What is a Go-to-Market Strategy? (A Complete Guide for 2023)

To sell to a new customer segment or market, you must offer a lot of value and meet specific needs and expectations.

You’re unlikely to achieve this goal without researching your target persona and competitors and assessing the viability of using your lead generation channels. That’s what a solid go-to-market strategy involves.

Let's see its definition before getting into the details of creating one.

What is a go-to-market strategy?

A go-to-market strategy is a plan helping you define your target persona, position your brand and its offering and keep everyone engaged (sales, marketing and operations) and aligned on the goals.

A go-to-market strategy is a plan to launch a new or existing product in an existing or new market or market segment.

Why is GTM important?

While this term is quite popular and widely used, some companies don't have a data-driven plan when launching new products.

They rely on their gut feeling rather than data about local markets, customer needs and the effectiveness of their marketing message. By doing so, they predestine themselves to fail with their product launch plans and end up with the product not aligned with their customers' needs.

Creating a go-to-market strategy allows you to develop a product that aligns with your customer expectations and find the most effective way to market it.

So what are the steps involved in creating an effective go-to-market strategy? Let's take a look.

5 steps to designing a go-to-market strategy

Creating and executing a go-to-market strategy can be done in just a few steps.

1. Understand your target persona

Defining your target customer is fundamental to creating a successful go-to-market strategy. How can you sell a product without understanding your ideal customer persona profile?

Knowing your target audience, you can develop product features and messaging that appeal to them.

To define your target persona, you should know their pains, challenges and goals. Then, you can learn about those by talking to your ideal customers during a sales call, a discovery session or even a friendly chat.

Over time, you’ll get a better idea of what customer segment benefits from your product the most and what needs to be improved in your product to meet your ideal persona's needs the best.

Once you have your segments, you can also start looking into a CRM software or tool to nurture these relationships and move them down the sales funnel.

2. Research competitive landscape

The next step to creating a successful go-to-market strategy is analyzing your competitors. Just think of what could happen if you skipped this step when entering a new market.

You can underutilize the channels your competitors have successfully put in action; offer a product that is inferior to what's already on the market, or set a higher price tag than your audience can afford.

While there can be a few scenarios that doom your product launch to failure, you can avoid it all by doing your research.

Start by picking 3-5 competitors offering similar products to yours. Then research the following aspect for each competitor:

• Unique value proposition
• Marketing message
• Product features
• Marketing and sales channels
• Marketing budgets
• Pricing

Once you have this information on the table, consider how your product is different and how you can stand out.

The idea behind competitor research is not offering what your competitors are offering. Copying someone using the same marketing tactics won't work unless you have a bigger budget and a more recognizable brand.

But offering more value to your niche will. So, again, it's about finding your unique selling point and where your product shines.

3. Create your marketing message

Once you have finished the research stage, it's worth thinking about what words and visuals you’ll use to appeal to your ideal customer.

Creating your marketing message is essential to reaching your target audience. If your message is weak and doesn't communicate value, your future customers won't engage with your ads, read your homepage, click your CTA buttons and register for your demo calls.

No matter how brilliant your marketing tactics are — they won't work with the wrong message in place.

When developing an actionable message, think of the value your product can bring, how it can help deal with your persona's challenges better and what different types of goals it will help achieve.

An actionable message should be concise and to the point. Remember that the user's attention span online is short — don't write long sentences using complicated language. Your audience might not have the patience and time to get into it.

4. Define your channels

So you already understand who you’re selling to, who else is selling the same thing and what words you will use to get people to buy. Now, it's time to choose the channels through which you’ll sell your solution.

For each channel, define your success metrics — the cost per lead and the number of sales opportunities you want to generate.

Once you have a prediction for your sales numbers, you can draft the budget you can allocate to each channel.

So what are possible places where you can push your product forward? Let's review the key ones.

Paid ads

Adding paid ads to your marketing mix helps reach users ready to schedule a call with your sales reps or who you can successfully nurture to convert into paying customers.

For example, by using Google Adwords, you can display your ads to people currently looking for a solution like yours. It's pretty straightforward — they’re just typing the words like "the best solution," "the best software" and "the best tool."

By utilizing Google search ads, you can reach them at the stage when they make the final decision.

All social media channels (Tiktok, Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn) let you reach potential customers with targeted ads.

Learn more: Where Do LinkedIn Ads Fit Into Your Marketing Mix? | With AJ Wilcox

Content marketing

Unlike paid ads, with content marketing, you can create a sustainable channel for lead generation without spending a dime.

Of course — you should first invest in creating and optimizing your content before it starts to rank. But in the long run, if successful, content marketing can transform into a free powerful channel for lead generation.

You should start with keyword research to learn what topics you should cover on your blog. Choosing the right keyword strategy will help you identify the issues you should cover on your blog.

When prioritizing your topics, you should consider covering bottom-of-the-funnel (BOFU) topics before moving to middle and top-of-the-funnel subjects. That's because you will see the results from this content much faster — it will attract an audience with high buying intent.

Referrals

Another channel that doesn't require an enormous budget in the beginning is partnerships. By reaching out to potential partners with built-out audiences, you can get first clients fast by giving up just a tiny chunk of your revenue.

Creating an intelligent reward system is key to your success. You have to be fair in your reward system to get all partners engaged and willing to do a lot of heavy lifting before results come.

Onboarding your partners properly and explaining the value and features of your product will make it easier for your partners to sell your solution.

Outreach campaigns

Your inbound campaigns should ideally be balanced and diversified with outbound activities — such as outreach.

Setting up an outreach campaign involves collecting information about your customers, such as their email or phone number. To find information faster, you can use various email finder tools. Then, once you have done it, you have to create a short yet persuasive message to get people to respond to it and send it over with email outreach automation tools.

While it can sound easy to do, it takes time to make it work because the devil is in the details. For example, creating outreach campaigns with a high email response rate that bring a lot of sales opportunities involves constant A/B testing of headlines and email content.

5. Iterate

Once you implement your strategy and measure the results, you’ll see that some tactics work and some of your assumptions are true, while some might prove wrong and ineffective.

That's the time to adjust your strategy — eliminate channels and tactics that don't work or find a different way to use the tactics. Then, by iterating on your system, you can polish it over time and see more results in the end.

Final thoughts

A well-thought-out go-to-market strategy helps eliminate the guesswork from your marketing plan.

You can better prepare for your product launch with a solid go-to-market strategy.

You get reliable data to base your hypothesis, know your persona better and can use proper channels and tools.

But creating a strategy is one step to success — next, you have to test it all in action, improve it and test again.