value of such a launch even if the product is well-designed and really creative.

However, having a GTM strategy doesn’t necessarily mean that you won’t fail it might help you manage expectations and work out any hurdles that your business is facing or might end up facing before launching or investing in a product.

Usually, the go-to-market strategies benefit the organisations in the following way:

·??????A well-defined plan and direction for the stakeholders.

·??????Reduced marketing time for the products and services.

·??????Increased and improved chances of successful product or service launch.

·??????Reduced chances of extra or unexpected cost bearing due to failed products or service launches.

·??????Improved challenge management.

·??????Enhanced abilities to meet customer desires and expectations.

·??????A determined growth path.

·??????Ensured an effective customer experience.

·??????Guaranteed regulatory compliance.

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What are the components of an effective GTM strategy?

A GTM strategy often and usually comprises the following core components –

Market: Which markets could be targeted and will be the best suited for the product or service?

Product-fit: What solutions does your product bring?

Target Audience:?Identifying who are those people who want your solutions? What problems are they experiencing that your product claims to solve? How much are they willing to pay for it? What pain points and issues can be solved?

Competition and Demand: Who’s offering the same products as you? Is there the same demand for those products, or is the market oversaturated?

Distribution Channel: How or which mediums will you use to deliver your products and services to your customers? Will it be via a website, a third-party distributor or an app?

Product messaging and positioning: What is the unique value or what are the primary differences of your product when it is compared to similar other products or services in the market? What message does your product deliver?

Price: what should be the pricing policy of the product or service cost for each customer group?

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These components identify the specific markets, target customers, proper distribution channels, determine the pricing, and set the product message and its position based on its competition and demand. It helps in determining and defining a specific and clear market to involve a large enough audience to meet the income and profit objectives by rendering the product or service. It also focuses on gathering information and research to define the market and use it to increase and improve the acquisition of new and existing customers. Depending on these factors relevant marketing parameters are considered and decided whether the existing customers are good enough to become your sales prospects or whether the organisation needs to come up with an entirely new set of the target audience to promote their new products. Segmenting customers allows for understanding the market better while determining the best-fit customers for a product or service. And once such products or services are decided for the target audience, a distribution model defines which channel or medium is best suited, simpler and convenient to reach the end customer.

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Some major questions to ask while determining a distribution channel include are:

How will the customers reach the end product or service?

How and where will they find it and through which distribution channel?

How will they download the product, in case it a software?

In case it is a physical store, how will they reach there?

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Your product needs to be positioned with an incredibly strong message explaining what is your product all about, what it does, how it offers a solution to a specific problem, and how will it generate leads for the business from both new and existing customers. The product offered should answer how it addresses a specific problem and how or what customers can expect from it fulfill their needs. It must also clarify if the monetary value being paid for the product is worthy enough. The product or service must be so differentiated to present it uniquely from all other similar offered products.

The pricing component must not be solely based only on the costs incurred during its manufacture or development rather it should be based on its market positioning and value proposition.

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Developing a GTM strategy

The main objectives of developing a go-to-market strategy include:

Increasing awareness of a specific product or service.

Generating and converting leads into regular customers.

Expanding market size i.e. entering new markets, outperforming competitors, increasing customer engagement.

Protecting the product against stiff competition.

Improving and building brand positioning.

Minimising costs and optimising profits.

Creating an effective GTM to fulfill the above-mentioned objectives should include –

1.???Segmenting and identifying buyer personas

2.???Building a value matrix

3.???Determining a marketing strategy

4.???Comprehending the buyer’s journey

5.???Deciding the sales strategy

6.???Performing in sync and support

7.???Understanding the product positioning in the market

8.???Determining the success metrics

9.???Determining the budget and resources needed

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1.???Segmenting and identifying buyer personas –

The first step to creating an effective GTM strategy is to segment the market to identify the buyer personas. This step includes segmenting and identifying the target markets as well as the customer base to build an understanding of how you can approach the customers and target audience to achieve long-term goals by using the gathered information and collected data.

2.???Building a value matrix –

Once you have segmented and identified your buyer persona, you need to create a value matrix to map to judge the success of your product or service that you are offering. Such matrix is used to communicate the purpose and reason of your offering to the stakeholders including the important clients for the business.

3.???Determining a marketing strategy –

When determining the marketing strategy, the organisations determine the place of the product or service place within the market to decide a course of plan to enhance the product awareness within the target market among the target audience. This stage widely involves testing various methods and strategies for advertising and promoting the product across the marketing platforms. These strategies include –

·??????Branding

·??????Lead generation

·??????Offering additional content

·??????A marketing map and website

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4.???Comprehending the buyer’s journey –

After the marketing strategy has been defined, the organisation must have a thorough comprehension of the buyer’s journey. The buyer’s journey is a process that each individual buyer goes through while purchasing any product or service. The journey consists of a number of stages i.e. awareness stage, consideration stage and the ultimate decision stage. Companies need to recognise the ideal course of the journey of a buyer both from the organisational and customer perspectives.

5.???Deciding the sales strategy –

The stage of deciding the sales strategy is comprised of creating a plan to introduce the product or service to the market and making it available to the buyers. A few elements of the sales strategy include:

Training support – To offer proper training and guidance to the sales team so that they can be determined and have enough knowledge about the product or service while selling.

Tools and resources – To offer anything that may be required by the sales team to certainly identify, engage, manage and sell or deliver the products or services to the customers.

Client acquisition – Identifying the best way to find and approach customers

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6.???Performing in sync and support –

The organisations need to align their objectives and pass on them to their sales and support teams to ensure how the customers must be provided or offered assistance if any issues or queries arise.

This stage determines:

·??????The tools that are required to build and manage healthy customer relationships with the management such as CRM;

·??????Proper guidance to help the users understand how the product or services are to be used;

·??????Building retention strategies and how they should be used in order to ensure customer loyalty:

·??????To set parameters to measure the satisfaction of the offered product or service and determine its overall success.

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7.???Understanding the product positioning in the market –

This stage comprises governing the overall priority and position of the particular product or service is placed within the overall company. It also includes determining if the product needs any further attention and is now just perfectly prepared to be launched to the market and whether the teams can move ahead to the next project.

It also determines how the product is placed on the roadmap and what is its priority, how is it addressed by all, what feedback can be expected and how the stakeholders will stay informed about the progress of the project.

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8.???Determining the success metrics –

The organisation needs to identify the primary purpose and objective of the product or service and determine how its success needs to be measured. These metrics are used to measure success and ensure that it is meaningful, measurable, motivational and easily trackable.

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9.???Determining the budget and resources needed –

Once all the previous steps have been successfully completed, the organisation needs to identify any continuing budget or resources that may continue or be in use even after the product or service has been launched in the market. It includes the amount of time and money spent on maintaining the product or service. It also includes all those other minor or major factors that create an impact on the everyday lives of the stakeholders.

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Thus, creating a go-to-market strategy is extremely crucial before launching your new product and offering it to your target audience. By simply following the here above-mentioned steps, you can seamlessly introduce your product or service to solve the unsolved for your future and existing prospects and operate a profitable marketplace.