Marketing Strategy Level – A go-to-market strategy (GTM) is a plan that helps you launch a new product or service, define your ideal customers, and tailor your messaging. The GTM strategy also aligns key business units into a common strategy. This allows you to meet the needs of the market and multiply your production accordingly. Who needs a go-to-market plan? Anyone who finds themselves in the following three situations needs a GTM strategy: Launching a new product in an existing market Launching an existing product in a new market Testing a new product market for growth Why is this important for people and companies in the B2B environment? GTM strategies provide companies with the information they need to effectively stand out from their competitors, create inbound and outbound models, and use the right methods to achieve their goals. Startups succeed when businesses think there is a market need for a product and invest in its development without gathering this information. What are the go-to-market strategies? The two main go-to-market strategies are marketing and product-led. A marketing-driven GTM strategy uses marketing to develop product demand, through content and presentation forms. A product-driven GTM strategy uses a product to acquire and retain users. In a marketing-led approach, marketers reach out to prospects with the goal of converting customers. This is a GTM strategy used by some B2B SaaS companies. For a marketing-led strategy, choosing the right B2B data provider is critical to its success. Accurate and responsive B2B data ensures your teams are targeting key audiences in key markets. It is a global B2B information provider. Book a demo for more information Calend and Slack are great examples of product-led development in action. In this blog, CMO, Alice de Courcy, tells you everything you need to know about the marketing-led GTM strategy, giving examples and answering frequently asked questions. 6 Steps to Building a Go-to-Market Strategy Watch the video below explaining Alice’s 6 Steps to GTM Strategy 👇 1. Define your ICP Your ideal customer profile or ICP is a general description of your ideal customer. The type of customer who can get the most out of your product or service, and who can provide you with enough value in return to make your business profitable. In most cases, this will be able to use your product to increase their bottom line, but there may be other benefits, such as: reduced costs, improved efficiency, improved employee productivity / safety, and the return of your ICP will give you. price back. You in the form of income. They can also offer referrals, customer insights and testimonials. To develop your ICP, you need to know who they are, where they work, what daily challenges they face, accurate and up-to-date B2B data. Quality data ensures that your teams are targeting data-driven marketing and sales strategies to the right people, leading to faster growth for your company. 💡 Companies like Zoominfo are popular B2B contact sites. 2. Research your competitors Understanding where your product or service fits into the current environment is key to any GTM strategy. Because learning about what your competitors offer and knowing the value they add helps position your product. Start by reviewing their G2 review page and click through the relevant business units. For example, an SME, is in the middle of the market, or business. This allows you to learn what you like and don’t like about competing platforms and what fits your ICP. It’s also worth considering how big and small trends can affect your startup now and in the near future. Doing so helped diversify the market. For example, when some B2B data providers have to adjust to the introduction of GDPR in 2018, it builds compliance into its platform. As a result, it is one of our core value propositions, integrated into all of our content and collateral. 3. Strengthen Your Message An effective brand message leads to: communicating the value of your product or service to the ICP in a way that aligns with their pain points. To do this, you need to speak their language. Start by listening to Gong’s recordings of sales demos and prospects or hang out with live sales reps. Pay attention to the language they use in relation to their pain points and desires. In Gong, you can search for specific competitor names and assess how the prospects are perceived. You can support this by taking words and phrases from sample reviews and G2 reviews and building your messages around them. Next, you need to understand all the messages your competitors are currently posting on their site and evaluate how they are positioning their product. This means you can find out what your USP is and how you can complement your competitors’ offerings. Once you’ve found this, you should prepare a brief for management, including the key ways you stack up against your competitors. Here you need to specify which people you will talk to and how you will talk. Finally, to set your message in stone, you need to arrange a call with key company officials and reach an agreement. It’s important to note that there may be a lot of changes before you get to the bottom line here, especially in terms of messaging and branding from your CEO. 4. Set Outbound Goals All good GTM plans have clear examples. And you can build these models from the available capacity / budget. For example, say you have two outbound sales development representatives (SDRs) working at your startup. If you review the number of cold calls, emails, and LinkedIn messages sent per day, you can work out their average results and response rates. This means you can predict the number of meetings each representative will hold. Next, you need to use the retention rate/opportunity to inform your target audience. From this you can make a regular chance to close the level. For this you use 25%. This allows you to build your entire funnel and set data-driven targets and sales goals for your reps to work towards each month. Note: If you find that you are falling short of this target, you may need to adjust one component of your GTM strategy to improve performance. Specify the ICP or message of your choice. Marketing now tracks your inbound efforts. At the beginning of your GTM plan, planning for a 50/50 split between inputs and outputs allows you to: Measure the two in terms of efficiency / success in ground-to-ground metrics. It all starts with a cost-per-lead (CPL) estimate. There, we bake in $30 as our worst case scenario for our content leads. This time, it’s $250 for demo applications that come directly from paid advertising. Next, you need to pass the estimated conversions step by step in the sales funnel, which will be different from the content and paid demo applications. You can also find out how much budget you need to hit the same opportunities that come out. In this strategy, you want to find these opportunities through a combination of content and paid advertising. The idea behind it is that you want to diversify and test different strategies as part of your GTM. In the table below, you can see how you can do this and create B2B marketing targets. 5. Choose your strategies To reach your ICP, you will need to use different strategies. These include: Data As we mentioned in defining your ICP, you need quality data to target the right people. And there are some top B2B data providers that can help you do just that. From there, companies like ZoomInfo, Lusha and LeadIQ provide targeted leads. Using current data, your sales team can improve customer-based accounting and target people who can buy your product or service, for example, according to Joe Mackay, manager of sales operations at QA. And Correct Data was generating 81k leads in two weeks. 💡 Read the QA case study to learn more about the benefits of using advanced B2B data. Marketing Strategy When planning your GTM strategy, you need to allow yourself room to test, experiment, and expand. This will be your mantra. Start with a discount. Then look to coordinate offers and lead sources that you believe can convert your ICP. You need different resources for top (TOFU), medium (MOFU) and bottom (BOFU) B2B marketing channels. You want too