How To Create a Successful GTM Strategy? [With 9-Step Plan]

Here’s a scenario.

💪Strong team ✅

💰Money ✅

⚙️Technology ✅

Plan? 😰

Moving forward without a plan is not cool. In fact, “no plan” is a plan to fail (if you know what we mean)! 🙃

60% of small businesses fail within their first five years due to a lack of vision and a solid progress plan.

So, a comprehensive plan, including a well-developed GTM strategy is what you need to level up in your business.

In this post, we’ll discuss how you can create a successful GTM strategy to grow your business like never before. Let's begin!

What Is a Go To Market Strategy?

A go-to-market strategy is a detailed plan about how a company brings its product or service to market. It is like a trusty map that guides you to your target audience, shows you the marketing routes that actually work (adios, useless ads!), and tells you exactly what you need to make it rain.

All in all, with a clear GTM strategy, you can avoid pitfalls. That’s because it provides you with a blueprint for delivering a product or service to the end customers considering factors like demand, pricing, and distribution.

Here’s Toby Dao’s (Marketing Manager at Tigren) take on how beneficial a GTM strategy is.

Who Needs a GTM Strategy?

Everyone!

A go-to-market strategy is critical for any business trying to launch a new product or service,or enter a new market. It portrays the action plan considering your resources and helps you give a new direction to the product or the company.

Take a look at the three GTM strategy components.

Product strategy - What problem does your product solve? Why do customers need it? What is the motivation behind launching the product?

Answer all of these questions and communicate to the audience the purpose of the product. Position the product right and provide a message that is a mix of emotion and action. It ensures connection to the audience.

Distribution strategy - Pick the right channels where your potential customers are and then fit your product in a way that educates the customer effortlessly. To do so, first, understand your audience - their hopes, challenges, online behaviors, etc. Second, find the why - why your audience needs the product, how it affects them, and more.

Community strategy - Offer the best customer experience. Give them a sense of belonging. Empathize and understand their challenges and help them define what’s next.

Here’s how a GTM strategy can help you in different scenarios.

🤔Starting as an entrepreneur?

A GTM strategy can help you avoid common mistakes like spending too much on advertising.

❓Planning to launch a new product in the existing market?

Your GTM strategy will help you decide which customers are most likely to buy from you and how much money it will take to get them on board.

❔Stepping up to launch your existing revenue-generating product in a new market?

A GTM strategy can help you do so without wasting money or any other resources.

Want to test a new product in a new market?

A GTM strategy can help you test it before making any significant investments.

But is this GTM strategy only for early-stage businesses?

Even established companies must develop go-to-market strategies for new products and markets to remain competitive because this quickly-changing business scenario is risky. You never know if your product will succeed. Even if you’ve had success with a particular product in the past, it might not work as well this time around. So, why not brush it up to match the new market and trends?

Importance of Building a GTM Strategy

Truth be told, the success of your product launch depends on how well you build and execute a go-to-market strategy.

A GTM strategy is essential to any successful product launch because it helps you identify and prioritize the activities required to bring your product to market.

It also helps ensure that there’s enough time available for each activity before launch day arrives. You don’t want to jump in without knowing the depth, do you?

Here are some reasons why you should build a GTM strategy before launching your product.

1. Helps you reach the right audience segment

You can’t build a successful product launch without identifying the right audience segment. A GTM strategy helps you identify your target market and define its needs. This allows you to create an effective communication plan that resonates with your target audience.

2. Helps you identify the most effective channels for reaching customers

Any marketing campaign must determine the proper channels to reach your target audience. You can’t just pick a handful of platforms and expect them to work for you. You need to identify which ones will resonate with your target market and help you achieve your business goals. GTM helps you identify what channels your target audience uses most often and how those channels can be used to create an effective communication plan.

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3. Helps you allocate resources efficiently

One of the most prominent challenges marketers face is finding the right balance between budget and ROI. With so many channels, it can take time to determine which ones are worth investing.

A GTM strategy helps you decide where to devote your resources, and how much time and money should be spent on each channel. This allows you from consuming copious amounts of time and money on channels that aren’t effective.

4. Fosters collaboration and alignment

A good GTM strategy helps your marketing team collaborate effectively. It can help you determine who will be responsible for what tasks and which channels will be used to achieve each goal. This fosters alignment among your employees and ensures everyone is on the same page.

5. Helps you monitor and measure the effectiveness of your efforts

With a good GTM strategy in place, you can easily monitor the effectiveness of your efforts. This allows you to adjust your strategy as needed and prevents you from wasting time and money on channels that aren’t working.

A GTM strategy can also help you track conversions and revenue from each channel so that you know how much money is spent on each one and whether it’s worth continuing down that path.

Sree Chadalavada, Cisco’s Head of GTM Strategies, considers GTM as a “loaded term”. Ask why?

Because, according to Sree Chadalavada, “in addition to linking product strategy to business strategy, you need to look at sales, partner and customer success. All of those strategies need to come together and they all need to be driven with one beat. That’s what the GTM brings to the table.”

To learn more about Cisco’s GTM strategy and get inspired check out the full conversation between Sree Chadalavada with Vijay Damojipurapu from Stratyve.

How To Build a Winning GTM Strategy?

Though GTM strategies can vary from company to company and industry to industry, some universal principles can help you build a winning strategy.

Let’s consider Notion - the productivity software to understand what building a successful GTM strategy looks like.

1. Identify the problem that you are solving

People buy the solution not the product.

The first step to building a GTM strategy is to identify the problem you are solving or the value you bring to customers.

Notion addresses several customer pain points. In fact, it is a one-stop solution for businesses. How? Take a look.

Notion takes care of project and task management. It can replace Trello, Jira, and Asana.

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Next, Notion can replace Confluence and GitHub Wiki with its Team Wiki feature.

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Notion can also replace Evernote and Google Docs with standard note-taking and documents functionality.

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Identifying the problem(s) your product will address helps you create content that speaks directly about addressing your target audiences’ pain points.

This concept is called product-market fit. It is the extent to which a product satisfies strong market demand. Because understanding this concept is essential to gaining a competitive advantage, startups should ensure they're launching their products at companies that can use them.

2. Define your target audience

The next step in building a GTM strategy is identifying and understanding your target audience. This will help you determine what channels are perfect to reach them, how they consume content, and what types of messaging resonates with them. Once you’ve identified your audience, build avatars based on their demographics or firmographics (job title, company size, etc.), psychographics (personality traits), online behavior, and more.

Answer these questions to get better clarity,

• Who are your target customers?
• What are their pain points and how can you provide a solution that practically addresses them?

Notion addresses its customer pain points in a wonderful way. That’s because the brand knows its target audience well. It primarily serves three distinct audiences:

• Individuals using the single-player mode.
• Small businesses and teams opting for self-service
• Enterprises using Notion across departments or company-wide.

Notion empathizes with its customer so well that it has built a 269k-strong Reddit community.

3. Conduct market research

Once you clearly understand your target customers, you can gather data on the market you are entering and your competition.

This information can include industry trends, market size and segmentation, competitor positioning and offerings, and customer pain points and needs. Here are some popular methods to conduct in-depth market research,

• Surveys
• Interviews and focus groups
• Social media monitoring
• Competitor analysis tools
• Online review sites

Notion uses surveys and interviews extensively. The brand focuses on its product feedback loop to understand where to improvise.

The operations team at Notion collects insights from customers when working on their product development to prioritize users’ problems and the tool Enterpret helps them do so. Here’s how we know it.

These insights from market research and customer interactions will help you make informed decisions about positioning your products or services and reaching your target customers.

Finally, analyze your gathered data and use it to develop your value proposition, pricing strategy, and go-to-market plan. This includes determining the most effective channels for reaching your target customers and creating a marketing and sales plan that leverages your unique strengths and offerings.

4. Decide your key messaging strategy

Key messaging is one of the most critical elements of your GTM strategy. It is the message you use to communicate your value proposition to customers and prospects, explain how your company can help them solve their problems, and support the sales process. Key messaging should be clear, concise, and compelling to resonate with customers and encourage them to take action.

It should be structured in a way to help them achieve their goal, not as another sales pitch to promote your product.

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You can use a value matrix to do this. A value matrix allows you to identify each persona, their pain points, the value your product brings, and a critical message that conveys how it solves their unique problem.

For example, Notion’s value matrix looks something like this👇

Pain points:

• Businesses are losing deals because they can’t easily manage projects.
• Teams miss deadlines because they aren’t able to track projects and tasks.
• Declining customer satisfaction due to lack of communication and information sharing among teams.

Product value:

• Notion helps you build product roadmaps, make notes, collaborate with the team, manage workflow and more.
• Notion enables you teams to track lined up tasks, the ones in progress, and the completed tasks.
• Notion offers the team wiki feature for teams to manage and access all information in a single place. This eliminates the information sharing issue and lets teams align better.

Key message:

• Your wiki, docs, & projects. Together. Notion is the connected workspace where better, faster work happens.

5. Map your buyer's journey

Part of your marketing strategy should be to map the buyer’s journey. This will help you understand where they are in their buying process and ensure you’re targeting them at the right time with the right message.

Here's what an ideal buyer's journey looks like:

• Top of the funnel: The first stage is where you target buyers with content like educational blog posts and guides that can provide them with all the information they need about your product or service.
• Middle of the funnel: This is because buyers need more information about what your product or service can do for them. Case studies, how-to guides, and eBooks can be helpful.
• Bottom of the funnel: At this stage, you can use an interactive product demo that allows your audience to see what your product or service can do.

Notion has a very diverse set of audience that makes it quite difficult for the company to curate content for each personas. However, Notion still does it very well! 👏

The brand’s content marketing has truly fired up since 2020 as their Designer & Engineer, Cory Etzkorn, stepped up to propel their marketing efforts. As a result, the team began producing frequent educational and helpful content (blogs, guides, and landing pages) for its top-of-the-funnel audience.

Gradually, Notion churned out a significant amount of content to support the fast-growing user base. The brand’s active presence on social media channels tells the tale. Furthermore, if you explore Notion’s blog “for teams” you can find various blog posts catering to different segments of their target audience.

6. Create a way to generate qualified inbound leads

Inbound leads are more accessible to convert and cheaper to acquire than outbound ones because inbound leads already know about your company and its product, making them more likely to buy. You can use multiple strategies to attract them.

Content marketing is the best way to do that. It helps you create awareness about your brand, build trust and authority in the eyes of your audience, and attract new leads. The more content you create, the more opportunities you have to reach potential buyers at all stages of their journey.

The main objective of your content marketing is to drive traffic to your website. To convert most traffic leads, you have to showcase the value it brings and the transformation it delivers. Though a YouTube video can do better, more is needed. You must include an interactive product demo to help viewers experience your product. This will help you connect with your customers on a personal level and build trust.

With Storylane, you can create a product demo that can help you enhance the value of your brand and increase sales. You can even track how long the viewers watch your demo and how many of them convert into leads or sales.

7. Choose effective channels for your content strategy

You should choose the most effective channels for your content strategy and target audience. If you're targeting millennials, then it's a good idea to post on YouTube. But if you're looking to reach working professionals, LinkedIn might be a better option.

Notion has a strong presence across major social platforms - Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn. Moreover, it has a well-grown community on Reddit.

Here's a detailed breakdown of the number of social media channels and how you can efficiently use them,

Source.

You must be aware of the different types of content you can use. For example, video is a great way to showcase your product engagingly and interactively on LinkedIn. You can also post infographics on Twitter and Instagram and slideshows on SlideShare to showcase your expertise in a specific industry.

8. Establish KPIs

Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) are essential for measuring the success of a GTM (Go-to-Market) strategy. They provide a way to track progress towards specific goals and help you make informed decisions about improving your strategy.

The importance of KPIs lies in their ability to provide objective, data-driven insights into your performance. By regularly tracking your KPIs, you can identify areas where you exceed your goals and areas where you need to improve. This helps you make informed decisions about adjusting your strategy to achieve your desired results.

Here are some common KPIs that can be used to measure the success of a GTM strategy:

1. Sales: Track sales volume, revenue, and other metrics to measure the success of your sales efforts.
2. Conversion rate: Track the percentage of prospects who become customers to measure the effectiveness of your marketing and sales strategies.
3. Customer acquisition cost: Measure the cost of acquiring a new customer to determine the efficiency of your customer acquisition strategy.
4. Market share: Track your market share to measure your relative success in your target market and track your progress over time.
5. Lead generation: Track the number of leads generated to measure the effectiveness of your marketing efforts.
6. Return on investment (ROI): Track the return on investment for your marketing and sales efforts to measure the overall effectiveness of your GTM strategy.

By regularly tracking these and other relevant KPIs, you can measure the success of your GTM strategy and make informed decisions about how to adjust your efforts to achieve your desired outcomes.

9. Launch and iterate

What else?

You’ve built a solution and have identified your target market. You’ve created a GTM strategy, identified the relevant KPIs, and tracked them regularly to see if you’re on track to achieve your business objectives.

Now it’s time for launch!

Notion witnessed a huge surge in its traffic and number of users following the Product Hunt launch of Notion 2.0 in 2018. The Notion 2.0 Product Hunt launch garnered over 6000 upvotes.

But how did this happen? What was Notion’s launch strategy? 🤔

Notion used the traction from its strong community of enthusiastic users who are already in love with the product 😍.

No dumping money on paid social channels, display ads, or search ads, Notion simply focused on building a product that buyers respond to with great positive stories.

And voila!

A major part of the brand’s success can be credited to its radiant community of users.

Get Started With Your GTM Strategy

Launching a product is no rocket science 🚀

If you have a solid go-to-market strategy, nothing can stop you from getting your product off the ground with a bang! 😎

GTM will set your expectations and eliminate the need for guesswork or assumptions by establishing who you are targeting with your product and how they can buy it—from where, when, and at what price point.

Coming to showcasing your product’s value, interactive product demos can be fantastic. They can effectively tell your customers the story about your product - its features, benefits, and how it can help them.

Storylane can help you create compelling interactive product demos in an easy-to-understand way. Moreover, you can analyze how users interact with your demo and use that information to improve or pitch it.

Want to know how Storylane can power your GTM strategy? Schedule a free demo now to uncover more.

Frequently Asked Questions

1. What is in a GTM strategy?

GTM strategies include pricing, sales, and channels; the buying journey; new product or service launches targeting specific customer segments (e.g., millennials); and branding changes for existing products or services within a company's portfolio of offerings.

2. What are the three main parts of GTM?

Go-to-market strategy relies on three essential components: market intelligence, segmentation into targeted consumer groups, and product messaging to reach them.

3. What is the difference between a GTM and a marketing strategy?

A Go-to-Market (GTM) and marketing strategies are distinct yet interconnected concepts. A GTM strategy outlines the overall plan for bringing a product or service to market and achieving success in a target market. In contrast, a marketing strategy focuses on specific tactics and programs to reach and engage target customers.