A Go-to-Market (GTM) strategy is not just a to-do list. It presents a carefully crafted blueprint that helps businesses align all their vital components to introduce a new product or service line flawlessly or to reposition an existing one. It further helps ensure that the designed strategy captivates the market strategically and irresistibly.
A Go-to-Market (GTM) strategy fuses all elements that drive a business, including marketing, content marketing, and brand development, and offers an action plan for how to reach customers better.
What is a Go-To-Market (GTM) Strategy
A go-to-market strategy presents a comprehensive plan that summarizes how a product or service will be positioned, priced, and distributed to a target audience. The strategy connects a range of business functions – from product, marketing, and sales to customer intel. It helps align the value proposition and action plan to launch and scale a new product.
A go-to-market strategy heightens market awareness and helps ensure that the organization does not waste its money, time, and resources when releasing a product to a market that lacks sufficient demand. It also helps launch the product into a new market, reposition the brand, or even improve its existing product sales.
Importance of a Go-To-Market (GTM) Strategy
A strong Go-to-Market (GTM) strategy will assist in gaining a deep understanding of the competitive market positioning, ideal customer profile, distribution channels, and sales enablement practices. A go-to-market plan is significant not only to commercialize the product but also to accelerate its adoption in the marketplace.
Benefits of a Go-To-Market (GTM) Strategy
Prioritizing a go-to-market strategy can massively help an organization streamline its products and customer relationships. Some of the benefits include:
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Reducing the time to launch a product in the market
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Lessening the financial risk of a failed launch
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Delivering the best experience to customers
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Designing a clear plan and direction for teams
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Setting out a clear target for growth
Developing an effective Go-to-Market (GTM) strategy can be quite daunting, but business is worth the time and effort.
Read more: Employing Data and Analytics to Drive a Strong Marketing Strategy
Purpose of a Go-To-Market (GTM) Strategy
Businesses design Go-to-Market (GTM) strategies to minimize the risks involved and to optimize potential success when launching a new product on the market. There are many risks involved when entering a new marketplace or launching a new product. For any brand, entering the average consumer’s rotation of products is challenging, and the competition is always high.
Go-to-market strategies help in foreseeing the challenges of this competitive space by identifying the target market, framing the product’s value proposition and a strong marketing plan, and crafting a strategy for sales and distribution channels. By compiling an effective go-to-market strategy, businesses can:
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Gain a comprehensive understanding of the marketplace, along with their target market.
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Identify promotional channels to reduce marketing costs.
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Troubleshoot product positioning and messaging.
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Define the logistics of distribution and sales channels before launch for maximum impact.
How to Build a Go-To-Market (GTM) Strategy
A go-to-market strategy involves several marketing methods to ensure that a product is launched in the market with the best possible chance of success. The following key elements will assist you in developing a thorough process and gaining a better understanding of what goes into compiling a GTM.
Steps to Develop a Go-to-Market Strategy
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Customer Journey Mapping
The customer is always placed at the center of any marketing strategy. As a result, whether a brand is launching a new product to the market or refreshing its existing one, it is imperative to research and understand the target market that will be most interested in purchasing it.
A target market includes a group of individuals with a shared set of features like demographic or psychographic similarities. The process of identifying the shared similarities is called segmentation and involves researching different individuals or organizations that will purchase the product. To identify the target market, businesses need to find answers to the following questions:
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Is the product being sold to the B2C market or the B2B market?
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What demographic, psychographic, or types of segmentation are being used to define the target market?
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What are the pain points of the target customers?
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Defining the Value Proposition
A product’s value proposition encapsulates the benefits it offers to consumers and the problems it solves. A value proposition should clearly articulate why the target market should purchase the product. When preparing a go-to-market strategy, businesses should have a clear understanding of the value proposition that their product provides to direct their marketing efforts.
The exact value proposition that the product or service will provide depends on what it is and the target market. And to define the product's value proposition, businesses need to find answers to the following:
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What are the pain points that the product provides remedy to?
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How is the product different from that of the competitors?
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What unique features does the product or service offer to potential customers?
Read more: The Evolution of 'Data-First’ Strategy: What does that mean for Businesses?
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Defining the pricing strategy
Price is a critical factor for any product. Businesses don’t want to sell a product for too much or too little. After gaining a thorough understanding of the target market and the value of the product, businesses can decide on what price a consumer might be willing to pay for their product.
A good price is one that fits the business strategy as well as matches the customer profile. When devising a pricing strategy, it is important to ponder on the following questions:
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How much does it cost to manufacture the product?
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What should be the price of the product to make a profit?
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How much do the competitors charge for a similar product?
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What is the target marketing willing to pay?
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Understanding the Product/Service to Craft the Promotion Strategy.
A promotion strategy is an action plan to promote the product to the target customers. Businesses need to design a strategic marketing analytics plan that summarizes the exact steps required to reach the customer base. The techniques used to promote the product will depend entirely on the product or service. While crafting a promotion strategy, some questions businesses need to consider include:
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What are the best channels to reach the target audience?
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Does the customer respond better to outbound marketing methods or inbound marketing efforts?
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On which platforms does the target audience spend most of their time?
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What marketing methods can be implemented based on the defined budget?
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Competitive Analysis: Choosing the right sales and distribution channels
Sales channels are where consumers can purchase the product, whereas distribution channels are how the product gets to the customer. Many times, sales and distribution channels can be the same when a consumer buys from a manufacturer. In other instances, distribution channels can be more complex. Depending on the unique demands for the product, businesses need to identify the buyer’s journey to make it seamless, reduce friction, and increase sales. Points to take into consideration when choosing sales and distribution channels:
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The nature of the product and the specific sales and distribution requirements.
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The manufacturing needs of the product and its impact on its sale and distribution.
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These are critical steps to make the sale of the product seamless.
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Setting Clear goals
The success of every go-to-market strategy is entirely dependent on the goals set by the brand. In setting these goals, businesses also need to identify the metrics to measure their success. As the go-to-market strategy progresses from idea to reality, tracking the metrics and making necessary adjustments is important. Some common metrics to measure the success of a go-to-market strategy are:
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Customer acquisition cost (CAC)
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Cost per dollar of sales expense
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Conversion rate
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Length of the sales cycle
GTM Framework: Components of a GTM Strategy
A go-to-market strategy incorporates several layers. A solid document will contain:
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Objectives: A detailed plan on how to achieve the goals.
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Customer attraction strategy: A plan to attract the target customers.
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Sales strategy: A sales model to promote the product.
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Delivery strategy: A strategy to get the products to the customers via direct shipping or a middleman.
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Customer support strategy: Steps to handle potential issues and support the customers when they face difficulties using the products.
While every product launch must focus on the objective part, the other aspects should also be prioritized differently, depending on market conditions and the product.
Read more: Data & Analytics Strategy: Must-Have Crucial Elements for Decision Making
What is the Go-to-market (GTM) Strategies
Every Go-to-Market (GTM) strategy is a combination of a finite set of tactics. By finding that balance, businesses can ensure that their audience is captivated by their new product, brand relaunch, as well as fresh service. Let’s break down some of the most common strategies.
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Inbound
Inbound marketing strategies encompass many forms of marketing - content marketing, search engine optimization (SEO), blogs or articles, and social media.
They help in creating brand awareness as well as attracting new prospects organically at every stage. This methodology is focused on attracting the right audience at the right time with the right content. An excellent addition to any marketing plan, inbound marketing does pay off over time and benefits from paid media support.
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Sales Enablement
Sales enablement strategies concentrate on boosting sales results and productivity by providing content, training, and coaching services at every stage of the sales cycle. This strategy is excellent for front-line sales managers, sales representatives, and all-around sales teams.
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Account-based marketing
Account-based marketing strategies focus on B2B marketing where marketing and sales teams meld their expertise to target, engage with, and close deals with high-value accounts through valuable content and comprehensive cross-channel campaigns.
Go-to-Market Strategy Benefits
In addition to launching a product successfully, compiling an effective strategy can benefit the business in multiple ways, including:
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Understanding the target market
Compiling a strategic Go-to-Market (GTM) strategy involves understanding the marketplace, the target market, the competitors, and the proposed products. With more insight into customers and market conditions, businesses will have more tools to thrive in all areas of business - ranging from product launches to introducing a new brand identity.
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Reducing costs
With a strong go-to-market (GTM) strategy, businesses can keep marketing costs down and explore new promotional channels with a high return on investment (ROI). They can further develop marketing messaging and content that resonates with their target market.
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Setting the right business goals
Creating a Go-to-Market (GTM) strategy presents a great opportunity to review the organization’s goals and make sure that the product efforts are in alignment.
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Lowering time to market
Go-to-Market (GTM) strategies help in launching products more quickly in the following ways:
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Brands can prioritize tasks that are critical for a product to enter the market.
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They can troubleshoot product positioning and messaging before the product goes into the market.
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By defining the logistics of distribution and sales channels, brands can ensure maximum market impact.
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Building brand awareness
When launching and promoting a new product, businesses have an opportunity to attract more attention to their brand as a whole and even attract new niche markets, thus expanding their customer base.
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Increasing growth potential
When skillfully executed, a go-to-market strategy can help in increasing a brand's growth potential. With access to new niche markets and an efficient process for launching products, businesses can seize growth opportunities easily with a Go-to-Market (GTM) strategy.
Read more: Data-Driven Sales Strategy Consulting That Puts YOU First
It's Time to Devise the Right Go-To-Market Strategy
A successful go-to-market strategy begins with insightful research about the customers’ requirements. As businesses prepare to launch their products and get them market-ready, they need to incorporate a flexible approach to meet the set targets.
Conclusion - Go-To-Market Strategy
Creating a go-to-market strategy is vital for the successful launch of any product or service. The right strategy presents a roadmap for a repeatable launch process in the future. A go-to-market strategy ensures that the product launch succeeds and helps in acquiring customers in the tough competitive market. It is equally important to remember that the strategy is ever-changing. A Go-to-Market (GTM) strategy that proved accurate and successful once won’t necessarily yield the same results every time.
Data-driven market strategy helps keep an eye on the changing customers' needs and what pains them. Businesses will be able to devise a successful and fresh strategy for their brand-new product and service when they are aware of their target audience and their demands.
While it can take time to build and operationalize a launch process, with a solid framework in place, businesses can determine their audience and messaging, set concrete goals, and have clear processes to execute their strategy.
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About SG Analytics
SG Analytics is an industry-leading global insights and analytics firm providing data-centric research and contextual analytics services to its clients, including Fortune 500 companies, across BFSI, Technology, Media and entertainment, and Healthcare sectors. Established in 2007, SG Analytics is a Great Place to Work® (GPTW) certified company and has a team of over 1100 employees and a presence across the U.S.A., the U.K., Switzerland, Canada, and India.
Apart from being recognized by reputed firms such as Analytics India Magazine, Everest Group, and ISG, SG Analytics has been recently awarded as the top ESG consultancy of the year 2022 and Idea Awards 2023 by Entrepreneur India in the “Best Use of Data” category.
