As businesses strive to market their products and services, they require a comprehensive plan outlining the steps to achieve success. This is where a Go-to-Market (GTM) strategy comes in. It’s a well-defined roadmap that outlines how a company plans to bring a new product or service to market and attract customers.

When you apply marketing efforts to this strategy, you try to ensure the new product succeeds. That’s why it considers product positioning, pricing, distribution, marketing, and sales tactics.

So, if you want to learn how to prepare an accurate Go To Market strategy and apply it to your product or service, don’t miss this article!

The Go-to-market strategy is a guide that follows the steps you need to take to launch a product to the market. It’s a roadmap that ensures product viability and predicts how well it’s going to perform according to multiple factors like:

• A pricing strategy

• Establishing target market

• Sales team performance

• Sales cycle

• The current business model

• The buyer’s journey

The idea is to take target customers from an existing market and release a product to solve their issues.

This strategy is not reserved for products only. You can use it for your business objectives, branches, or new service releases.

A go-to-market strategy establishes a roadmap and aligns stakeholders to a sales and marketing plan that benefits the product launch.

Each milestone must be completed to reinforce the sales funnel and use potential customers’ pain points during the sales process.

The overall benefits of preparing a Go-To-Market strategy are:

1. Helps define common goals that align with all stakeholders.

2. Reduces the time sales teams market products.

3. Improves the possibilities of successfully entering a new market.

4. It prevents adding extra costs for using marketing channels.

5. Enhances customer acquisition through demand-generation strategies.

6. Helps increase the customer base with a successful GTM strategy.

7. Prepares a straightforward growth path.

8. Ensures that marketing objectives are fulfilled.

9. It develops key performance indicators.

10. Optimizes the minimum viable product for your release.

A GTM strategy ensures you have a value proposition to generate demand, find new customers, and profit from your efforts.

There are clear disadvantages when preparing a product-based strategy. Have them in mind when building your marketing plan.

1. A go-to-market strategy takes 3 to 12 weeks to complete.

2. Requires a big investment.

3. It could cost the entire business if done incorrectly.

4. It’s difficult to identify a target market due to constant changes.

5. It demands time and effort to present the product to all stakeholders.

6. The strategy could become ineffective due to obsolete data.

Agile communications and updated data are crucial to developing a successful go-to-market strategy. Without them, your business could be potentially harmed.

A solid GTM strategy must include five key elements to help you with strategic planning. These are:

Establishing The Market You Want to Sell Products in

This aspect considers all the market possibilities where you can sell your product. This includes people, companies, etc. You must specify where your efforts will go to develop an effective GTM strategy.

Defining the Right Audience

When preparing product marketing for a new release, you need to find out who your potential customer is.

If you’re an existing company, you should also consider if your paying customers are interested in a new offer or if you must find other buyer personas. GTM strategies will show you what to do.

Identifying How You’ll Deliver Your Product/Service

A new product needs specific distribution models to follow. This means you must consider which channels you’ll use to make sales.

Social media influencers? Traditional marketing? Upselling techniques?

It all depends on your business plan and if you want to use indirect or direct sales channels. If you need help deciding how to distribute the new offering, you could ask these questions:

• How will customers feel about the new product?
• How are competitors selling similar products?
• Are you delivering clear marketing messages about the new product?
• What is your niche? Established companies, small businesses, the final consumer?
• What is your market position?
• If it's a physical product, where will it sell?

Pinpointing The Value Proposition Your Product Brings

Messages are powerful. They explain situations and trigger emotions. You must develop an optimal marketing messaging strategy when selling your product.

That’s why you should include in your inbound marketing things like:

• Clear product descriptions
• Who will benefit from it
• How customers are going to learn about your product

Explain the value proposition and how the product solves customers' needs. It’s also important to identify how it differentiates from similar solutions.

The ultimate goal is to provide optimal customer experience while increasing possible sales.

Setting Up a Price For The Market

As a new product launch, you may consider reducing costs to increase sales. But the truth is that if your value proposition is good enough, clients won’t have an issue paying for them.

Consider the value of existing products and use them to know how much customers are willing to pay.

When you think about building a complete strategy centered around a product, you must prepare and identify key information to give you a competitive advantage in the market.

Here’s how you create a go-to-market strategy:

Find Your Target Audience

The first thing you must do is find a good market for your product. This means establishing buyer persona, the market forces, and how you’ll get to them.

You must use the information gathered so far to achieve this.

Identify The Customer’s Needs

Enterprise businesses – and any other form of company – need to identify the customer needs that are solved with their products. You can use a value matrix that maps it all out and then communicate with all stakeholders to confirm the information.

Once you know this, you can find growth opportunities where you could only see issues before.

Use Competitive Advantage To Increase Awareness

Now that you know the customer's needs, you must use your advantages to convince customers during the buying process.

You do this by using strategies that raise awareness in the market. Some of these strategies are:

• Branding
• Email marketing
• Websites
• Newsletter

Use a clear message to create a sales conversation that attracts customers across multiple platforms.

For example, you could grab the Media's attention by preparing a guest post in a famous digital newspaper.

Before creating content, you must consider how your competitors talk to the audience.

Prepare a Customer Journey

The customer journey consists of three stages: Awareness, Consideration, and Decision.

You must identify each process stage to meet expectations and consider how potential customers will follow the sales funnel until they purchase the product.

A common market problem happens when you don’t consider everything related to the customer. For example:

• Are you selling complex products?
• Do competitors charge less money for a similar solution?
• Are you solving key questions?
• Are you launching a new product in the right market?

These questions will help you to hit the customer pain points correctly to increase the conversion rate and reduce the customer acquisition cost.

Create a Sales Strategy In Your Marketing Plan

Developing a marketing plan for a new or existing product is a must-have for a GTM plan. Taking a product to market with a brand, you will need to:

• Prepare sales-led marketing training so your employees are confident enough to close deals.
• Give tools to identify and focus on customer needs and manage relationships.
• Identify high-value accounts to maintain them without many risks.
• Make research to set up a product-led growth strategy.

Optimize Customer Service

Whenever you have a business problem, customer service must be ready to solve it.

That’s why you must prepare your support teams to learn to assist your customers. Some of the things you need are:

• CRM tools. They’ll help product management staff to track and manage relationships. This will also help salespeople to measure satisfaction and brand awareness levels.
• A comprehensive guide about your product/service. This will give the support team clear knowledge about how to solve issues.
• Clear retention strategies focused on retaining customers and finding new prospects.

Identify Where Would The Product Market Fit

You can’t sell a product without real demand for it. That’s why you must research the market before launching a new product.

Hence, you must:

• Identify if the product satisfies a need.
• Consider primary and secondary markets.
• Promote the product or service as something unique and better than your competition.

After determining the aspects above, you can create a clear timeline and processes your business will go through to prepare the new products.

You should also have prepared an action plan to explain how the new product will affect productivity to all stakeholders involved.

Establish KPIs For Product Positioning

All organizations must be able to measure their results.

That applies to every aspect of the company, from HR to product growth.

So, once you have specified all the aspects above, you need to determine the KPIs your business will follow to measure if a product is successful. They must be achievable, meaningful, motivational, and clear.

Set Up a Budget And Pricing Strategy For Continuous Upgrades

With the current global technological situation, if a business releases a product and doesn’t update it continuously according to the client's needs, it will get obsolete.

You must prepare a monthly, quarterly, or yearly budget for product optimizations and maintenance.

Consider this investment as part of your Go-to-market strategy.

Still don’t know how to start your GTM strategy?

We have prepared a business case study from a well-known tax company so you you’ll have an idea of where you can apply your marketing efforts:

TaxJar is a tax automation company that wants to increase brand awareness in its niche. They have a solid proposal for companies that want to automate tax procedures.

They prepared a go-to-market strategy focused on SEO and brand awareness. They used all their budget to boost their product and develop high-promotional content.

This was a game-changer for them. They could position their main keywords by creating evergreen content because their competitors weren’t applying that strategy. As an overall result, they became authoritative and acknowledged in their market.

The moral of this use case is that you can position yourself on top of your competitors if you prepare a unique strategy that gives value to your target market. 

Creating a new product and taking it to the market could be stressful for any company without a go-to-market strategy.

You may feel you need to produce lots of products and ensure quick wins. Instead, you go for further improvements and take your time to build an excellent proposal that can compete and surpass your competitors.

For example, let’s say you’re a SaaS and originally published software to improve document performance and organization. It was a hit and brought revenue to your company.

Now, you want to innovate and release new software.

You need to prepare and follow a go-to-market strategy aligned with your company’s resources without risking the rest of your operations.

It’s a mid-term strategy vs. short-term that will help your business remain.

To create a proper go-to-market strategy, you need a reliable productivity tool that helps you record all your processes and ensures you’re aware of data flaws you can’t see.

Fortunately, Microsoft Windows 2021 has everything you need.

You can use the whole program suite to develop a go-to-market strategy in Microsoft Word and prepare spreadsheets with updated data and charts from Excel.

Microsoft Office 2021 suite requires you to purchase an original license to work, which costs you $319,99 on the official website.

Instead, you can get Microsoft Office 2021 Professional Plus Key Retail Global on RoyalCDKeys. This is a lifetime license you can use on your computer.

Start using this powerful productivity suite as the answer to building solid go-to-market strategies!

If you don’t know how to start a go-to-market strategy document or don’t want to create some from scratch, you can always use templates.

We have gathered task-specific templates you can use to improve your go-to-market strategy:

Template #1

Strategic Marketing Plan Template, to immediately work on business goals - Download Link

Template #2

Go-To-Market Strategy Template, complete template to establish business goals and run a GTM strategy - Download Link

Template #3

Cost-Benefit Analysis Template, the document you need to determine if a product is profitable - Download Link

The go-to-market strategy is a crucial aspect of every marketing plan that aims to prepare a new product or service and release it to the market.

It’s necessary to count on the correct information, use it properly, and decide the steps to take with a specific budget that aims to develop a new proposal for your customers.

Whether you are a new or an established business, you should always consider a document that will serve you as a guide for all stakeholders.

Use the templates above to prepare your GTM strategy and invest in your company’s future!