Developing a go-to-market strategy

How to develop a strategy that delivers your unique value proposition to your target customers

When you’re starting out or launching a new product, the last thing you want is to launch it in a market that will not adopt it because it is already too saturated with similar solutions or it is unnecessary. This is why you need a go-to-market strategy. A go-to-market strategy answers the questions like how to connect your business to your customers, how to deliver unique value to your users/customers, and how to take a lead or potential customer through the customer journey to the fulfillment of your brand promise.

Your go-to-market strategy is a sub-total of all the key elements that move your business forward, this includes marketing, brand development, sales, pricing, competitive analysis, product, engineering, customer service, and consumer insights. It helps give a strategic plan that gives insights into how to communicate with your target customers and be a better competitor in the market. You can apply your go-to-market strategy to both existing and new products and services.

How does a go-to-market strategy benefit the business?

While developing a GTM takes time and resources, the benefits are worth it as it ensures a path to market success. It can help your business reduce the time taken for a product to evolve from an idea to market availability and lets you focus only on those steps that are essential for the product to enter a market. It also helps to increase the product’s adaptability to changing market conditions.

When launching a new product, the challenges faced could rapidly evolve and it takes having a high level of adaptability to be able to tackle the challenges, having a go-to-market strategy can help make managing these challenges easier. It also helps carve out the path for growth by helping you know who your target audiences are and giving a deeper insight into what they need. By keying into market trends and providing for the needs of the moment will do two things: give you more market share while helping you grow and scale. This also ensures a well rounded and successful product launch.

Developing a GTM strategy also helps ensure a high-quality customer experience. To establish a feedback loop, you need customer experience and opinion because this feedback loop gives insight into what the customers need which helps to create a product that satisfies. Good customer satisfaction is the key to building a strong brand name. Finally, it helps to clarify what the company’s goals are, its values, and what it stands for. It will also help you better outline the steps required to achieve this goal.

What’s Inside Your GTM Strategy?

Your GTM strategy should aim to improve key business outcomes. To do this, align the strategy to the evolving needs of your customers. The key components of an effective GTM strategy include the following:

• Markets: define the target market you want to pursue.
• Customers — Define the exact personas you are looking to sell to.
• Channels: Define where you will be communicating about your product offerings to your customers. Where do they normally buy from? What locations do they normally go to? What social media apps do they use the most?
• Product or offer: What are you selling or what service are you providing? Define what is unique about this service, particularly to each target customer group.
• Price: What will be the cost of your service or product or offering? How much will your customers have to pay for it?
• Positioning: What is the main thing that differentiates you from other competitors in your target market? How will you identify and connect to things that matter to your target audience? How will you then position your brand accordingly?

Answering all these questions will help you in developing a stellar GTM strategy.

Key Takeaways:

A go-to-market strategy will help you develop a well-rounded approach for launching a new product or service or even starting up a new business. Because you know what all the moving parts of the strategy do and how they operate, you can target your customers effectively and offer services and products that answer their needs. To do this, you need to make sure you have defined these six key elements of a stellar go-to-market strategy:

• Markets
• Customers
• Channels
• Product or offering
• Price
• Positioning