What is a Go-to-market Strategy?
A go-to-market strategy refers to an actionable plan to reach your target audience and ensure that your business achieves a market advantage over competitors.
Like the go-to-market pitch deck slide, the idea behind the go-to-market strategy is to create a plan that sees you delivering your products or service to your customers while factoring in variables such as pricing and distribution. The difference between the go-to-market slide and the strategy is that the slide provides a graphical or visual representation of the plan contained in the strategy.
Understanding the importance of the go-to-market strategy makes it easy to see that it applies in various use cases. These use cases include relaunching a product, brand, or company, launching a new product, or introducing an existing product into a new market.
With the go-to-market strategy, you will understand the reason for launching the product, your target audience, how to reach them, and the plan for convincing them to buy the product or patronize the service.
Once you have this strategy, building the go-to-market slide becomes much easier.
How to Build an Effective Go-to-Market Strategy
The process involved in the creation of an effective market strategy includes;
Creating and Understanding Personas for Your Target Audience
Understanding the target audience is the first and most important part of creating a go-to-market strategy. The success of the product, brand, or service is based on the product or service's ability to resonate and be accepted by the target audience. This places the target audience as a crucial element of the strategy and go-to-market slide.
Thus, it is essential to understand the target audience or customers. The best way to understand the target audience is to create a persona for them. You may have already included this person in the market or customer acquisition slides.
A persona is a representation of an individual or a group of individuals (could be a demographic) created using your research or survey results. The persona allows you to understand the traits of the individual or group you are trying to represent.
In this case, the persona seeks to represent the prospective buyers of your product. This way, you will see your prospective buyers' motivation, pain points, and objectives. With this information, you can craft a launch and marketing approach that appeals to your prospective buyers' pain points, motivations, and goals - making it much more likely they will purchase your product or service.
Another benefit of creating the buyer persona is that it allows you to understand the buyer's journey. By buyer's journey, we refer to the buyer's steps and decisions before buying the product. By understanding this journey, businesses can fit themselves into one of these steps or processes.
Create a Value Chain
The value chain, also known as the value matrix, links the product or service being launched to the needs of your target audience. This process helps you and other stakeholders in the business understand why you are launching the product, service, or brand in the first place. This value matrix also helps you establish the criteria with which you should judge the success of the launched project.
While a value chain may not fit on the go-to-market slide on a pitch deck, putting it in your strategy will make your deck much clearer.
Create a Marketing Approach
The first two steps help you understand the place of your product in the market. Up next, you need to devise a plan to raise awareness about the product in the market. This plan will ensure that your business uses the right marketing approach and platform.
The marketing strategy will include lead generation, a marketing website, branding, and marketing content.
Looking at the go-to-market slide above, this is how you will get out of stage 1 of your business's journey and reach stages 2, 3 and 4.
Create a Sales Strategy
A sales strategy is different from a marketing strategy. While the marketing strategy devises a plan for raising awareness about the product, the sales strategy creates a plan to get the product to the customers and buyers.
In the sales strategy, you will have to decide on;
Tools and resources: This includes equipment, items, and resources that the sales team needs to identify, engage, and create a working relationship with prospective buyers. These tools will also include those needed to demonstrate a product and service for prospective buyers, such as Zoom, a website and CRM.
Training and Support: This includes all training required to provide the sales team with enough knowledge to confidently sell the product to buyers.
Customer Acquisition: This includes the approaches required to identify the ideal customer for the product or service.
Identify the Place of the Product in the Overall Company Roadmap
Remember that you have identified the place of the new product or service in the target market. However, you need to understand the place of the same product in the company's roadmap.
By understanding your product's or service's place on your roadmap, you will set priority levels for the product concerning other offerings from the company. This helps you understand if you should direct more resources to the product after launching or if you should focus on other offerings from the company.
Many go-to-market slides will include details of the DMU (decision-making unit) of a business. This is a key part of a company roadmap as it lists the people that have a say in whether your product or service gets purchased.
