Launching a new product or service needs a solid action plan to help a company target the right market and gain a competitive advantage. The best way to achieve this is through a go-to-market strategy.

Are you at a stage where you’re ready to launch a product? That’s great! The question now is how do you bring it to the market? The last thing you need is wasting valuable resources that does not reap the results you desire.

To stay away from disastrous outcomes, you need a well-thought-out strategy. In this post, we’ll show you the steps to crafting a successful go-to-market strategy.

A go-to-market strategy or GTM strategy is a comprehensive plan of action to better understand your target audience, their buying journey, and determine the best time to launch your product. But before doing that, let’s figure out what a go-to-market strategy is. Here goes.

What is Go-to-Market Strategy?

A go-to-market strategy is a road map that guides a company to successfully launch a product to market. Generally, it outlines who their target audience is, and the sales and marketing strategies to use.

Think of GTM strategy as a marketing plan, only more precise in scope as it targets a particular product or service. It can be used for a variety of reasons such as:

• Grow a new business
• Unveil a new product or service
• Promote an existing product to a new market
• Relaunch a company brand

Additionally, it gives you a clear view of the pain points your customers face when using your product. This helps you gain their trust by providing them the best experience possible.

If you own a large company, your go to market strategy might focus on the brand messaging and sales acquisition to reach your market. However, most new business owners start with building products and assess how the market responds later on.

Keep in mind that each product is different. So, your go-to-market strategy must be carefully planned; your product should offer a solution to a specific problem.

How to Create a Successful Go-to-Market Strategy?

In a nutshell, your go-to-market strategy should answer:

• why you’re launching a specific product
• who it is for
• how you’re going to engage your target audience to buy this product.

When carefully planned, your GTM strategy ensures that all stakeholders are on the same page when reaching milestones and results. This gives you a clear-cut path to product success.

Here are the steps you take to build a go-to-market strategy for your company.

Find your Product-Market Fit

Essentially, product-market fit is a concept that describes when a startup identifies a strong market demand and creates a solution that target customers are willing to pay for.

This concept is obvious right from the get-go. To increase your chances of success, you need to ensure that you have enough people who want to buy what you’re offering.

First, ask yourself why you’re building this product. What problems does it solve? How do you confirm that this product is what your users need?

More importantly, you need to figure out long-term objectives. As market demands evolve, how will your product adapt to these changes? Your GTM strategy should give you an idea of how your products will serve this market demand in six months to one year, and beyond.

Identify Buyer Personas

Part of the go to market process is understanding who your target market is. What does your ideal customer look like based on data and research? What are their needs and preferences?

A buyer persona is a research-driven representation of your ideal customer. It describes who your target customers are, the challenges they face, and how they make decisions to achieve their goals.

Buyer personas help business owners understand their customers better. It ensures that their sales and marketing strategies are perfectly tailored to meet their customer’s needs. The more specific and realistic your customer profile is, the better it will be for your company to attract and serve customers.

Outline Marketing Strategy

This is a crucial part where you lay out an action plan to engage with customers, create brand awareness, and hit your marketing objectives. This step tests a variety of methods to reach the target audience across different platforms. It may include:

• Lead generation – This helps you to search for leads and turn qualified leads into customers. A great example is content marketing, where you generate interest by producing content that drives traffic to your website.
• Brand strategy – Brand awareness tells customers who you are as a company and what makes you different from competitors. Does your product align with your branding?
• Ads and other promotional activities – How do you attract customer’s attention? You can promote your product launch through paid ads, press releases, or hosting events.

Make sure to test different channels and evaluate which produces high conversion. Then, disregard channels that don’t generate the most conversion for you.

Define Sales Strategy

If you’ve already locked down your marketing strategy, it’s time to get down and dirty with making those sales. Generally, there are four types of sales strategies, each of them tailored to different business models and products. It’s important to consider the cost, complexity, and long-term scalability.

• Self-service – a customer buys the product on their own. This typically practiced e-commerce websites such as Amazon.
• Inside sales – a sales model that requires a sales representative to nurture prospects and convert them into qualified leads. This is ideal for products with moderate pricing and complexity.
• Field Sales – this is when our entire sales team goes out of the headquarters to close enterprise deals. Some of the strategies include cold calling, door-to-door, and creating sales presentations. This is often expensive and entails a long sales cycle.
• Channel model – in this model, a third-party company sells your product. This model is affordable as this doesn’t require building a sales team. For example, if you’re a home appliance business, you can partner up with Walmart and Costco to sell your products.

Depending on your industry and market size, you can use one or any of the models together. What’s important is that you choose a strategy that’s cost-effective and scalable for your business.

Provide after-sales support

Whenever you’re launching a new product, expect customers to have questions and issues. Your go-to-market strategy should include how your support team will work alongside your marketing and sales team.

This step covers:

• The onboarding process to help customers understand how to use your product.
• Resources and tools to keep and manage the relationship with customers. An example would be using a Customer Relationship Management software.
• A retention plan to keep your customers loyal to your brand.
• Satisfaction metrics to measure the success of the product launch and support.

Scale your budget and resources

Your go-to-market strategy doesn’t stop once you’ve launched your product. You need to figure out how to sustain that product long after it has entered the market.

Are your budget and resources enough to sustain your product’s upkeep? This includes other factors that may directly affect how stakeholders function their processes.

Bring Product to Market with Confidence

Without a doubt, launching a new product or service can be challenging on its own. However, this becomes much easier when you use a go-to-market strategy customized to your business needs.

Indeed, it seems like an additional burden especially for small businesses on limited budget and resources. But, outlining your GTM strategy at the start will pay positively in the long run.

Additionally, make sure to iterate and improve your strategies as you grow. If you need an extra hand to implement your market strategy, we’re here to help. At Full Scale, we work with our clients to help them reach their marketing goals. Our marketing team can walk through the steps to launch your new products successfully.

Interested? Talk to us to get a comprehensive marketing solution today.