go to market strategy presentation examples

Go to Market Strategy Example

A go to market strategy, or GTM strategy, explains the process needed to break into a new market or a new audience, step by step. You can use a go to market strategy for a new product launch, new service offering, a startup launch, or a brand relaunch. It’s similar to a marketing plan, but with a narrower, more detailed focus on one of your products or services.

A go to market strategy presentation ensures that your new product or service launch is properly planned out.

Use our go to market presentation template to:

• Outline your business strategy
• Validate timing, target audience, and market
• Inform all teams about the go to market strategy

Build your Go to Market Strategy Presentation

Each slide in your go to market strategy presentation has an important role to play. Graphics such as comparison charts, bullet lists, graphs, timelines, and sales funnels can help to illustrate your data. Each of these options is available with your go to market presentation template and can be added in an instant.

Pro Tips for a Go to Market Strategy Presentation

Customize your go to market strategy presentation with these tips in mind.

There’s a lot of data to cover in these types of presentations. Use graphics like timelines, scatter plots, bar graphs, or a SWOT analysis to make your data easily digestible.

Stick to one topic or idea per slide. If you try to add too much content to one slide, you’ll overwhelm your audience.

Your strategy involves analysis of your target audience, market fit, competition, and so on. Make sure your data is up to date and accurate before moving forward.

If you need additional slides to compare data, display tables, share pull quotes, or display word clouds, add them to your presentation.

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infoDiagram visual slide examples, PowerPoint diagrams & icons , PPT tricks & guides

10 Slide Ideas for Effective Go-To-Market Strategy Plan Presentation

Last Updated on November 3, 2022 by

Are you presenting an action plan that outlines the necessary steps to succeed in a new market? If you need to convince the management board, investors, or other stakeholders, to enter the new marketplace, having a concisely presented go-to-market strategy can help a lot.

Below we present several ideas for visual slides covering new market strategies, including:

• country macroeconomic snaphot
• market size comparison
• financial highlights of specific market
• potential partners evaluation
• timeline of a rollout to the new marketplace
• PESTLE analysis with instruction on how you can create fresh-looking PESTLE analysis slide using simple design tricks.

We hope our examples will help you stop wasting time on figuring out how to present a certain strategy, and allow you to focus on the content.

All slide examples below can be downloaded as an editable source. See the full Go To Market Strategy Plan graphics collection for PowerPoint.

What is Go-to-Market Strategy?

A GTM strategy is a tactical action plan that outlines the steps necessary to succeed in a new market or with a new customer. It can be applied to pretty much anything, from launching new products and services, to re-launching your company or brand or even moving a current product into a new market.

Get inspired by 10 slide examples of how you can showcase the various aspects of your go-to-market plan. You’ll also find an instruction on how you can create fresh-looking PESTLE analysis slide using simple design tricks.

Present all elements of go-to-market strategy to show the big picture

Such a framework presenting all important elements of your go-to-market strategy on one slide will help to analyze the situation.

You can list the common elements such as:

• Product (What you offer),
• Customer (Who is your client),
• Competitive Advantage (Why client should care),
• Distribution (Where your product will be available),
• Business Model (How it will all work),
• Timeline (When the plan will happen).

Notice how headers and bold text make the info more structured, and an icon of a chess figure gives an idea of what you’ll be discussing right away.

Show market macroeconomics

This slide example shows how you can arrange macroeconomics indexes in a clean dashboard. Numbers on the right on the map background focus on the most essential indicators, like Population, Households, and Tourists Annually, and the figures on the left go deeper.

If you want to add a map to your report, see more ideas on preparing professional-looking map slides .

To present a split by Gender, Age, Income, Education, or Place of Living, you can use such country demographics dashboard, which focuses only on indicators connected with population. Use buyer persona graphics to describe your best customer profile and target client.

Visualize market comparison

In the diagram above we illustrated the total available, serviceable available & obtainable market volume. Such a slide looks more attractive rather than a simple bar chart.

If you’d like to present competitors’ comparisons in a more detailed way, see the above example of the competitive landscape analysis table.

Illustrate financial highlights

Financial information can be hard to digest, especially by non-financial audiences. To present financial highlights of your business case benchmarking network development, revenue, and profitability, you can apply the timeline of 5 years (or as many as you need).

Notice the color-coding of each indicator, which makes the whole chart easier to read. You can also include comments at the bottom of the slide not to steal attention from the main content.

If you want to focus on each index separately, you can try using such a slide with four smaller tables.

Outline preferred partners in go-to-market strategy presentation

Most tables contain a lot of information and numbers and become very heavy and not readable. Simple design elements and tricks, like thin lines, color coding, and illustrative icons can help make your slide look professional and clear.

On the example slide, you can see the comparison of three potential partners by the following parameters: Background, Key Strengths, Brands Portfolio and Financial Situation.

Present timeline of a rollout to the new marketplace

Illustrate the product introduction by a 5-step timeline: Market Analysis, Legal Arrangements, Marketing Campaign, Stores Opening, and % of Market Share. We also added symbols to each key milestone.

You can also mention key success factors of the new market entrance strategy using a diagram with success determinants. As an example, we outlined the following factors: Correct Business Model, Reliable Business Partner, Local Expertise, Right Timing, and Relatable Messaging.

Step-by-step instruction on how to redesign PESTLE analysis into a modern table

Usually, PESTLE analysis is presented as a simple bullet-point list or default table in the best case. Enjoy a quick guide on how you can create an innovative PESTLE analysis slide using simple shapes, icons, and a few tricks that will save you time.

1. Show elements of PESTLE using columns layout for an attractive readable look.

2. Add color elements e.g. lines, to make points distinct.

3. Add circles in proper colors.

4. Assign icons for each category to create a visual association.

See the whole instruction and other visual examples on our YouTube channel.

Here is also this blog summary in a video:

If you are looking for inspiration on presenting client profiles, goals and general vision, product strategy, and more check our marketing strategy plan visualization ideas.

Resource: Go To Market Strategy Plan Infographics

The diagrams and graphics in this blog are a part of our go-to-market strategy plan deck. It contains templates to illustrate the strategy framework, market evaluation, dashboards, competitive analysis, financial highlights, and more.

See the full deck here:

Go-To-Market Strategy Plan PPT Presentation

If you need more general diagrams, consider the ultimate collection of infographic templates .

How to Write a Go-To-Market Strategy Slide (with Examples)

Table of contents, what is a go-to-market strategy.

A go-to-market strategy defines how your organization will engage with customers to maximize sales productivity and growth.

It typically includes:

• Distribution strategy: How and where you make your solution available to customers  (e.g. online, brick-and-mortar store, resellers, brokers, etc)
• Marketing strategy: How you identify and engage with your potential customers through marketing channels (i.e. what is the marketing mix?)
• Sales strategy: How you structure and enable your salesforce to meet business targets

Download a free go-to-market strategy slide and 29 other slide templates for free

Roadmap slides, recommendations slides, journey slides, key takeaways slides, next steps slides, panel slides, and more!

What is a go-to-market strategy slide?

A go-to-market strategy slide summarizes an organization’s overall go-to-market strategy, and covers distribution, marketing and sales. It usually follows the value proposition, which cover the product, price and positioning.

Typically, the go-to-market strategy requires multiple slides to communicate effectively. In fact, it’s not uncommon for the strategy be a standalone PowerPoint presentation.

Example key takeaways slides

Check out some examples of go-to-market strategy slides from top consulting firms.

Go to market strategy presentation: A comprehensive guide

This guide will help you launch your new product or service successfully.

Raja Bothra

Building presentations

Hey there, fellow marketing enthusiasts!

Today, we're diving deep into the world of go-to-market (GTM) strategy presentations.

Whether you're a seasoned marketer or just starting in the field, understanding how to craft a winning GTM strategy presentation is crucial for success.

In this comprehensive guide, we'll explore the ins and outs of GTM strategies, presentation templates, and everything in between.

So, grab your favorite beverage, get comfortable, and let's embark on this enlightening journey.

What is a go to market strategy?

Before we jump into the nitty-gritty, let's establish a solid foundation. What exactly is a go to market strategy, and why is it essential?

A GTM strategy, often referred to as a go-to-market strategy, is a comprehensive plan that outlines how a company will launch and deliver its product or service to the market. It's the roadmap that guides businesses through the complex process of bringing a new product or service to the masses.

But why is it important?

Well, imagine embarking on a road trip without a map or GPS. You might eventually reach your destination, but the journey will be filled with wrong turns and wasted time. Similarly, a GTM strategy ensures that your product or service launch is a well-planned, efficient, and successful journey.

Why is go to market strategy important?

Now that we understand what a GTM strategy is, let's delve into why it holds such a pivotal role in the business world.

Go-to-market strategies are crucial because they:

• Maximize efficiency : By mapping out every step of your product launch, you can identify and eliminate inefficiencies, reducing time and resource wastage.
• Minimize risks : A well-thought-out GTM strategy helps identify potential pitfalls and challenges, allowing you to proactively address them.
• Drive growth : Effective GTM strategies are tailored to reach your target audience, increasing the likelihood of a successful launch and subsequent growth.
• Optimize resource allocation : With a clear plan in place, you can allocate your resources—both financial and human—efficiently.
• Enhance competitive advantage : Understanding your competitive landscape and market trends enables you to position your product or service effectively.

Benefits of go-to-market strategy presentations

Now that we recognize the significance of a GTM strategy, let's talk about why creating a GTM strategy presentation is a game-changer.

A well-crafted GTM strategy presentation:

• Conveys clarity : It ensures that your entire team, from stakeholders to sales and marketing personnel, comprehends the plan clearly.
• Facilitates alignment : A presentation brings everyone on the same page, aligning your team's efforts towards a common goal.
• Simplifies communication : Complex strategies can be distilled into easily digestible information, making it simpler to convey your vision.
• Strengthens buy-in : A compelling presentation can convince the management and stakeholders of the strategy's viability and potential for success.
• Acts as a reference : It serves as a go-to resource throughout the product launch, keeping everyone focused and informed.

KPIs and metrics to add in go to market strategy presentation

When it comes to measuring the success of your GTM strategy, metrics and KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) are your best friends. Let's take a closer look at what you should consider including in your presentation.

• Sales and marketing metrics : These might include customer acquisition cost, market share, and sales growth.
• Product-related metrics : Consider product adoption rate, customer satisfaction, and revenue per user.
• Market analysis data : Highlight market trends, demographics, and competitive market insights.
• SWOT analysis : Discuss your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats.
• Distribution strategy : Explain your plan for getting your product or service in front of your target audience, whether through brick-and-mortar stores or online platforms.

By including these metrics and KPIs in your GTM strategy presentation, you provide a clear roadmap for measuring success and adapting your strategy as needed.

How to structure a go to market strategy presentation

Structuring a Go-to-Market (GTM) strategy presentation is crucial for effectively communicating your plan to stakeholders, whether they are internal team members, investors, or potential partners. Here's a step-by-step guide on how to structure a compelling GTM strategy presentation:

Title slide:

• Title of the presentation: "Go-to-Market Strategy"
• Your company's logo
• Your name and position
• Date of the presentation

Agenda slide:

• Provide a brief overview of what you'll cover in the presentation.

Introduction:

• Start with an engaging opening, possibly a compelling statistic or a relevant story.
• Briefly introduce your company and the product or service you are launching.

Market analysis:

• Explain the market you're entering or operating in.
• Share key market trends, size, growth projections, and potential opportunities.
• Highlight your target audience and buyer personas.

Competitive landscape:

• Present an analysis of your competitors.
• Highlight your competitive advantages and key differentiators.

Product/service overview:

• Describe your product strategy or service in detail.
• Explain its unique features and benefits.
• Use visuals, such as product images or diagrams, if applicable.

Value proposition:

• Clearly articulate your value proposition and how it addresses customer pain points.
• Show how your offering meets customer needs better than competitors.

Go-to-market strategy:

• Explain your GTM strategy, including channels, tactics, and timing.
• Discuss your pricing strategy and any promotions or discounts.
• Highlight your distribution channels and partnerships.

Sales and marketing plan:

• Detail your sales strategy and marketing tactics.
• Include a timeline for each tactic.
• Explain how you will generate leads, nurture them, and convert them into customers.
• Discuss your content marketing, advertising, social media, and email marketing strategies.

Customer acquisition:

• Explain your plan for acquiring customers.
• Highlight any customer acquisition costs and lifetime value considerations.
• Mention your customer onboarding process.

Financial projections:

• Share financial forecasts, including revenue, expenses, and profitability.
• Provide a breakdown of your budget allocation for sales and marketing.
• Discuss key performance indicators (KPIs) you'll be tracking.

Team and resources:

• Introduce your team and their roles in executing the strategy.
• Discuss any additional resources, technology, or partnerships needed.

Risk Assessment:

• Identify potential risks and challenges in executing your strategy.
• Explain your contingency plans for mitigating these risks.
• Present a visual timeline that outlines the key milestones and launch dates.

Conclusion:

• Summarize the key points of your GTM strategy.
• Emphasize the value your product or service will bring to customers and the market.

Q&A session:

• Open the floor for questions and discussions.

Thank you slide:

• Express gratitude for the audience's time and attention.
• Provide contact information for further inquiries.

Additional tips for a stellar go to market presentation

In addition to the structure, here are some extra tips to ensure your GTM strategy presentation shines:

• Tailor to your audience : Customize your presentation to suit your audience's level of knowledge and specific interests regarding your product or service.
• Data-driven evidence : Back up your claims with data and evidence. Show, don't just tell, why your product or service is exceptional.
• Realistic expectations : Be realistic in setting goals and expectations. Avoid overpromising and underdelivering.
• Passion and enthusiasm : Let your passion for your product or service shine through. Your audience should feel your belief in what you're offering.

In conclusion, crafting a compelling GTM strategy presentation requires careful planning and execution. With the right structure and an engaging narrative, you can effectively convey the value of your strategy and motivate your audience to take action. Remember, simplicity, clarity, and enthusiasm are your allies in this journey.

Do’s and don'ts on a go to market strategy presentation

As you write a go-to-market strategy presentation, keep these do's and don'ts in mind:

• Use a GTM strategy presentation template to maintain consistency and professionalism.
• Position your product or service as a solution to your target market's pain points.
• Provide an overview of your value proposition.

Don't:

• Overload your presentation with jargon—keep it simple and relatable.
• Force humor; use it sparingly and naturally.
• Neglect to differentiate your product from competitors.

Summarizing key takeaways

• Understanding go-to-market (GTM) strategy : A GTM strategy is a comprehensive plan that guides how a company will launch and deliver its product or service to the market, ensuring a well-planned, efficient, and successful journey.
• Importance of GTM strategy : GTM strategies are essential as they maximize efficiency, minimize risks, drive growth, optimize resource allocation, and enhance competitive advantage.
• Benefits of GTM strategy presentations : Creating a GTM strategy presentation conveys clarity, facilitates alignment, simplifies communication, strengthens buy-in, and serves as a reference throughout the product launch.
• Key metrics and KPIs : Include sales and marketing metrics, product-related metrics, market analysis data, SWOT analysis, and distribution strategy in your GTM strategy presentation to measure success effectively.
• Structuring a GTM strategy presentation : Structure your presentation with title and agenda slides, introduction, market analysis, competitive landscape, product/service overview, value proposition, GTM strategy, sales and marketing plan, customer acquisition, financial projections, team and resources, risk assessment, timeline, and conclusion.
• Additional tips : Tailor your presentation to the audience, use data-driven evidence, set realistic expectations, and convey passion and enthusiasm for your product or service.
• Do's and don'ts : Do use templates for consistency, position your offering as a solution, and provide an overview of your value proposition. Don't overload with jargon, force humor, or neglect differentiation from competitors.

Remember, an effective go-to-market strategy presentation can be the key to unlocking your product or service's potential in the market. So, embrace the power of presentations, align your team, and watch your business succeed in a new market.

1. What is a go-to-market strategy presentation, and how can powerpoint be used to enhance it?

A go-to-market strategy presentation is a vital component of launching a product or service into the market. Using powerpoint can make your presentation engaging and visually appealing. It's a tool that allows you to create a professional and persuasive go-to-market plan.

2. How to find a free go-to-market strategy template to help me get started?

There are various resources to find a go to market strategy template that includes a comprehensive strategy framework. These templates contains pre-built slides, including a market problem analysis, product-to-market strategy, and a target customer value matrix. You can use these slide to save time and create a successful go-to-market presentation.

3. How can a go-to-market presentation template help me launch my product successfully?

Go-to-market presentation template is designed to help your audience identify and understand the value that your product or service offers. These template contains a value matrix that will also assist in choosing the right marketing and sales strategy using a one-slide dashboard. With this template, you'll be well on your way to market penetration.

4. What are the key success factors in a go-to-market strategy, and how can a template assist in this process?

Key success factors in a go-to-market strategy include identifying your target audience and keeping your team aligned. Our template includes a slide that will help you build a strategy for putting your product in front of potential customers. It follows a similar process for each product or service launch, making it easier to iterate and launch your next product successfully.

5. Can you explain how to use this information in the go-to-market presentation template to create a winning strategy?

Certainly! Go-to-market presentation template is a pre-built resource that will help you create a well-structured presentation. You can use this template to present your product to market effectively. It includes one slide will help summarizes the entire strategy, making it easier for your audience to grasp your plan quickly. This will help your audience understand your next steps and the value your product or service brings to the market, ultimately saving you time and ensuring a successful product launch.

Create your go to market strategy presentation with prezent

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Here's how Prezent can help you craft a powerful go-to-market strategy presentation:

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• Presentation builder : Our intuitive presentation builder makes it easy to create stunning, brand-compliant slides. Say goodbye to hours spent on design.
• Tribal knowledge : Leverage the collective knowledge of your team. Prezent helps you capture and incorporate tribal knowledge into your presentation for a deeper understanding of your market.
• Real-time sharing + collaboration : Collaborate with colleagues both within and outside your company in real-time. No more back-and-forth email chains.
• Brand-approved design : Ensure your presentation adheres to your corporate brand guidelines with ease. Prezent's document management features make brand compliance a breeze.
• Save time and costs : Prezent helps you save 70% of the time typically spent on creating presentations and can cut communication costs by 60%, replacing the need for expensive agencies.
• Create personalized presentations : Tailor your presentations to the preferences of your audience while staying 100% on brand and approved by your corporate brand and marketing team.
• Professional services : If you're looking for a personal touch, explore our professional services, including overnight services and presentation specialists.

With Prezent, you can confidently create a go-to-market strategy presentation that not only impresses but also effectively communicates your business strategy.

Elevate your presentations and achieve full brand compliance with Prezent today. Sign up for our free trial or book a demo !

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The Proven Process for Developing a Go-to-Market Strategy [+Templates]

Updated: August 24, 2022

Published: February 10, 2022

Free Sales Plan Template

Outline your company's go-to-market strategy in one simple, coherent plan.

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To have a successful product launch, you need to craft a thoughtful, actionable, effective go-to-market (GTM) strategy framework.

Without proper planning, it’s impossible to know if you’re chasing the wrong audience, are too early or too late to a given market, or targeting a market that's too saturated with similar solutions.

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To make the process easier to navigate, I’m going to walk you through everything you need to know to build a killer go-to-market strategy in this article. This guide can be used for startups, B2B businesses, and virtually any new venture you plan on launching.

• What is a Go-to-Market Strategy?

Go-to-Market Strategy Benefits

Go-to-market strategy framework, how to build a go-to-market strategy, go-to-market strategy tips.

• Go-to-Market Plan Template

Go-to-Market Strategy Examples

What is a go-to-market (gtm) strategy.

A go-to-market (GTM) strategy is a step-by-step plan designed to bring a new product to market and drive demand. It helps identify a target audience, outline marketing and sales strategies, and align key stakeholders. While each product and market will be different, a well-crafted GTM strategy should identify a market problem and position the product as a solution.

Your go-to-market strategy should be a handy roadmap that measures the viability of a solution's success and predicts its performance based on market research, prior examples, and competitive data. Ultimately, you want to create a plan that sets the product apart from the competition and generates leads and customer retention.

It's also worth noting that go-to-market strategies aren't exclusive to physical products. You can create a GTM plan for a new service, a new branch of your company, or even an entirely new business.

Free Product Go-to-Market Kit

Free templates to ensure that your whole team is aligned for your next product launch.

• Product Launch Template
• Product Roadmap Template
• Sales Plan Template

You're all set!

Click this link to access this resource at any time.

Free Go-to-Market Kit

Fill out this form to get your free templates..

As you develop a new product or service, it’s vital to start drawing a go-to-market strategy that’s customized to fit your budget and your buyer persona . Although it takes a great amount of effort, time, money and resources, a well-planned go-to-market strategy can significantly benefit your project.

Create Alignment

Alignment is essential when preparing to launch a new product or service. Whether you’re a product designer or a social media coordinator, everyone needs to be on the same page.

Go-to-market strategies help maintain alignment throughout the whole product lifecycle because they include roadmaps and planning documents that keep the team informed on who will be handling which tasks. They can also help you establish deadlines so your team stays on schedule.

Without alignment, things can get unorganized pretty quickly. This can lead to miscommunication, missed deadlines, and errors that can cause your project to flop.

Establish Product-Market Fit

Creating a go-to-market plan can prevent many of the mistakes and oversights that can tank new product launches. Poor product-market fit can dampen a launch — even if the product is well-designed and innovative.

Take Apple, for example. In the 1980s, decades before Steve Jobs launched the game-changing iPhone, he led one of Apple’s biggest flops: the Apple Lisa computer.

Although Lisa had some of the best graphic technology of its time, only 10,000 units were sold. Critics attribute the failure to Lisa’s misleading ads and high price, despite its low processing power.

While Apple and Steve Jobs recovered, smaller companies could have a lot more to lose when bringing a product to market with a poor plan.

Work Out Kinks

While a go-to-market strategy isn't guaranteed to prevent failure, it can help you manage expectations and work out any kinks before you invest in bringing a product to market.

The process of creating a go-to-market strategy allows you to discover gaps in the market, which can help you hone down your product’s niche and better alleviate your buyer persona’s pain points.

To aid you in this process, we have free go-to-market strategy templates that can help you build a strategy that positions your product in front of your target audience.

Go-To-Market Plan Methodologies

I've seen two major methods for developing a go-to-market strategy: the funnel and the flywheel . While the traditional, one-off funnel method focuses on attracting leads and nurturing them into sales, the flywheel approach uses inbound marketing and other strategies to build long-lasting customer relationships.

While the funnel is centered around the awareness, consideration, and decision stages of the customer’s journey, the circular flywheel focuses on attracting, engaging, and delighting prospects, leads, and customers.

When a lead becomes a customer, the flywheel continues as the company is tasked with attracting them, engaging them, and delighting them all over again with solid customer experiences, new content, and potentially new offerings.

Before I share my go-to-market strategy framework, I thought I’d go over four key points of a GTM plan.

All of these points are integrated into the step-by-step guide I share below, so you don’t need to answer these questions now. Still, they’re useful for keeping in mind — especially if you’re creating a never-before-seen product.

Here are the critical parts of a go-to-market strategy:

• Product-Market Fit: What problem(s) does your product solve?
• Target Audience: Who is experiencing the problem that your product solves? How much are they willing to pay for a solution? What are the pain points and frustrations that you can alleviate?
• Competition and Demand: Who already offers what you’re launching? Is there a demand for the product, or is the market oversaturated?
• Distribution: Through what mediums will you sell the product or service? A website, an app, or a third-party distributor?

Alternatively, you could also try to use go-to-market platforms like Dealfront to help establish and initiate your strategy framework. 

Platforms like Dealfront allow you to pull from four layers of data, enabling you to target your ideal customer, track visitor behavior, reach out to leads, and promote your company with the help of B2B display advertising. 

Now, let’s get started. Below is my step-by-step guide to building your own GTM strategy using the tactics I’ve implemented to build multiple companies throughout the years.

I’ve also outlined how you can iterate and optimize as your company evolves, and you’ll find helpful examples of how we’ve broken these steps down at my most recent company, SalesHero .

• Use go-to-market strategy templates
• Identify the buying center and personas.
• Craft a value matrix to help identify messaging.
• Test your messaging.
• Optimize your ads based on the results of your tests before implementing them on a wide scale.
• Understand your buyer’s journey.
• Choose one (or more) of the four most common sales strategies.
• Build brand awareness and demand generation with inbound and/or outbound methods.
• Create content to get inbound leads.

1. Use go-to-market strategy templates

Launching a new product or service can get overwhelming very quickly, especially when there are many moving parts and stakeholders. That’s why the first thing you should do when taking a new product to market is to find go-to-market strategy templates that keep you and your team stay aligned and on schedule.

HubSpot offers a free go-to-market kit that features an assortment of templates that help you organize each aspect of your strategy and keep key stakeholders informed on who is responsible for which task.

Download the kit today to get started on your go-to-market strategy.

Each template has its own unique purpose, but they are best utilized in tandem:

• Product Launch Planning Template: Create tasks that need to be completed for the product launch, provide progress updates, and plan social media and PR messaging
• Product Update Email Templates: Internally communicate product updates and changes to your team
• Product Roadmap Template: Create a schedule of all the tasks that will be addressed and who will be handling them
• Product Lifecycle Mapping Template: Keep track of your product’s lifecycle stages
• Product Classification Template: Classify your product and align all teams on product vision, marketing plan, and sales strategy
• SWOT Analysis Template: Determine your product’s strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and weaknesses, as well as conduct market research on competition
• Sales Plan Template: Outline and communicate sales strategy to stakeholders

2. Identify the buying center and personas.

When preparing your product for market, you must always consider your customer.

According to Gartner, the typical buying group for a complex B2B solution involves six to 10 decision-makers. These people make up what is called the "buying center."

Each of those buyers typically fills one of the following roles (though it’s important to note some job titles might occupy more than one role):

• Initiator: Starts the buying process or shows initial interest
• User: Uses your product regularly
• Influencer: Convinces others the product is needed
• Decision maker: Gives final approval for the purchase
• Buyer: Owns the budget
• Approver: Final approver who pushes the initiative on a larger scale (typically someone in the C-suite)
• Gatekeeper: Blocker in getting a product implemented or approved

These roles vary based on the product, industry, and vertical you’re selling to. Get your team together and brainstorm the various job titles that could be impacted by your solution.

Research each role to get a general sense of what they do, their goals, and their pain points. It’s critical to learn who these people are, what motivates them, and what their problems are, as they will be the ones to put your product on the map.

Using SalesHero as an example, the buying center breaks down like this:

But the sales funnel is no longer the best way to look at your buyer’s journey. Instead, I propose using the flywheel methodology , which takes a more holistic approach that puts your customer at the center and turns your leads from prospects to customers to active promoters.

In the flywheel model, customers go through three stages: attract, engage, and delight.

First up is the attract phase. Content at this stage grabs a potential customer’s attention. This can be in the form of a blog, whitepaper, or video. A lead gets here by clicking on an ad, social media post, or a search engine result. However, these behaviors do not indicate that this lead is ready to make a purchase yet.

After that comes the engage phase. In this stage, a prospect has demonstrated they have a problem your product can solve. They show this through digital behavior like downloading an ebook or joining a webinar, allowing you to engage them with educational content.

While each company divides the lead generation and qualification process differently, marketing is typically in charge of the attract and engage phases. Your marketing team will need to generate interest and awareness and educate the relevant audience on a product’s value through messaging and content (more on that later).

Halfway through the engagement phase, the prospect should ask for a quote or a trial period. They’re nearing a decision on whether or not to purchase.

Once the prospect reaches this point, the sales team takes over. The process will typically look as follows:

• Contact: Communication between the lead and sales rep begins.
• Qualification: The sales rep learns more about the company, their customers’ pain points , and asks questions to see if they meet the basic requirements to purchase the product (BANT is a popular sales qualification method but several other sales methodologies are used to qualify).
• Business case: The prospect tests the product through a free trial or POC to see if it can solve their needs.
• Evaluation: The decision-makers in the organization weigh the cost of the product to the results they achieved during the business case.
• Negotiation: Both sales reps and decision-makers discuss pricing details and feature needs.
• Close: A deal is agreed upon and your prospect turns into a customer.
• Renewal (Optional): Your customer renews their contract or subscription.

Right after your sales representative closes the sale, the lead leaves the engage phase and enters the delight phase. When your customer has reached this stage, they should be delighted with a painless onboarding process and friendly customer service options.

After that, your customer should ideally turn into a promoter. They bring you more customers, keeping the flywheel going and enabling you to grow better.

7. Choose one (or more) of the four most common sales strategies.

You’ve done all the required foundational work, now it’s time to pick a strategy that will push your product into the market. No one method will work for every product or market, so it’s important to consider the complexity, scalability , and cost of yours.

There are generally four go-to-market sales strategies — each one catering to a different product and business model.

The Self-Service model

The self-service model is when a customer purchases on their own. We typically see this model with B2C purchases in which a customer can find and buy a product via a website, like Netflix or Amazon.

This works best for simple products with a low-cost point and high volume of sales. It’s difficult to build, but, when successful, it sees a short sales cycle, zero cost to hire salespeople, and is highly profitable.

While you won’t need a sales team, you will need a marketing team to drive traffic and conversions to your site. The core marketing team would likely include growth marketing, performance marketing, and content marketing experts, though there will likely be other team members as well.

The Inside Sales Business Model

The inside sales business model is when a prospect needs to be nurtured by a sales rep to convert into a deal. This type of model works best with a product of medium complexity and price.

The sales cycle ranges between a few weeks and a few months. Here, you’ll invest in a sales team — but inside sales reps are less expensive than field reps.

With a high volume of sales, this model can be profitable and is fairly easy to build and scale as you hire more team members. The sales team in this model is typically composed of a sales manager that supervises a handful of reps.

The Field Sales Business Model

The field sales business model is when you have a full sales organization that closes large enterprise deals. These are typically complex products with high price points, which also means there’s typically a low volume of deals with a long sales cycle.

The sales team in this model is often very costly as the field reps are experienced, high-salary employees. This model is easy to build, but harder to scale, because it takes time and money to hire and train a full sales organization.

Members include a sales manager, field reps, sales engineers, a sales development representative (SDR) team, and sales operations.

The Channel Model

Lastly, in the channel model , an outside agency or partner sells your product for you. This is hard to build, as the people can be difficult to recruit and educate on the benefits of your product. They are also often less motivated to sell than your own sales team would be.

However, this is a cheap model, because you don’t need to pay a sales team of your own. It works best with a product that matches the partner’s interest. For example, if you sell phone cases, you might want to find partners selling related products, like Best Buy or Apple.

You can mix and match these strategies based on industry or customer size (i.e., number of licenses or seats). For startups, it’s healthy to scale over time rather than investing in an expensive sales team too early.

8. Build brand awareness and demand generation with inbound and/or outbound methods.

Now you need to fill your pipeline by snagging the attention of your target audience. This occurs through demand generation, which can happen with both inbound and outbound strategies.

With inbound, prospects discover your brand through marketing efforts and reach out to you or show signs of interest organically. Some examples of organic inbound traffic channels could be social media, content, or paid ads leading to a landing page.

Outbound demand generation is when a salesperson contacts a lead through cold outreach tactics. They might do this by reaching out to a contact list, sending warm emails , phoning leads , or gathering leads at industry conferences .

Once interest has been generated through these methods, sales conversations begin, and the leads are led to more educational content and then into the sales funnel.

9. Create content to get inbound leads.

Inbound leads are generally easier to convert and cheaper to acquire than outbound leads. This is because inbound leads are already partially educated on the business problem you solve, aware of your product, and usually more interested in buying your product.

Content marketing is the key to generating that inbound interest, as content will drive traffic to your site.

Your content marketing team will drive this inbound traffic by finding and targeting keywords that your potential customers would search for and then creating and posting related content on your website.

At the core of content marketing is search engine optimization (SEO) , which is the way a search engine ranks the content on the internet once a query is entered into the search bar. This will be a large source of your organic web traffic.

What goes into content marketing? It’s a cycle of keyword research, creation, and measurement.

• Keyword research: Identify keywords related to your product, analyze the volume (how often that keyword is searched), the difficulty of ranking for that keyword (i.e., how competitive that keyword is), and see who is already ranking for those keywords.
• Content research: Brainstorm content topics that include that keyword. See what articles already exist around these topics and begin to plan your content calendar.
• Content creation: Put those ideas into motion and have a writer create articles on those topics.
• Design: Add relevant images, infographics, videos, and other multimedia to your content so it’s more visual and engaging.
• Promote: Spread your content and drive traffic to your website by sharing the links via social media or emails to your customer database.
• Build links: Reach out to other publishers and ask them to link to your content to gain even more traffic with link-building tactics. This gives you site authority, which helps improve your SEO rankings.
• Conversion rate: Track and measure the engagement and conversion rates of your content. Keep doing what works and drop what doesn’t. From there, begin the content creation cycle again.

Your content team should develop content that aligns with the various stages of the buyer’s journey (top-of-funnel, middle-of-funnel, bottom-of-funnel).

Top-of-funnel content is lighter educational content, middle-of-funnel content is deeper, more applied learning, and bottom-of-funnel content is for those who are ready to buy and implement. To use SalesHero as an example, the content at each level of the funnel would look like this:

• Top-of-funnel content: "What is sales AI?"
• Middle-of-funnel content: "How sales AI can increase productivity"
• Bottom-of-funnel content: "Using sales AI to extract dark data"

If you're feeling overwhelmed, don't worry. I've created a chart you can fill in. Create a messaging strategy or content marketing plan based on your customer’s journey. The template includes notes on where you should be in the flywheel and funnel’s cycles.

Top-of-Funnel Content

Funnel Stage: Awareness

Flywheel Goal: Attract Prospects

What type of content will you create to catch the eye of potential customers in similar industries? Make a table like this one below.

Middle-of-Funnel Content

Funnel Stage: Consideration

Flywheel Goals: Attract and Engage Leads

In this phase, your audience might know of your service, or they might be researching products related to yours. What types of content do you create to move your service to the front of their minds?

Bottom-of-Funnel Content

Funnel Stage: strong> Decision

Flywheel Goals: strong> Engage and Nurture Leads / Gain and Delight Customers

Your audience is really interested in your service. How will you use content to sell them?

• Find ways to optimize your pipeline and increase conversion rates.
• Analyze and shorten the sales cycle.
• Reduce customer acquisition cost.
• Strategize ways to tap into your existing customer base.
• Adjust and iterate as you go.
• Retain and delight your customers.

1. Find ways to optimize your pipeline and increase conversion rates.

Growth requires more than simply picking a sales strategy and building a demand generation process. You must optimize.

Sales is a numbers game, and you can only be successful if you measure progress . The key performance indicators (KPIs) for managing a sales team are volume, conversion rate, and time.

You’ll also want to track how many opportunities come into the flywheel: your pipeline volume.

Then track how many leads turned into customers. Comparing the volume of the pipeline opportunities to the number of won deals will get you your overall conversion rate.

It’s even more important to optimize the conversion rate between stages. As opportunities move through the funnel, they’ll go through various qualification processes (i.e. basic qualifications, current solutions in use, technical evaluation, and closing), and you’ll want to track at which stage the opportunities fall out and why.

You’ll need to measure this for your overall flywheel and per sales rep. This information tells you where each rep needs to improve and potentially receive more training. Work to personalize your sales coaching efforts to shorten the sales cycle of each rep. Compare time and conversion rate to see who's better and faster in particular stages.

Track how many opportunities each rep converts and at what stage in the process they drop out. The sooner an unqualified opportunity falls out of the flywheel, the better, because less time, energy, and resources are spent on that particular lead.

2. Analyze and shorten the sales cycle.

Finally, track how long your sales cycle is. This is the amount of time it takes for an opportunity to enter the sales funnel and change to a closed/won deal. The goal is to shorten the conversion between every stage. This can be done by identifying common objections (and iterating ways to remove them before they happen), doing ongoing lead nurturing, and brainstorming ways to find the best-fit customers.

3. Reduce customer acquisition costs.

As a business owner , you’ll also need to optimize your customer acquisition cost . This will be very expensive at first, but as time goes on, you’ll need to reduce this cost by optimizing your processes, or you’ll be losing more money than you make.

Customer acquisition is how much it costs to gain a new customer or deal per $1. The lower the customer acquisition cost, the lower the impact your marketing efforts have on your PNL, and the higher the profit you get per customer.

4. Strategize ways to tap into your existing customer base.

A common adage in the industry is that it costs seven times more to acquire a new customer than it does to do business with an existing customer. That's because, if you're providing a great buying experience, existing customers already know, like, and trust you.

The best opportunity for companies to earn more and gain revenue is through renewals, cross-selling, and upselling . The average cost for a company to renew a product is $0.13, while upsells cost a company $0.28.

Many people think of sales as a black box. But with analytics and new sales AI technologies cropping up, business leaders can optimize their processes to accelerate business.

5. Adjust and iterate as you go.

Building a successful company is not reserved for those entrepreneurs who’ve been blessed with special skills.

Chances are, you’ve already built your product, and building a company is a very similar process. You must be strategic and continue to improve throughout the process.

Take time and continue to iterate, and you too can build a company. Return to areas of your plan that aren’t working and tweak them. Make note of the things that are working, and brainstorm ways to expand upon them.

6. Retain and delight your customers.

In this phase, you will focus on maintaining your customer relationships and spreading good word-of-mouth. This is where a flywheel strategy can be much more helpful than the funnel, which ends at sales. For a detailed rundown of the delight phase and beyond, check out this ultimate guide .

Although different products might require different launch strategies, the below template and steps should help you create a solid starter plan which can be customized along the way.

Go-To-Market Plan Template

Download Now

Creating a go-to-market strategy from scratch can be daunting — especially if it’s your first time launching a brand new product or service. That’s why we created a complete go-to-market kit to help you get started. You’ll find templates that help keep your team on schedule and promote alignment between all product stakeholders.

The kit includes:

• Product Launch Planning Template
• Product Update Email Templates
• Product Lifecycle Mapping Template
• Product Classification Template
• SWOT Analysis Template

Still stumped? Below, I’ve included a few more examples of go-to-market strategies that can help you inspire your own.

• Microsoft Surface
• Bread Beauty Supply

Via is a ridesharing platform that was founded in 2012 when Uber was still relatively unknown .

While Uber has bypassed Via in popularity and product usage, Via has effectively carved a niche in the transportation technology space.

Why Via’s Go to Market Strategy Works:

The company’s GTM strategy consisted of its emphasis on ride-sharing — that is, riders literally share rides with other riders who are traveling in the same direction. The driver takes a predetermined route and drops riders off at convenient locations, rather than picking up riders at private locations.

Via set out to solve a common pain point for commuters: overcrowded or unavailable public transit with inflexible routes.

Another pain point of the target audience was that Uber and Lyft rides were overpriced and couldn’t be used for daily commutes. Via looked at this problem and created a true ridesharing service that could fill the space Uber and Lyft didn’t fill.

Now, the company partners with private transit operators, schools, and public transit agencies to expand existing operations or provide more riding options for passengers. The result of Via’s go-to-market strategy is that it no longer sees Uber as a direct competitor .

2. Microsoft Surface

Microsoft Windows has long been the preeminent OS, and for good reason: most computer manufacturers offer Windows laptops and desktops.

So why would Microsoft launch its line of computers and tablets if its software is ubiquitous?

Why Microsoft Surface’s Go to Market Strategy Works:

In its go-to-market strategy for its Surface products, Microsoft set out to solve a common problem for tablet users. Tablets were primarily mobile devices; while they were convenient to carry, they didn’t offer the full functionality of a laptop. And for many people, owning both a tablet and a laptop was not financially feasible.

When it released the third generation of the Surface tablet , Microsoft made its position clear. The device was a fully functioning computer in tablet form. You could have a light device without sacrificing function. Compared to the Apple iPad, its principal competitor, the Surface tablet offered more functionality at the same price.

Now, the Microsoft Surface line has expanded to include laptops and desktops. Microsoft realized that laptop buyers may not purchase a Windows laptop because there are so many manufacturers to choose from. Specifications and hardware components vary from machine to machine.

With its Surface laptops, Microsoft makes the choice easier for target demographics such as college students and everyday users. These devices compete with Apple’s macOS offerings and are designed to seamlessly integrate with all of the features of Windows OS.

At first glance, the Owala brand of water bottles doesn’t seem much different from competitors.

But in its go-to-market strategy, the brand used its motto, "Do more of what you love," to hint at its products’ ease of use. You can "do more of what you love" since you won’t even waste time opening the bottle. The lid itself is where you sip.

Why Owala’s Go to Market Strategy Works:

With its product launch, Owala addressed common problems for water-drinkers: openings that are too wide, spills, and two-handed drinking.

Owala specifically targets those who are active. In its first series of Instagram posts, the brand posted a mosaic of a man on a motorcycle, and in most of its social posts, it includes people in workout clothes.

The company arguably entered an overcrowded space. Brands such as HydroFlask and Contigo dominate the industry. By addressing a specific target buyer and solving their problems, however, Owala successfully launched into that competitive market. The brand distributes its offerings through its website, BestBuy, and Amazon for optimum reach.

4. Bread Beauty Supply

Bread Beauty Supply , a Black- and woman-owned hair care line, set out to solve a common problem for its curly-haired audience: overcomplicated routines that waste time, energy, and products.

Why Bread Beauty Supply’s Go to Market Strategy Works:

The brand launched in 2020 and partnered with Sephora as its principal distribution channel. In its go-to-market strategy, the brand identified a segment of buyers who would rather keep their routine simple and leave their curls in their natural state.

Compare this strategy with that of competitor brands such as Pattern Beauty and Ouidad, both of which offer a multitude of hair care products that can dizzy, confuse, and overwhelm buyers. When creating its go-to-market plan, Bread Beauty Supply recognized that some people with curly hair would rather spend less, not more, time on their hair.

Image Source

While the curly hair care industry verges on overcrowded, Bread Beauty Supply successfully launched by taking a unique stance in the industry.

The Sip , a Black- and woman-owned champagne subscription service, makes drinking luxury wine more affordable.

Champagne clubs have always been around, offering monthly deliveries of delectable wines at a premium cost.

To the target audience, however, this model poses a few problems. The wine of choice for that month could fail to meet expectations, and that could result in a wasted bottle. And that is at full cost, too. One of The Sip’s competitors, Club Bubbly, charges $100 per month to deliver two bottles of champagne.

Why The Sip’s Go to Market Strategy Works:

In its go-to-market strategy, The Sip emphasized its mini-bottle program: subscribers can try three mini-bottles of champagne at a fraction of the cost. If you happen to like one, you can buy the full bottle.

By solving common problems faced by subscribers of wine boxes, The Sip not only attracted the subscribers of its competition, but opened up this type of subscription to buyers who could not previously afford it.

Vuclip , a mobile video-on-demand service, tapped into emerging markets with limited access to high-quality video streaming services. Consumers in these areas — including India, Thailand, and Egypt — dealt with slow video buffering speeds due to a lack of advanced mobile networks.

Why Vuclip’s Go to Market Strategy Works:

The company's go-to-market strategy rested on appealing to those "must-have" markets, where it could come in with a competitive advantage by presenting an accessible platform that addressed those regional consumers' issues with buffering.

The result? Vuclip built a subscriber base of more than 41 million consumers across over 3,000 cities, with plans to establish a presence in even more underserved markets around the world.

Upscope , an interactive screen sharing platform, came on the scene as a resource to suit a more technically inclined crowd than its competitors — namely onboarding, support, and IT specialists.

Why Upscope’s Go to Market Strategy Works:

The primary pain point the company looked to address was the trouble consumers ran into when trying to share their screens — particularly when it came to walking prospects, customers, or employees through technical subject matter.

The company addressed that issue by creating a solution that lends itself to instant and interactive screen sharing — sparing users the trouble of fumbling through the screen share process and letting all parties engage with the content they're seeing.

Upscope supported its go-to-market efforts with a solid content marketing strategy — maintaining an active web presence and blog. It also incorporated integrations with other tools into its solution, giving itself more visibility and clout.

Baggu is a reusable bag brand. While it seems rather simple on the surface, its go-to-market strategy has made a buzz in the world of sustainability.

Why Baggu’s Go to Market Strategy Works:

This brand was created to eliminate unnecessary waste through responsibly managing deadstock products and fabric. This appeals to eco-conscious consumers who are trying to minimize their use of plastic bags.

Accompanying its relatable mission, Baggu has held many collaborations that take its products from functional, to stylish statement pieces.

Baggu recently partnered with Joonbug , a Jamaican artist known for impressive skate designs, and made colorful patterns that showcase his cultural roots and style.

The products are visually interesting, eye-catching, and were marketed through Instagram — a social media platform designed for visual ads and promotion, and a perfect vehicle for a mutually beneficial collaboration for JoonBug, who is also a prominent influencer in the art sphere.

Thinx is a feminine hygiene company that makes underwear for people with periods. This re-imagined approach to menstrual products has been gaining more traction in the industry, and its go-to-market strategy has definitely aided in its success.

Why Thinx’s Go to Market Strategy Works:

A common pain point for people with periods is spending a lot of money on one-time hygienic products, and it’s not good for the environment, either. So offering washable underwear with a 2 year guarantee is a much better investment than the alternative.

Thinx is also known for partnering with organizations using cause marketing, like with Black Mamas Matter Alliance. BMMA focuses on the issue of maternal health (specifically for black women who are three times more likely to die from childbirth than other races) that Thinx’s audience would also care about or be aware of.

This strategy appeals to consumers who can feel good knowing they're buying something that gives back a portion of profit to something beyond themselves, especially if it raises awareness of inequalities in maternal health.

10. Metaverse

One of the most outlandish ideas of recent go-to-market strategies is none other than the launch of the Metaverse. It’s an immersive, digital economy made by Facebook, and a look into the future for the platform.

Why the Metaverse’s Go to Market Strategy Works:

This brand understands that people are leading digital lives more than ever, which includes more online shopping — but without the experience of shopping in person. So while it is more convenient to add items to your cart through clicks, customers give up the feel of shopping in store.

Metaverse solves for this, by incorporating the brick and mortar experience in a VR-centric, digital world.

In addition to solving the online shopping dilemma, the PR campaign and influencer marketing was such a huge rollout on one of the most major social media platforms, it caused quite a buzz through the internet and news outlets.

Create a Strong GTM Strategy for Your New Venture

Building a go-to-market strategy is critical before bringing your new product to market. With the steps I shared in this guide, you’ll be well on your way to launching a product or service that solves for your future customers and becomes profitable in the marketplace.

Editor's note: This post was originally published in November 2019 and has been updated for comprehensiveness.

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Go-to-Market Strategy

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Why do some products crash and burn? Answer: Go-to-Market Strategy . Below, we'll explain what Go-to-market strategy is, how to use it, how to customize our template to launch your own product, and if you read until the end, you'll learn how Slack used Go-To-Market strategies to grow from a zero-dollar a year company to a four billion-dollar company in just four years.

Our customizable Go-to-Market Strategy template includes some of the best Go-To-Market tools available today, such as: Product-Market Fit, Customer Value Maps, Product Growth Projection, Global Market Trends, Launch Status Dashboards, and twenty-five other tools. Below is a breakdown of how some of these tools can be used to successfully bring your next product to market.

1 questions and answers

Could you make a go to market strategy based on Rippey AI email bots

Yes, a go-to-market strategy can be developed based on Rippey AI email bots. The first step would be to identify the target market for the AI email bots. This could be businesses looking to automate their email responses or customer service departments seeking to improve efficiency. Next, the unique selling proposition of the Rippey AI email bots should be determined. This could be their ability to understand complex queries, their speed of response, or their integration with other business systems. The pricing strategy should also be considered. This could be a subscription model, a one-off purchase, or a freemium model where basic features are free but advanced features require payment. Finally, the channels to reach the target market should be identified. This could be through online advertising, partnerships with other businesses, or direct sales to businesses. Remember, the key to a successful go-to-market strategy is understanding the customer's needs and how your product can meet those needs.

Tool highlights

Product-market fit.

The job of any new product or service is to understand what people want. First, companies have to find the right product-market fit. On the left side of the table, identify the characteristics of the target customer. WHO are they and what do they need to accomplish? WHY do they need the product or service? HOW will they acquire the product or service? And WHAT does the customer do with the product to get real value?

On the right side of the table, identify the key features and values of the product that will accomplish the stated goal. Here you also can identify key metrics to track. It's important to track key metrics to validate the product-market fit and ensure customers receive value from the product. For example, a service like Waze identifies the job that customers need to get done, which is "get to work fast." Its characteristics include its ability to calculate the shortest and fastest route, which is an alternative to competitors like Google or Apple Maps, which don't provide the same side streets and uncommon routes. Waze's channel is the Google and Apple app stores, which provides value to the customer because it is easily accessible and eliminates the need for brick-and-mortar stores. Stick to the end and we'll show you how Slack used a similar process to bring its product to the masses. (Slide 4)

Customer value map

The customer value map expands on the concept of product-market fit. To find the right fit, companies need to know what the customer values and how much they are willing to sacrifice (or pay) to receive that value. Label one of the companies on the map as yours, and label the others as direct competitors. The Y-axis tracks the price of the product, while the X-axis tracks customer performance and satisfaction. The goal is to provide high value at a reasonable price point relative to the competition. It might be tempting to start a product at a high price point, especially if it provides high value. But successful product launches often need a lower relative price compared to the competitors. In this example, Company 4 is most poised for a successful go-to-market launch because it provides excellent value at a low relative price. (Slide 5-6)

Global market trends

Global Market Trends validate your product to stakeholders and show a product idea will work on a global scale. Identify the market trend that your product meets, and then use this slide to visualize its global expansion. Icons on the map can be moved around to show different countries the product can expand to. The bottom-right table shows the trend's projected growth from year one to year five. In this example, the company looks at online sales as a market trend for growth. Based on our previous example, a company such as Waze that has an app store as its channel would meet this trend. (Slide 17)

How does 'My Fitness' fit in the European market?

To determine the fit of 'My Fitness' in the European market, several factors need to be considered. Firstly, the health and fitness trend in Europe is on the rise, with an increasing number of people becoming health-conscious and investing in fitness products and services. Secondly, the digitalization of the fitness industry, including online fitness programs and mobile fitness apps, is gaining popularity. Lastly, the European market is diverse, with different fitness trends and preferences in different countries. Therefore, a thorough market analysis is required to understand the specific needs and preferences of the target audience in different European countries. However, the success of 'My Fitness' in the European market will also depend on factors such as the uniqueness of the product, its pricing, marketing strategy, and the competition in the market.

Product growth projection

Once a company has done its research on trends and the competition, it has to show that its product has legs. That's what the Product Growth Projection chart is for. This chart is fully editable and can be adjusted to your projections. It shows both the monthly forecast and the cumulative profits. The data on the chart can be edited to show a monthly, quarterly, or yearly projection. The graph updates automatically according to the data you put in. (Slide 15)

Launch status dashboard

Last thing: every Go-To-Market strategy needs a launch timeline, with priorities and goals. This launch status dashboard can be used while a team is in the middle of a product launch, or to prepare before a launch. It's an invaluable tool that will help sync members of multiple departments. The names can be adjusted to represent individual team members or departments such as Product, Marketing, or Sales. On a qualitative level, the dashboard shows which tasks are the highest priority, represented by a star, and which tasks have dependency on a separate member or department, represented by an exclamation point. (Slide 25)

Case study: Slack

Go-To-Market strategy as a team effort is exemplified by the rise of the team collaboration tool Slack. When Slack first started in 2013, CEO Stewart Butterfield said in an internal memo to his team "Understanding what people think they want and then translating the value of Slack into their terms is something we all work on. It is the sum of the exercise of all our crafts."

Slack identified a goal that their customer needed to achieve, which was more effective internal communication. Endless email chains had become outdated, and a new platform was needed. Butterflied began with product-market fit. He described the life of a startup divided into two distinct phases: before product-market fit and after. "Once the product fits the market, a company is able to step on the gas, spending to promote a product that will actually sell." He goes on to say "The best possible way to find product-market fit is to define your own market." Butterfield defined Slack's market and the value points it would add with four characteristics:

• More relaxed, productive workers
• Masters of their own information,
• Less frustrated by a lack of visibility
• More purposeful communicators

Slack centered its go-to-market strategy around those values and characteristics. A key part of its growth was its price point: free. Slack identified payment as a barrier to entry, and only implemented payment later on for premium features. Its strategy was product-focused instead of pricing-focused. Butterfield knew that a great product would grow a loyal user base by word of mouth. And he was right. Since its launch, Slack grew from zero to four billion dollars in four years and was eventually sold to Salesforce for over $27 billion dollars.

If you need a successful Go-To-Market strategy for your next product, you need this presentation. Download the Go-to-Market Strategy presentation for more slides such as Product Positioning Map, Unique Selling Proposition, Demographic Overview, Launch Checklist, and GTM Strategy Map, plus many more.

How to build a winning go-to-market strategy [including template]

• What is a G2M strategy?
• Who needs one, and when?
• How does it deliver growth?
• What types are there?
• How to build your strategy
• How to measure your success
• Three examples

Every company looking to attract users or customers needs a go-to-market strategy. Explore how to create yours and what good looks like.

Looking for a template? Check  Paddle's go-to-market strategy template here .

What is a go-to-market (G2M) strategy?

A go-to-market strategy is a plan for how to launch a new product or service in-market or launch an existing product in a new market. As such, go-to-market strategies tend to focus on the short-term, but effective ones will also consider how any immediate success can be sustained over a longer period. 

There is no standard format for a go-to-market strategy. Different companies will need to consider and prioritize different elements, depending on their maturity, their existing presence in the market, their business model, how they are organized and financed, and any exit plans they may have. 

Who needs a go-to-market strategy, and when?

Any project that aims to attract new customers needs a go-to-market strategy. Some of the obvious scenarios include:

• A startup launching their first product
• An established company launching a new offering
• The relaunch of a product that has been innovated to attract new users
• Building on the early success of a product with a stronger growth trajectory 

Even companies and products that consider themselves settled can benefit from regular go-to-market strategy reviews, as a way to be aware and prepare for new competition and other market forces. So should your business have one? Absolutely.

How does a go-to-market strategy deliver growth?

It is possible to succeed without a go-to-market strategy, but for that to happen you need a once-in-a-generation product or a huge amount of luck. A good go-to-market strategy is designed to mitigate risk and maximize return on investment (ROI) by gathering knowledge before the event and using those insights to make the most effective action. 

Let’s consider how this works. 

Company A and Company B have new software products of equal capabilities. Company A opens for business first, without a go-to-market strategy. It may get some lucky early sales, but soon new customers dry up. It doesn’t know where to go to get new customers, or indeed what type of people they should be talking to, or what to say even if they find them. They try to cover all bases but find their marketing budget is spread too thin and their advertising messages don’t cut through. They quickly become drowned out by the competition. Meanwhile, the customers they did get are becoming increasingly frustrated at the lack of support and eventually go elsewhere. 

Meanwhile, Company B has produced a detailed go-to-market strategy before it’s even taken a dollar in sales. Their marketing budget is concentrated in just a few countries that they have calculated are most profitable, and its advertising has been designed to resonate with a specific professional group. They have also taken the time to build a buying process that is not only easy to follow but incentivizes new customers to scale their use of the product. And by tracking some key user and financial metrics, they are able to predict with authority how they will grow, and thus the extra resources they will need to enable this future growth.

Company B wins every time. This is the value that a go-to-market strategy delivers. 

But a go-to-market strategy is not enough by itself. Go-to-market is one of three strategies that are needed for growth; with a product strategy and  revenue delivery strategy  being the other two. 

A product strategy should clearly define the challenges that the solution aims to overcome, who benefits, and how those benefits are realized (e.g. in cost savings, time savings, higher performance, or improved security). The product strategy should also compare the capabilities of the product to similar solutions in the marketplace, and articulate how it is better, and where it falls short.

A revenue delivery strategy explains how the operational elements that are needed to support a product’s growth will be organized. A revenue delivery strategy is broad, covering how orders are taken and processed, how customer records are maintained, how users are onboarded, supported, billed, and upsold to, and what’s required to stay on the right side of financial and legal regulations. 

The three pillars of growth

• Product strategy - explains the value the product brings and to whom.
• Go-to-market strategy - finds and persuades the people most likely to benefit.
• Revenue operations strategy - defines the processes and tools needed to commercialize the product.

What types of go-to-market strategy are there?

So, the best products (resulting from the product strategy) will fail without customers (delivered by the go-to-market strategy); and the best products, with lots of customers, will fail if sales can’t be processed and service levels sustained (step forward the revenue delivery strategy). 

But not every go-to-market strategy slots neatly into the middle of this journey. How you approach your go-to-market strategy depends on what will be driving your growth. In simple terms, there are two options: growth that is product-led; and growth that is sales-led. 

A product-led go-to-market strategy 

A product-led go-to-market strategy puts the product at the heart of growth. The product is not only a solution to a business problem but also serves as a silent salesperson by letting customers buy, renew and upgrade all without leaving the product. Key to the concept of this self-serve sales model is not just the absence of a salesperson at the moment of purchase, but also in the discovery and research phase of the sales journey. In theory, everything a potential customer wants to know - from the features and technical requirements of the solution to the pricing options and contract terms - should be available within the product.

Product-led go-to-market strategies are a volume play, with tactics such as a freemium offer designed to attract users first, before turning them into paying customers later.

In product-led go-to-market strategies, the product is the core sales channel, and so the distinction between product strategy and go-to-market strategy becomes more blurred. Elements such as site architecture, product design, UX and copy all determine the customer journey, and so become more important to the go-to-market strategist.

A sales-led go-to-market strategy 

A sales-led go-to-market strategy sees sales initiated and closed by a salesperson. Though the product will be a key part of any sales conversation, the sale itself (and any future renewals and upgrades) take place away from the platform. This tends to be the approach taken when the product is so revolutionary, or complex, or expensive that the buying decision involves many stakeholders and many engagements, over a number of months. The sales process is resource-intensive, and in turn, the business will focus on achieving fewer sales at higher margins. 

Because sales-led go-to-market strategies are directed by people, the product plays less of a role, and therefore the ongoing link with product marketing is weaker. Instead, in a sales-led growth plan, product marketing and go-to-market strategies will work closely at the start to define the benefits of the solution and the target audience. Equally, in a sales-led go-to-market strategy, where the product is not the vehicle for processing orders, product and revenue delivery strategies are more detached.  

How to build your go-to-market strategy

Whether you’re launching a new startup or a new product; and regardless of whether you’re following a product-led or sales-led path to growth, a good go-to-market strategy includes certain core elements. Here we look at four of the main components you should consider when creating a go-to-market strategy.

• Target market:  Who is going to benefit most from what we offer, where are they (geographically and in terms of sector), what else can we find out about what they have in common, and is anyone else likely to be involved in the buying decision?
• Product market fit : What are the specific pains that we are helping to overcome, how do we do that differently (and better) than the competition, and how do we communicate that in a way that resonates?
• Pricing strategy : How much money is someone likely to pay for what we do (if at all), how does that mentality change if we offer more capabilities, and what method of payment and consumption will make them more inclined to buy and keep buying?
• Distribution and adoption plan:  What channels and formats are the best to reach our target customers, what help and how long might they need before committing to a purchase, and what support do they need to maximize their investment with us?

As we saw with the relationship between go-to-market, product and revenue strategies, these elements are not linear. There are interdependencies, meaning the answer to one question will inform (or invalidate) another. That said, every go-to-market strategy needs to start somewhere. This will often be driven by the history or culture of a business. 

An effective go-to-market strategy should be continually reviewed, and if necessary adapted, to ensure success

Startups whose founders set out to fix a problem that frustrated them will likely begin with the product-market fit and engineer a business case around that; whereas an enterprise vendor with the means to innovate quickly may be driven by what their customers are telling them they need. Equally, an opportunistic entrepreneur may conclude that every product in a range is overpriced or suffering from poor customer service and set out to remedy that. 

Where you start with your go-to-market strategy is not as important as ensuring you focus on all four elements in parallel. This will ensure your final go-to-market strategy is holistic, thorough, and consistent.

1. Define the target market

Markets can be defined in different ways, and each needs to be considered in a go-to-market strategy. Markets can be a specific sector, a profession, a demographic, or a physical place. Sometimes, these need little thought. A software platform for managing employees will clearly need to target HR professionals. An app that provides public transport schedules for Japan is unlikely to find much success in any other country. But sometimes there is more than one target. For example, a user of your product may not be the person who decides to buy it; and there may also be a separate person who needs to sign off the budget. 

Making things more tricky still is the different way that businesses are structured and make decisions. In one business, you only need to persuade a single middle manager, whereas another may require more senior approval. If your product is software or other technology, then it’s likely that the prospect’s IT and security people will want a say to ensure it can integrate with their other systems. There may also be influencers - both inside and external to the prospect - whose words wield power. The key is to build personas for every possible target that helps move the strategy from the abstract, closer to reality. 

The same applies to selecting your market segment. Products that have been designed for a specific vertical - think compliance software for banks or safety equipment for construction firms - need only worry about a specific sector. But for a product with a multi-sector appeal, (i.e. because it supports a general business function, such as finance, HR, or CRM) the plan becomes more complicated. 

It may be uneconomical to go after every target persona and market segment straight away. A good place to start is to understand the Total Addressable Market (TAM) and the value of each subsect of that - be it a specific sector, demographic, or country. The go-to-market strategy should prioritize which targets to go for first, and when to push the button on the others. Alongside the size of a market, other criteria that can be used for this prioritization include the existence of competitors, speed of decision making, cost of acquisition, number of potential users, expected lifetime value, or a buyer’s influence in the marketplace. 

Example: Vuclip, a video buffering service, focused on the “must-have” market and not “nice to have” markets. Having analyzed failed ventures in this category, Vuclip decided against targeting enterprise businesses and instead went after mobile consumers in Africa, where mobile usage is high but network performance is poor.  Read their story.

2. Make your product fit your market 

Though it’s the job of the product strategy to explain the value the product brings and to whom, the go-to-market strategy goes deeper, explaining how to communicate these benefits in each market being targeted. 

A product-market fit should consider two elements - what customer pains are being addressed, and what outcomes can be expected. This is often called a ‘value proposition’, and it ensures prospects and customers hear a consistent message. For complex products, where there are multiple targets involved in the buying journey, different value propositions should be created for each group or market.

Though a value proposition will be adopted in external marketing and advertising messaging, it begins life as an internal document; and how that is created and visualized is key to its effectiveness. It is common for value propositions to be devised with a matrix, where some measure of business outcome (i.e value) is set against some measure of input (i.e cost, complexity of deployment, ease of use). 

Plotting a product on this grid is helpful to visualize its comparative strengths and weaknesses, and more so if you do the same for competitors. The grid is typically split into quadrants, to understand who are the closest competitors based on the product-market fit, and which products are likely targeting a different audience (or the same audience, but with a different business case) and so can be deprioritized.

The best go-to-market strategies will go a step further, and articulate ‘attack’ and ‘defense’ positions against each close competitor identified in the value matrix. Often these become fully formed scripts that can be lifted straight into customer pitches and conversations.

Example: Monday.com, a CRM platform, doesn’t leave product-market fit as a behind-the-scenes research project. From the  homepage of its website , prospects are able to direct their journey according to the pain they are facing. And not only that - Monday.com also serves up a quick comparison of its platform versus the leading competition.

3. Set the right prices and packages

One of the key make-or-break factors of any new product launch is the price. A great product can be snubbed by customers if over-priced, but if underpriced you could be unnecessarily leaving revenue on the table.

The work done so far on defining your target customer personas and your product-market fit will give you a clear indication of the right bracket to set your price in. Indeed, your research may have uncovered a lack of willingness on behalf of your target customers to pay for the solution you are offering. If so, you may conclude that the product in its current state does not have enough market potential; or you may decide to launch as a free service, with a view to selling higher value product extensions and services later. 

As well as cost, a pricing strategy should define how a customer  will want to pay . This is partly around consumption - for example, does your target value the flexibility of a monthly subscription, or could they be persuaded to purchase a potentially more lucrative multi-year licence? It is also about cost criteria - in other words, do you charge based on how much (or little) of the service is used, how many users a customer has, or a set price determined by a customer’s perception of the value you bring, and your negotiations skills. 

Understanding payment method preference is also important, and very dependent on the market(s) you are targeting. For example, in the US paper checks are still a common way for people and businesses to pay, whereas in Western Europe cards and bank-to-bank payment methods like direct debit are far more popular. And around the world, payment preference is increasingly defined by localized schemes and alternative payment methods (APMs).  

Example:  HubSpot  employs a  tiered pricing strategy , designed around the specific needs (and budget) of different customer targets, and as well as offering a free introduction package, it also promotes packages that bundle a range of services together for ease of purchase.

4. Reach (and keep) customers

The final part of an effective go-to-market strategy should take the prospect journey all the way through to sales closure, adoption, and future upgrades and renewals. The core of this phase is the sales and marketing plan, which considers the best channels to reach prospects with the value proposition. 

Today, there is an almost unlimited choice of channels - from traditional media and PR, TV and radio, to digital advertising and social media influencers. For some sectors, selling through partners and resellers who are established in a market can be a traditionally effective way of achieving cut-through. The aim of the plan is to predict which channels will produce the best ROI. Depending on the other elements of the go-to-market strategy, ROI may be defined by volume of customers, cost-per-sale, customer lifetime value, or a combination of these and other KPIs. 

What happens to a new customer is equally important. A go-to-market strategy should be clear about the level of customer support that needs to be achieved to sustain growth. For example, high-value customers with complex deployments and hundreds of users may expect a dedicated account and support team; whereas that level of resourcing is unlikely to make commercial sense for a self-service customer. That said, well-designed onboarding and a localized response (i.e. that lets a customer communicate in their language and timezone) are important to their happiness, and propensity to upgrade and renew in the future. 

Example: Dropbox employed a simple customer referral program as a new sales channel, to go from 4 million to 500 million users in just 7 years. In exchange for a successful referral, customers would receive free storage. Key was embedding the referral program within the onboarding journey to build interest when customers were at their most engaged and excited. The  referral program is still running today .

The best go-to-market strategies address all four of these elements in parallel. There's a lot to it, so we've built  a template to help you get started .

Take the headache out of growing your software business

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How to measure the success of your go-to-market strategy

An effective go-to-market strategy should be continually reviewed, and if necessary adapted, to ensure success. To do this, it must include meaningful and measurable KPIs that track both short-term (even real-time) performance and long-term sustainable growth indicators. How many KPIs you track will be dependent, in part, on your ability to gather the data and report on it . Modern data analysis platforms have allowed businesses to get a more accurate and granular reading of success than ever before. That said, limiting yourself to KPIs that can help drive decision-making is more effective than drowning in numbers - what is known as ‘analysis paralysis’.

Many go-to-market strategies will visualize progress in terms of a funnel. At the top of the funnel are all the target customers that have been identified, and at the bottom are those who progress to become a customer. By dividing the funnel into various sections, you can measure the success of each step of the acquisition journey, to understand what is working, and what elements need refining. If you’re running a subscription model, you’ll need to extend that funnel to measure factors like churn, lifetime revenue, and recurring revenue.

There are limitless KPIs for a go-to-market strategy. Here are just some examples:

Operational

For product-led growth strategies, where the website is the core sales tool, measuring engagement on the site is fundamental: 

• Visits - how many visitors are you attracting, what are they looking at, and where are they?
• Click-throughs - are they simply reading your content, or are they taking action (e.g. requesting information, submitting a contact form)?
• Touchpoints - how often does a prospect visit you (and what are they looking at) before they buy?

For sales-led growth strategies, where a salesperson initiates and closes a sales:

• Outbound calls - how many conversations is a salesperson having every day, who are they speaking with, and how many of these are second, third, fourth...time calls?
• Average conversion time - how long does it take a salesperson to convert a prospect into a customer?

Customer support - how many calls or support tickets are successfully dealt with, both in absolute terms and as a percentage of all inquiries?

• Cost-per-acquisition - how much does it cost to convert a prospect into a customer, in general terms, and also split by channel, location, customer persona or other criteria?
• Average revenue-per-customer - how much money is each customer bringing in, again divided to determine the best performing categories?
• Cash burn rate - how much money is being spent overall to keep the company (or specifically the product) in business, with a projected cash flow for up to two years?

Subscriptions

• Churn - what percentage of customers are you losing over a given period of time?
• Average and recurring revenue - average revenue is how much each customer is buying over a given period, with recurring revenue being that number rolled up across your entire business?
• Net revenue retention  - takes into account customer upgrades, downgrades, and churn to show (as a percentage) how much your business could continue to grow from your current customer base alone.
• Customer review scores - independent third parties (e.g. Trustpilot, Google, Rated People, Feefo) that aggregate customer and user feedback. 
• Brand tracker surveys - it is common for businesses to survey customers and the wider market to understand brand awareness, sentiment, and competitor strengths. 
• Share of conversation - tools can aggregate activity from multiple social platforms and digital communities to understand how dominant (or not) their voice is in a particular conversation, term, or group.

Three real-life examples of go-to-market strategies

In December 2018, Kaleido launched a tool to automatically remove backgrounds from images called remove.bg. By offering the tool freely, Kaleido captured media attention and millions of users tried their product. They also offered a scaling monthly subscription plan and a pay-as-you-go model.

In partnership with Paddle, they launched in 20 countries, and have made currency optimization a core KPI. 18 months later they have 43,000 customers across 181 countries. Subscriptions are now their fastest-growing revenue segment.

Mailchimp, an email automation tool, began by only targeting small businesses and individual users. They offered a free service to lure prospects with limited budgets and created buzz through SEO, PR, and word-of-mouth marketing. To keep costs low and acquisition easy, they adopted a product-led strategy that put their platform at the heart of their new sales operation.

After growing steadily for a few years, they reviewed their pricing strategy and introduced paid-for subscription packages based on enhanced features, third-party integrations, and volume. 

Acorio, an established partner of SaaS vendor ServiceNow, strengthened its market position with a go-to-market strategy that used research and data to reinforce its credentials. These insights were divided up according to relevance to key decision-makers and used to create targeted  content  - including reports, articles, and presentations.

Ready to build a killer go-to-market strategy?

Check out the  Paddle go-to-market strategy template , and get started on yours today.

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How To Create A Go To Market Strategy Presentation In Just An Afternoon

Are you creating an action plan outlining the measures required to succeed in the market?

If you want to convince the management team, investors, or other stakeholders, to support your ambitions, having a succinctly defined Go to Market presentation can be extremely beneficial. A G o to Market strategy can help you make crucial decisions on how to introduce a new product, brand, or feature or enter and establish your company in a new market.

What Is A Go To Market Presentation?

A Go to Market strategy presentation template (GTM Strategy) is a strategic framework that outlines key tenets required to succeed in a new market or audience segment. You can develop GTM plans for almost any entrepreneurial effort, such as the introduction of a new product or service, the launch of a business, the re-launch of a brand, or even the expansion into a whole new market.

A Go to Market Strategy , to some extent, is a more crystallized version of your marketing strategy, but it comes with a more comprehensive scope and a greater concentration on only one product or service. It often involves the implementation of a certain growth plan for propelling your company forward.

Go-To-Market Strategy Purpose & Checklist:

First and foremost, before creating a presentation, it is critical to identify its purpose. What are you trying to achieve with the document?  Is it to convince stakeholders about the plan you want to implement and secure buy-in and investments? Or is it to inform and motivate your team to offer a roadmap and assign responsibilities.

This PowerPoint slide  helps you organize your thoughts on key messaging associated with the key elements of a Go To Market strategy . Depending on the purpose, the level of detail and messaging for each of these elements will vary. 

Go-To-Market Strategy Summary Template

Next, bring all the stakeholders on the same page in terms of all the constraints such as budgets, timelines, risks, etc to define the boundaries under which you will work on the GTM strategy. 

Product Overview & Objectives

This Go to Market slide is aimed to describe the complete overview and the objectives associated with the new product that you’re planning to launch. Here you get different sections to help your audience visualize the scope of the new product that is being launched.

Competitors & Positioning

It is good to gather as much information on your competitors – their products, sales, and marketing strategies. Conducting a competitive market study can help you implement better company strategies, keep competitors at distance, and gain market share.

In this Go to Market slide , you will get an overall visualization of your competitors and their position in the current market. There are two separate sections for direct and indirect competitors. For each type of competitor, you can compare with respect to the value proposition, market size, and comments.

Product Strategy Overview

With core product understanding and competitive landscape review, the audience will be ready to get deeper into the product strategy itself. This slide will help you build thinking on various aspects of the strategy.

Main Value Proportion

The value proposition slide will help you outline why a customer should select your product or service above others. It should communicate the most obvious benefit that the customer obtains by purchasing your product. 

Positioning

Positioning is a key aspect that helps bridge the gap between strategy and execution. Sometimes you may have a portfolio of products: seeing relative positioning across the portfolio can help the audience contextualize the market position you are planning to take. Below is a  representation of one among many positioning templates .  

Customer Journey

Mapping the customer journey helps you not miss out on any opportunities to engage with your customer. This approach also assists the audience in better appreciating typical consumer pain points. Businesses can use this information to provide more optimal and tailored customer experiences.

Using this Go to Market presentation slide , you can easily hone in on the relevant aspects of the journey of your buyers and remove unnecessary complexities.

Buyer Personas

Having all your prospective buyer’s personas on one page makes it simpler to keep it as a reference and adjust your content, message, product development, and services to their individual requirements, habits, and concerns.

This slide is focused to provide a visual representation of the product use cases. It allows you to consider the market segments and the activity that is in focus. It also allows the user to provide quantification.

Messaging Plan

Your messaging plan aids in the development of brand awareness and informs customers about who you are as a company—and it may be the key determinant in whether or not they choose to join you. In order to communicate your messaging plan, this slide provides crucial information such as tagline, key messages, boilerplate copy, and the lexicon.

Sales and Support Materials

In this presentation slide , you can define your sales and support strategy that will ensure a robust customer experience throughout their buying journey. 

Pricing is the key factor whenever any company launches any new product or service. The pricing should be favorable to both – you and your customers. 

In order to establish the same, we have provided a block representation for pricing. In this slide, you can describe your pricing within the context of the overall promotional strategy.

External Marketing Or Sales Plan

Marketing strategy plays a central role to level up your sales and revenue. This slide helps your audience understand your tactical marketing plan for each component of your strategy.

Success Metrics

Leaders can use the correct KPIs as a baseline for how well the product is performing when the right metrics are properly tracked. It is critical to establish metrics before taking initiative to track success from start to finish.

Summary & Ongoing Support

Use this slide to summarize the main points of your Go to Market strategy and how you will continue to grow and support this launch. 

Wrapping It Up

A Go to Market strategy assists you in developing a clear route for launching new products/services and thoroughly assessing all areas of your future operations. It not only helps you cement your business vision, but it also allows you to look at your products through the eyes of your consumers.

Your Go to Market strategy presentation should assist you in minimizing the risks of a failed launch and, as a consequence, the consumers’ trust and affinity for your brand.

Using this go-to-market strategy presentation template that is available in both PowerPoint and Google Slides Template , you can create an impressive presentation in just one afternoon! Find more go-to-market templates for your professional presentations.

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Mastering Your Go-To-Market Strategy: 7 Crucial Steps for Success (Plus Free PPT Template)

Discover the key steps to creating a successful go-to-market strategy plan. Follow our guide and achieve growth with our proven steps. Download our free PowerPoint template to get started today!

StrategyPunk

Introduction

Mastering your go-to-market strategy is crucial for the success of any business. It brings a new product or service to the market and ensures it reaches the right audience. A well-executed go-to-market strategy can help businesses mitigate the risks of launching a new product or service and achieve their sales and marketing goals.

Businesses must follow seven crucial steps to master their go-to-market strategy. The first step is to identify the target market. This involves understanding the needs and preferences of the target audience and developing a product or service that meets those needs. The second step is defining the value proposition, which is the unique benefit of the product or service to the target audience. The third step is to set clear objectives that align with the business's overall goals and objectives.

The next steps in mastering your go-to-market strategy include developing a marketing plan, building your sales pipeline, developing a pricing strategy, and measuring and optimizing your results. A well-executed marketing plan can help businesses reach their target audience and generate interest in their product or service. Building a strong sales pipeline is essential for converting leads into customers, while a well-defined pricing strategy can help businesses maximize their revenue. Finally, measuring and optimizing your results can help businesses identify areas for improvement and make data-driven decisions to improve their go-to-market strategy.

Identify Your Target Market

The first crucial step in mastering your go-to-market strategy is identifying your target market. Your target market is the group of customers who are most likely to purchase your product or service. To determine your target market, you must understand their characteristics, preferences, and behavior.

One way to identify your target market is to conduct market research. This can include surveys, focus groups, and analysis of industry reports. Market research lets you gain insights into your target market's needs and preferences and their demographics, buying habits, and pain points.

Another way to identify your target market is to create buyer personas. A buyer persona is a fictional representation of your ideal customer. It includes demographic information, such as age, gender, and income, as well as psychographic information, such as interests, values, and motivations. By creating buyer personas, you can better understand your target market's needs and tailor your marketing messages to resonate with them.

Once you have identified your target market, you can develop a marketing strategy tailored to their needs and preferences. This can include creating targeted advertising campaigns, developing content that speaks to their pain points, and identifying the most effective channels for reaching them.

Define Your Value Proposition

Defining your value proposition is one of the most critical steps in developing a go-to-market strategy. Your value proposition is a statement that describes the unique benefit that your product or service provides to your target audience. It should communicate why your product or service is better than your competitors’ offerings and why your target audience should choose you over them.

To define your value proposition, you can start by identifying your product or service's key benefits. Consider what sets you apart from your competitors and makes your offering unique. Consider the pain points of your target audience and how your product or service can address those pain points.

Once you have identified your key benefits, please make a clear and concise statement that shows your value proposition. Your value proposition should be easy to understand and resonate with your target audience. You can use simple language and avoid jargon or technical terms that may confuse your audience.

Here are some tips to help you define your value proposition:

• Focus on your product or service's benefits, not the features.
• Use language that resonates with your target audience.
• Be clear and concise.
• Communicate your unique selling proposition.
• Highlight the value that your product or service provides.

By defining your value proposition, you can differentiate your product or service from your competitors and communicate the benefits of choosing your offering to your target audience.

Set Clear Objectives

Setting clear objectives is a crucial step in developing a successful go-to-market strategy. Your goals should be specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound. This will help you stay focused and ensure everyone on your team works toward the same goals.

When setting your objectives, it's essential to consider your target market, value proposition, and sales pipeline. Your objectives should align with these critical areas and help you to achieve your overall business goals. For example, if your value proposition is focused on providing a low-cost solution to a common problem, your objectives include increasing market share and reducing customer acquisition costs.

It's also essential to set objectives that are realistic and achievable. While it's important to aim high, setting unrealistic goals can lead to frustration and demotivation. By setting achievable objectives, you can build momentum and celebrate small wins.

To help you set clear objectives, consider using the SMART framework:

By following these steps and using the SMART framework, you can set clear objectives that will help you to develop a successful go-to-market strategy.

Develop a Marketing Plan

Once you have identified your target market and defined your value proposition, the next step is to develop a marketing plan to help you reach your target audience and communicate the benefits of your product or service.

A marketing plan should include a detailed analysis of your target market, including their demographics, interests, and behaviors. This information will help you tailor your messaging and marketing tactics to resonate with your audience.

Next, you should identify the most effective marketing channels for reaching your target audience. This may include social media, email marketing, content marketing, and paid advertising. Each track should be evaluated based on its potential reach, cost-effectiveness, and ability to generate leads and conversions.

Once you have identified your marketing channels, you should develop a content strategy that aligns with your value proposition and target audience. This may include creating blog posts, videos, infographics, whitepapers, and other types of content that provide value and help establish your brand as a thought leader in your industry.

Finally, it would be best if you established metrics for measuring the success of your marketing plan. This may include tracking website traffic, email open rates, social media engagement, and conversion rates. Regularly monitoring and optimizing your marketing efforts ensures that your go-to-market strategy is effective and generates the desired results.

Build Your Sales Pipeline

Building a sales pipeline is a crucial step in your go-to-market strategy. A sales pipeline is a visual representation of your sales process, from the initial contact with a potential customer to closing the deal. By building a sales pipeline, you can stay organized, track your progress, and identify improvement areas.

Here are some steps you can take to build a successful sales pipeline:

• Define the stages of your sales: Start by identifying your prospects' stages as they move through your sales process. This will help you understand where they are in the buying process and what actions you need to take to move them to the next stage. Standard sales stages include prospecting, qualifying, proposing, and closing.
• Identify your ideal customer: You must know who you're targeting before building your pipeline. Identify your perfect customer by considering demographics, industry, company size, and pain points. This will help you tailor your sales approach to their specific needs.
• Develop a lead generation strategy: Once you know who you're targeting, you must find them. Develop a lead generation strategy that includes tactics like content marketing, social media outreach, and email campaigns.
• Qualify your leads: Not all charges are created equal. It would be best to qualify your leads to ensure they're a good fit for your product or service. Consider factors like budget, timeline, and decision-making power.
• Track your progress: Use a CRM or other sales tracking tool to monitor your progress and identify areas where you need to improve. This will help you stay organized and ensure you're not missing any opportunities.

Following these steps, you can build a successful sales pipeline to help you close more deals and grow your business.

Develop a Pricing Strategy

Developing a pricing strategy is a crucial step in your go-to-market plan. It involves determining the right price for your product or service to attract customers and generate revenue for your business. Here are some key factors to consider when developing your pricing strategy:

• Costs: Consider the costs of producing and delivering your product or service. This includes materials, labor, overhead, and any other expenses. Your price should cover these costs and provide a profit margin.
• Competitors: Research your competitors' pricing strategies to determine how your product or service compares. You may need to adjust your pricing to be competitive in the market.
• Value: Consider your product or service's value to your customers. If your product or service offers unique features or benefits, you may be able to charge a premium price.
• Market: Consider the market demand for your product or service. If demand is high, you may be able to charge a higher price.

Once you have considered these factors, you can determine your pricing strategy. There are several pricing strategies you can use:

It's important to regularly evaluate and adjust your pricing strategy based on market conditions and customer feedback. This will help ensure that your pricing remains competitive and profitable for your business.

Measure and Optimize

Once you have launched your product and started selling, measuring your success and optimizing your strategy is essential. This involves tracking key performance indicators (KPIs) and making data-driven decisions to improve your go-to-market strategy.

Some essential KPIs to track include customer acquisition cost (CAC), customer lifetime value (CLV), conversion rates, and revenue growth. By regularly monitoring these metrics, you can identify areas for improvement and adjust your strategy to increase profitability and growth.

In addition to tracking KPIs, it's important to gather and use customer feedback to optimize your product and marketing strategy. This can involve conducting customer surveys, analyzing customer reviews, and monitoring social media channels for customer feedback.

Another critical aspect of measuring and optimizing your go-to-market strategy is A/B testing. You can identify what works best by testing different versions of your marketing materials, pricing strategy, and product features and make data-driven decisions to improve your strategy.

Measuring and optimizing your go-to-market strategy is an ongoing process that requires a commitment to data-driven decision-making and continuous improvement. By regularly tracking KPIs, gathering customer feedback, and conducting A/B testing, you can ensure that your strategy is constantly evolving and improving to meet the needs of your target market.

Executive Summary

Here are the seven most essential steps in developing a go-to-market strategy plan :

• Identify Your Target Market: The first step is to define your target audience, identify their needs and preferences, and understand their buying behavior. This will help you tailor your product, messaging, and pricing to appeal to your target market.
• Define Your Value Proposition: Your value proposition should clearly articulate how your product or service solves a specific problem for your target audience, what makes your offering unique, and why customers should choose your product over your competitors.
• Set Clear Objectives: You should set specific, measurable, and realistic goals for your go-to-market strategy plan. This could include targets for revenue, customer acquisition, market share, and other key performance indicators.
• Develop a Marketing Plan: Based on your target audience and value proposition, you should develop a marketing plan that outlines the channels, tactics, and messaging that you will use to reach your target customers. This should include digital marketing, social media, content marketing, advertising, events, and PR.
• Build Your Sales Pipeline: You should create a process for identifying and nurturing leads, qualifying prospects, and converting them into paying customers. This could include building a sales team, developing sales materials, and setting up a CRM system to manage your pipeline.
• Develop a Pricing Strategy: Consider different pricing models, such as subscription-based, one-time purchase, or usage-based pricing, and determine the optimal pricing strategy for your product or service. This should be based on your target market, value proposition, and competitive landscape.
• Measure and Optimize: Finally, you should track your progress against your goals and KPIs, measure the effectiveness of your marketing and sales efforts, and continuously optimize your go-to-market strategy based on the insights you gather. This will help you stay competitive and adapt to changing market conditions.

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Go-To-Market Strategy Overview + 6 Best Examples

When it comes to product performance, one thing stands out among successful companies: a well-defined go-to-market strategy. Launching a product successfully is no easy task. Research from Nielsen reveals that approximately 80% of new products fail , and even for the ones that do succeed, the margin between success and failure is razor-thin.

In this article, we'll dive into intriguing case studies and notable benchmarks that showcase the best examples of GTM strategies. By exploring these success stories, you'll gain valuable insights to empower your own business and position yourself among the winners.

To support your efforts, we've included a complimentary go-to-market strategy template pre-filled with data. This template can be easily customized to fit the unique needs and goals of your organization.

But before we jump into these inspiring examples, let's take a moment to refresh our understanding of some key concepts that form the backbone of a successful GTM strategy.

What Is A Go-To-Market Strategy?

A go-to-market strategy, often referred to as GTM strategy, is a roadmap for successfully launching and delivering your products or services to your target customers. It encompasses a comprehensive set of actions and tactics that will help you gain a competitive advantage and make your product shine in the market.

To ensure the success of your GTM strategy, it is crucial to define clear objectives and establish metrics for tracking progress. Key performance indicators (KPIs) play a vital role in assessing the strategy's effectiveness. Examples of KPIs include customer acquisition cost, conversion rates, market share, revenue growth, customer retention, and customer satisfaction.

By putting together a well-thought-out go-to-market plan, you can confidently assess your product-market fit and navigate your way from being a newcomer to becoming a recognized player in an existing market.

Components Of A Successful Go-To-Market Strategy

To truly understand why certain strategies stand out as remarkable and effective, it is essential to identify the key components that make up a viable go-to-market plan.

A GTM plan is essentially a step-by-step plan that details how a company intends to bring its product to market.

The purpose of the plan is directed towards achieving strategic alignment between the solution the company is offering and the target market it intends to convert.

While the specific details of each GTM plan may vary depending on the nature of the product the company wishes to launch, there are several crucial components that every plan should incorporate. According to Stefan Groschupf, the current CEO of SalesHero and founder of Datameer, these components can be boiled down to four key points :

1. Product-market fit

What problem(s) does your product solve, and how?

This component revolves around understanding the problems your product solves and how it addresses the needs of your target customers. It involves clearly articulating the unique value proposition of your product in the market.

2. Target audience

Who are those experiencing this problem? What are their specific pain points, and how do you make these go away? How much will they pay for a solution?

Identifying the specific audience experiencing the identified problem will help you define your buyer personas and map the buyer’s journey. It requires gaining a deep understanding of their pain points and how your product effectively addresses those pain points. Additionally, determining the pricing strategy that they are willing to pay for a solution is vital.

3. Competition and demand

Is there a sufficient addressable market for the product? Who else is offering solutions in that space, and what are you doing differently?

Evaluating the overall market demand and analyzing the competitive landscape are critical steps. Assessing the size of the addressable market for your product, as well as conducting a value matrix analysis to understand customer preferences and competitive positioning, will help you determine your unique positioning and differentiation in the market.

📚 Recommended read : 6 Competitive Analysis Frameworks: How to Leave Your Competition In the Dust

4. Distribution

How do you intend to market, sell, and make money from your product?

Developing a strong marketing and sales strategy to drive revenue generation and achieve your goals is a crucial component of the GTM plan.

On the marketing side, it involves identifying the most effective channels to reach your target audience, create awareness, and ultimately drive sales. This can encompass a range of strategies, from traditional marketing approaches to digital techniques such as inbound marketing and search engine optimization (SEO). It is important to prioritize the marketing channels that effectively reach your specific target audience.

For your sales strategy, it is vital to train and equip salespeople with the necessary skills and resources to effectively communicate the value of your product and close deals. Clear and well-defined sales processes should be established to ensure consistency and efficiency throughout the sales efforts.

Notably, these four key points address every critical juncture of a product launch, from origination to final sale.

Note : A GTM strategy is not exclusive to just physical products. It has proven valuable for launching a new service, an entirely new business, or even a new branch of an existing company. Please note that every reference to the term “product” in this article includes these other uses as well.

👇🏼 With that said, let’s dive into our examination of GTM strategies that achieved these critical components and found significant market success.

7 Go-To-Market Strategy Examples

Companies can always draw inspiration from what their peers have done in successfully taking a product from ideation to market.

One preliminary observation that will quickly become apparent from the discussion that follows is that the companies with the most successful products identified a central anchor of their GTM strategy and focused on this.

These are the 6 best go-to-market strategy examples we've ever seen:

Double down on customer experience

When Stewart Butterfield and his team hit upon the idea to share their revolutionary internal communications SaaS platform with the world, they knew they had something big. The problem for them, however, was how to translate the superior benefits of a convenient, always-available communication system to email-weary users. This meant competing with a very well-known and universally adopted existing product: the email.  

The solution? To strategically position themselves as the go-to for a simple, integrated, team communication tool that does away with confusing email threads.

And so “ the email killer ” was born. 

They identified that internal communication was a huge problem for many companies, even if they didn’t know it. Although email was the most common means of team engagement, it quickly became a problem for growing teams.

As a result, the company focused on selling Slack as a fun, easy-to-use, highly convenient solution that keeps communication straightforward. They utilized webinars and outbound efforts to educate potential customers about the platform's value, targeting decision-makers who were frustrated with traditional communication methods.

As Butterfield shared in a memo to his team just before their official new product launch:

“What we are selling is not the software product because there are just not many buyers for this software product. However, if we are selling “a reduction in the cost of communication” or “zero effort knowledge management” or “making better decisions, faster” or “all your team communication, instantly searchable, available wherever you go” or “75% less email” or some other valuable result of adopting Slack, we will find many more buyers.”

Over the years, the company has continually doubled down on customer experience and referrals, including by creating a Customer Development Team that listens to users and implements solutions accordingly. They have optimized their customer journey and onboarding process to ensure a smooth experience for new customers.

The result? Slack became one of the highest-value startups in the world with a meteoric rise in value from $0 to $4 billion in just four years, 3.5x growth in daily active users over a single year without a marketing team, and an eventual sale to Salesforce for $27 billion .

Slack's success can be attributed to its focus on customer success, acquiring a large customer base, and generating word-of-mouth through exceptional customer experience.

Focus on community impact

Huawei faced several challenges when it first began to plot its entry into the Indian market. For one, being a Chinese brand, Huawei already faced an uphill battle in marketing its products in India due to the historically frosty relations between China and India.

In addition, the perception within the country of Chinese mobile phone brands as low-quality, dirt-cheap devices that only catered to the lower spectrum of the market limited the size of its addressable market.

Therefore, Huawei needed a product strategy that would not only help their products appeal to a wider class of customers, but also conquer the negative associations with China.

They chose to navigate these challenges by implementing a GTM strategy that focused on changing the perception of their products from the roots. They began by building local R&D centers in India and hired locals in a prominent recruitment drive that showcased their commitment to the local community. This also helped them understand the demographics and preferences of Indian consumers.

They also contributed to the “ Make in India ” initiative, a manufacturing/focused drive to add more industrial capabilities to the Indian economy.

Huawei also partnered with a leading local television channel to sponsor a competition where the company’s products were established as aspirational. They leveraged marketing campaigns to showcase their high-end specifications, superior performance, and competitive pricing to the Indian audience. Through these efforts, Huawei aimed to attract new customers and position itself as a strong contender in the mid to high-end market, directly competing with brands like Samsung and Apple .

While pursuing a broader market base, they were also careful not to leave the low-end market behind.

The company established the “Honor” brand to provide competition to other companies in the mid to low-end sector, including Xiaomi Redmi and OnePlus. This allowed Huawei to cater to a wider range of potential customers and tap into India's status as the second-largest phone subscriber market in the world.

Over time, these strategies helped the company change the perception of its products. Now, India has become Huawei’s largest research base outside China and its R&D investments in the country keep accelerating .

The company reported 60% growth in its India business within the first quarter of 2017, well over the global average of 43%. The Honor brand alone enjoyed sales growth of 500% over the course of 2018.

Huawei's success can be attributed to its ability to understand the local market, establish a strong customer base, and execute targeted marketing efforts that resonate with the Indian audience.

Lead with your superiority

Apple has been one of the biggest names in tech for a long time now, and a key part of that dominance is down to the core GTM strategy of the company.

Put simply, Apple does not sell phones, laptops, watches, or tablet computers - it sells a lifestyle, and the company goes to great lengths to ensure its customers know this.

Apple styles itself as a company that operates on the cutting edge of technological advancement.

The company messaging revolves around the innovation and intelligence in its solutions, as well as the exclusivity that customers get when they purchase Apple products. This is central to its GTM strategy.

While, traditionally, companies communicate what they do, how they do it, and then why, Apple flips this instead and starts with their “Why”.

They use a system called “The Golden Circle” to powerfully establish their purpose as a company, how they do this by making products that are on the cutting edge of available technology, and then drilling down into the specific product they intend to push.

Here’s an example of this strategy in play during the launch of Apple’s iPhone in 2008:

As the mobile phone industry struggles to come to grips with Apple's iPhone, the biggest mistake it could make is to see the device purely as a phone.

As the Guardian reports, “ Apple “articulated a persuasive vision of the iPhone as a 'platform' — i.e. a general-purpose computing and communication device .” “ The key feature of the Apple device is that it is a powerful handheld computer which runs Unix and has a nice user interface — and which also happens to make voice calls. Of these properties, the last is the least interesting .”

The result of this strategy has been an almost fanatical engagement with the company’s products. Right at the start, Apple immediately cornered 28% of the US smartphone market, and that number has grown to approximately 57% today.

The company complements its unique messaging with a mix of direct-to-consumer (DTC) and third-party channel distribution, allowing Apple to exercise significant control over its customers’ buying experience. By leveraging a variety of marketing channels, including digital marketing and social media, Apple reaches its ideal customers and creates a sense of brand awareness.

The company's focus on a product-led GTM approach, combined with strong sales team, has allowed them to maintain their position as a leading player in the tech industry.

📚Recommended read : How Apple Became the Top Non-Corporate Tech Brand

Sell a vision

Although Tesla didn’t build the first electric car or the first functional battery in the industry, the company is today seen as a trailblazer in electric automobiles.

Again, as with the other companies discussed here, Tesla’s rise to the top of the US car market was largely due to its remarkable GTM strategy.

When the company was first launched, they were aiming to build from the ashes of General Motors’ EV 1, the world’s first (nearly) viable electric car.

Their initial vision was to show the world that it could build an electric car that was not only equal to gasoline-fueled vehicles in terms of utility, but also superior in performance.

But, where you would expect the company to concentrate on starting small with a market-ready prototype that can quickly achieve mainstream adoption, Tesla flipped the script instead. Tesla focused on four major aspects in its GTM strategy:

• Target affluent buyers right off the bat. This elevated their car to a position of exclusivity, and also freed the company to produce its absolute best from the start. The company’s first vehicle, the Roadster, cost $109,000.
• Create a spectacularly unique experience for buyers, from how they order their vehicles, to customizations, over-the-top upgrades, fully digital controls, performance, and more. Tesla's focus on customer experience allowed them to establish a loyal customer base.
• Adopt a DTC sales strategy, allowing them absolute control over the buyer experience and also removing the cost of middlemen dealers, thereby allowing them to provide their vehicles at a relatively lower cost. This business model enabled Tesla to streamline its operations.
• Vertical integration, including taking control over the production of its batteries, electric powertrain components, automation technology, and more. Compared to the company’s direct rivals which must outsource up to 80% of their manufacturing, this presents significant advantages in terms of optimizing product quality and achieving cost efficiency. Tesla's focus on vertical integration contributes to its competitive advantage.

Today, Tesla has become an automotive powerhouse. In January 2020, the company made history when it became the most valuable American automaker ever, with a market capitalization of $86.5 billion.

That same year, the company’s valuation rose to $442.7 billion, more than the size of several rivals, including General Motors , BMW , Toyota , and Ford .

Tesla's success can be attributed to its ability to sell a compelling vision of sustainable transportation, its dedication to innovation, and its commitment to vertical integration throughout the sales cycle.

Show people why they need you

TaxJar provides tax management software to businesses and organizations. When the company first launched, the goal was to position itself as a technology company that provides tax solutions anyone can use.

But it faced two significant challenges. First, tax is a notoriously opaque topic that most business owners would rather avoid. Second, and as a result of this, they were more likely to outsource their tax management, even for tasks that could be conducted in-house, such as sales tax tracking.

In plotting its entry into the market, the company found that most of the available content on taxation was boring and difficult to understand.

So they set out their product strategy based on a simple plan- to support their prospects with valuable, engaging, readable information about tax and then convert them. TaxJar's focus on content marketing allowed them to address the lack of accessible information in the industry and establish themselves as a trusted resource.

The company started with content about sales tax, and this was met with a highly positive reaction from its prospects. By providing educational resources and addressing common pain points, TaxJar demonstrated its expertise and value to potential customers.

As more business owners started to find the content useful, the company was able to build authority and trust, allowing them to move prospects into the buying stage.

They didn’t stop at the content they provided, though. They ensured that their tax solutions were molded in the same engaging, simple manner, thereby ensuring a consistent experience for users across the board. TaxJar's approach to onboarding and customer success ensured a smooth transition for users, leading to increased customer acquisition and retention.

Due to this success, on April 2021 TaxJar was acquired by Stripe to add cloud-based, automated sales tax tools into its payments platform.

Pivot to meet the market

Sometimes, a company’s initial GTM strategy may not work. You may target the wrong market, incorporate unnecessary features, or entirely miss with your sales strategy.

But what do you do when you discover your GTM strategy may not have been the best fit? You can pivot to meet the market, as Socrata did.

Socrata was initially established as a data aggregation platform where anyone could capture and present data in an engaging manner.

However, the company soon discovered that its platform was gaining traction amongst governments as a reliable open data platform.

To capture this unintentional market, the company quickly redesigned its product, adjusted its business model, and redefined its target audience. They recognized the opportunity and included more features that specifically cater to governments and their agencies, including security and availability.

They focused their marketing efforts and reoriented their GTM strategies around this new market segment. By showcasing their expertise in cloud-based solutions for data-centered governments, Socrata positioned itself as a trusted partner in the public sector.

The result? Socrata was acquired by Tyler Technologies on April 2018 with the goal of accelerating and advancing its vision through the data sharing and analytical capabilities of the robust Socrata platform.

7. Microsoft

Embrace change and transformation.

When it comes to successful go-to-market (GTM) strategies, Microsoft stands as a prime example of a company that has mastered the art of driving digital transformation across industries.

With its wide range of software, services, and solutions, Microsoft has continually evolved its GTM strategy to remain at the forefront of technology innovation and maintain its market leadership.

One key component of Microsoft's GTM strategy is its relentless focus on understanding the needs of its customers. By conducting extensive market research and engaging with stakeholders across various industries, Microsoft identifies the pain points and challenges faced by businesses and organizations. This enables them to develop tailored solutions that address these specific needs and deliver tangible value.

What stands out about Microsoft's GTM strategy is it’s strong partner ecosystem collaboration. By partnering with a diverse network of technology providers, system integrators, and developers, the company expands its reach and capabilities to deliver comprehensive solutions to customers.

Through joint marketing initiatives, collaborative development efforts, and co-selling programs, Microsoft fosters a mutually beneficial relationship that drives growth and customer success.

As a market leader, Microsoft leverages its extensive customer base and strong brand reputation to drive cross-selling and upselling opportunities. Through effective sales team enablement, including sales reps equipped with in-depth product knowledge and value-based selling approaches, Microsoft maximizes its revenue potential and expands its footprint within existing accounts.

By continually adapting and innovating its GTM approach, Microsoft has solidified its position as a leading technology provider, empowering businesses worldwide to thrive in the digital era.

📚Recommended read : How Microsoft’s innovations made it a technology giant

GTM Strategy Through Value Proposition?

As these GTM strategies show, there is no single plan that guarantees the success of a new product or service. Successful strategies are often as varied in their content as they are in the products they successfully pushed to market.

But what they all have in common is that they identified specific value propositions that underlay the products they wanted to push, and then built plans that supported and enhanced those propositions.

Execute A Bullet-Proof GTM Strategy With Cascade 🚀

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Sign up today for a free forever plan or book a guided 1:1 tour with one of our Cascade in-house strategy execution experts.

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10 Go-To-Market (GTM) Strategy Examples and Templates

Table of Contents

What is a go-to-market strategy.

• 5 Companies show you examples of their go-to-market strategies
• 5 go-to-market strategy templates that companies used

Here's the Wikipedia definition:

"Go-to-market or go-to-market strategy is the plan of an organization, utilizing their inside and outside resources (e.g. sales force and distributors), to deliver their unique value proposition to customers and achieve competitive advantage."

Here's Gartner's definition:

"A go-to-market (GTM) strategy is a plan that details how an organization can engage with customers to convince them to buy their product or service and to gain a competitive advantage. A GTM strategy includes tactics related to pricing, sales and channels, the buying journey, new product or service launches, product rebranding or product introduction to a new market."

Here's my summary of half a dozen slightly different definitions:

A go-to-market strategy (GTM) is the plan for targeting a customer pain point with the right sales and marketing process, so you can grow your business at the optimum pace. You can create a GTM strategy for a new business but also for a new feature, brand or location.

Why have a go-to-market strategy?

For large companies with existing products, their GTM strategies might focus on ensuring accurate communication and effective branding for new markets.

For those of us building a new business, an incorrect GTM strategy can mean years of slower growth because of incorrect pricing, marketing channels and sales processes.

While I had heard of the concept before it was listening to this podcast that brought it firmly to my attention. When a founder who has been building companies over decades says that he’d start with a GTM strategy before anything else, it’s time to get reading.

If you’re already confident you can build a product, you can focus on picking a big market and nailing the pain point, the brand, messaging, content, ads, emails and sales model needed to reach that market.

You can do this if you’re experienced.

Most first time business founders are not.

Most of us build products and figure out the marketing afterwards or do some half-baked version of both and the more I learn the crazier that seems.

What are the major components of a go-to-market strategy?

Some answer "what is your go-to-market?" by talking about their marketing but go-to-market is a strategy that extends across the organisation.

To get a feel for the major parts of a GTM strategy, I've summarised the GTM plan of a serial entrepreneur, Stefan Groschupf, taken from this great blog post .

Craft a value matrix and messaging around the pain point

This is a good way to understand what the pain point is and how to set up messaging to address the pain point.

Identify the buying personas involved in the journey

At Upscope we realised, by analysing sign-ups, that the person who first signs up or enquires about the product is often a manager and not an end user as we imagined. Yeah, this was a surprise and quite obvious in hindsight.

Also, we found that the gatekeeper we needed to clear is often someone in charge of data security, so we created additional detailed documents explaining how we secure data.

There are several people involved in the stages of making a purchase including:

• The initiator who first comes across your product.
• The influencer.
• The decision maker.
• The buyer who approves the budget.
• Final approver.
• Gatekeeper - such as the IT dept in charge of data security of vendors

Understanding these people and what each needs during the process helps create the right content and processes you'll need to make the sale.

Understand your buyer’s journey

In short, figure out your top of funnel, middle of funnel and bottom of funnel so you know what documents are needed at each stage.

Upscope’s top of the funnel is the blog and integration listings which lead to the home page containing videos and testimonials to get attention.

Upscope’s middle of the funnel is live chat and demos to answer key questions.

Upscope bottom of the funnel is the trial , educational emails, one-to-one product walk-throughs and pricing quotes to get to a sale.

Choose a marketing strategy

This is where you figure out your inbound and outbound strategies.

For Upscope, it's primarily content.

We started with email and then realised we did not have the messaging and target market nailed so went to content until we knew more. You can see Upscope's content marketing funnel statistics here .

Choose a sales strategy

You might use only one, or you might use a mix of self-service (where they enter credit card and buy), inside sales, heavy-duty field sales and/or a channel model.

At Upscope, we began as a self-service product and later incorporated inside sales because larger companies needed to build layers of trust in both us and the product, particularly if they operated in the health and finance sectors.

If you'd like to see the full post on the above points about building a GMT strategy, see Stefan's post .

How do l pick the right benefits, headline and messaging for my GTM? Use the positioning process and the strategic sales narrative

We've all spent months and sometimes even years arguing about which headline to use and what key benefits to show on our products for our target market.

I wish someone had told me this years ago.

First figure out your positioning . Then figure out your strategic sales narrative based on that positioning.

Positioning

Positioning has now become a science and helps you realise which benefits are most important for your target market.

There’s an exact process for positioning built by April Dunford and it’s getting a lot of praise from the most experienced serial entrepreneurs out there. Read about it here

Strategic sales narrative

Once you’ve got the positioning right then work on your sales narrative. Positioning is an input into the strategic sales narrative which, in short, is a compelling story that helps customers understand why they need your product.

Why do you need that sales narrative?

What if you’re targeting a customer’s pain point but the customer is just not feeling much pain? Most customers feel relatively pain free. It needs to be explained to them with context and that’s what the sales narrative does.

The argument about positioning and narrative

There is an ongoing argument about which one comes first, positioning or narrative. My view, working in a company that has gone from the startup phase to growth and enterprise sales, is for new startups to do positioning first and play with the narrative second to flex their mind further around messaging.

You don’t know your market in the early days of a startup. You don’t know who the bad guy in your narrative will be. But, you might be able to skip to the narrative if you’re established and know your market.

Either way, read both April Dunford’s process on positioning and this link on strategic sales narrative and I believe you’ll know where you stand.

With that in mind, below are GTM strategies for 5 different companies.

1. Vuclip's go-to-market was based on "must-have" needs in emerging markets

I was quite impressed with the Vuclip founder. Incredibly smart engineer type who seems to have figured out how to build multiple businesses and evolve his own strategy.

• The pain point is video buffering.
• Vuclip chose to build a brand for consumers rather than build for enterprise.
• They chose the "must-have" mobile streaming market in developing countries.
• Those companies whose GTM was based on selling to enterprise all failed.

What was the pain point they addressed?

According to Nickhil Jakatdar, CEO of Vuclip, their pain point was “In emerging markets, both networks and phones have limitations, making buffering a big problem.”

There were hundreds of sites like Youtube but networks were behind

“There are different networks — 2G, 3G and 4G — and there are phones of many types. Data plans are limited even in developed countries. In emerging markets, both networks and phones have limitations, making buffering a big problem. With nearly 100 hours of video uploaded on YouTube every minute and with hundreds of sites like YouTube mushrooming all over the world, the combination of fragmentation and volume made mobile video a daunting problem.”

They focused on “must-have” market and not "nice to have" market

“I decided to deploy the technology where it was a “must-have” rather than where it was a ‘nice-to-have.’ In the U.S., there are many ways to access video. In India, Indonesia, Africa or Latin America the only way the masses can access video is via mobile. So we focused our energies and resources on emerging markets.”

They went for building a consumer brand because others catch up too quickly in enterprise

“We decided to do the hard slog and build a brand. Others always catch up with technology and a price war lowers profitability.”

They went web based rather than app based as familiarity is an advantage

"We bet on a browser-based approach instead of an application-based approach. This go-to-market strategy was based on simplicity. Explaining to consumers in emerging markets about applications is simply too tedious. In retrospect, this sounds like a good idea. However, all the 18 or 19 companies that were funded in the space took the enterprise and application route. None of them exist today."

Read the full article here

2. At Upscope the early go-to-market strategy was built on riding the growing live chat wave

SaaS GTM strategies change as we learn more

Upscope is the next generation of screen sharing built specifically for companies help customers on their app or website.

We first thought that Upscope was for taking a quick look at the user’s screen , when they had a customer support problem, to see the problem and fix it.

While that’s still true, the heaviest users include customer success, account management, onboarding specialists, sales teams as well as support staff who can spend up to 30 minutes with each customer using Upscope to guide them through their app.

There’s less of a market for a quick peek type technical support service and it’s used by many other teams outside of customer support.

With hindsight, this may seem obvious but the early days of SaaS are confusing.

Doing regular customer job titles and usage analyses changed our road map and future GTM plans.

What's the pain point Upscope solves?

When customers have a problem navigating your website, you can’t ask every one of them to set up a Zoom screen share, to help them. When you can’t see their screen you end up communicating by typing lists of instructions or blindly guiding them on the phone, which can take an hour or more with non-tech customers.

The solution is instant and interactive co-browsing , meaning you can see the user’s screen in one click AND use your mouse on the user’s screen to click for them.

That’s why customer support , onboarding and salespeople use it a lot and they are the buyers.

What personas are involved in the buying process for Upscope’s products?

The first sign-up for larger companies is often the CS, sales or support manager.

The first sign-up for startups is often the founder or director.

The IT department will be the gateway for clearing it for security.

A developer will customise it, test it locally and then push it to production.

The CS, account management and support team will trial the software.

Then if it’s a finance or health company they will have a security department clear the product.

What was our marketing plan?

Our target market evolved but the way we reach them is still roughly the same- via content and integrations. We saw live chat companies like Intercom, LiveChat, Zendesk, Drift and others growing and we wanted to ride a growing wave.

We created integrations with these tools, got listed on their app stores and created content so that if a user searches for ‘intercom pricing’ we’re there on the first page of Google . As those companies grow, the traffic to our content grows with them.

We also attracted SaaS founders by writing about our SaaS journey including onboarding emails , SaaS pricing , and other posts like the one you’re reading now. We’re now developing further marketing channels for CS, account management and enterprise support. This will include further integrations, ads, emails, and content.

What's the sales model and the buyer personas journey

The different people mentioned above need different types of content and material to convince them to continue to the next stage.

At the top of the funnel we're getting the "attention" of the manager when they come to our landing page

A team manager or c-suite exec reads our blog post or sees our integration listing and comes to the website.

At this point we get their attention using short videos, testimonials, a security page covering key customer data concerns, individual landing pages for each integration.

In short, we try and tick all the main boxes for them to move to the next step.

Consideration

In the middle "consideration" phase we're talking to managers, end users, developers, those in charge of data security and vetting.

They book a demo and /or ask questions on live chat.

The demo is often to the initial champion who signed up and a couple of others they invited.

They might book follow up demos involving other decision makers and ask a series of questions on live chat or via email to look for comparisons to our competitors.

It's useful to have documents on our enterprise features or on-premise solutions to pass on to their tech team. It's important to respond quickly.

At the bottom "decision" phase we're making sure the trial goes well, all docs are completed and we quote the right price

They take up the trial. We complete security forms, price quotes, we give them an additional walk-through of the product for specific features and settings during the trial.

Upscope has grown even though our initial GTM strategy was vague. When we started we only had a rough idea of the market, we were not specific about who needs it most and now that we can be specific, we can move faster.

The most recent GTM evolution allowing bottom up growth for Upscope can be seen in our new 'should have built this years ago' product: the Co-Browsing extension

Learn more about Upscope’s lessons learned about pricing, enterprise sales, copywriting and more here .

3. Go-to-market at the billion dollar country level

If you associate quality products with the likes of Apple and Samsung, what would a new Chinese company called Huawei do to win a market?

Here was the problem Huawei had in India

"The Indian telecom supplier market was heavily saturated and to make an impact, Huawei needed to separate itself from the rest and create a distinct identity as well as a reputation for reliability. Historically, Indians have viewed Chinese companies as hard to form relationships with and Chinese made products as subpar and inferior. In addition, China and India have relatively uneasy diplomatic relations."

Huawei first got a foothold by building local R&D centres

“Huawei began establishing its foothold in India by setting up R&D and service center facilities in India and hiring predominantly locals to show commitment to creating value for Indians rather than just extracting benefits. India is now Huawei’s second largest research center outside China.”

They positioned it as an aspirational product

“Huawei is now working on positioning its smartphones as aspirational products by working with local English Language channels to hold contests and beat the stereotype of a low quality Chinese product.”

Establishing trust and building relationships

“The lesson to learn is that establishing trust, building and sustaining relationships and showing continuing commitment to the new market can lead to a successful foothold and increased opportunities.”

Read the full article on Huawei here .

4. A cornerstone of TaxJar's go-to-market was better content to help confused clients

If you aim to be the number one educator of potential customers in a subject like SEO, then you’ll be up against people like Neil Patel and Brian Dean who rank at the top.

However, if you’re looking to be number one in an industry like tax, you’ve got a lot of low-hanging fruit to take advantage of and that can be the cornerstone of a strategy.

They became a technology company first, a tax company second

"We looked at ourselves as a technology company, not so much as a tax company. That was a new approach to our space. We've let the customer be in the driver's seat for the way the product has been built."

Their marketing strategy was based on building trust by educating the customers on tax like few others had done

"Another opportunity for us was our ability to educate the world on sales tax. Before we existed, most of the content that was available was either hard to find or hard to understand.

Therefore, we decided to build the best content we could to help people wrap their heads around sales tax, which feels like an insane problem that's changing all the time.

As a result, we were able to build trust and customers began to try the product because they trusted and understood what we're saying. This also helped us succeed through word of mouth, which has been a tremendous lever for growth."

Read more about TaxJar's planning

5. EightSleep developed a go-to-market for a specific new feature

This is useful if you're launching a new integration with a partner.

This is different from the other go-to-market studies we've mentioned in this post but I figured it's great for single feature launches.

Eight did an integration of their sleep hardware / software with IFTTT (an app for integrating and automating different applications using 'if-then' logic).

"We did so with an announcement email to our entire user base and highlighted some of the connections we’d already created, to help them realize the possibilities. We also created a dedicated landing page on our website to highlight, explain, and link back to IFTTT and our connections."

Post-launch

"We promoted videos on Facebook and Instagram that showcased different use cases, such as automatically starting your coffee machine when you wake up. These videos were really helpful in explaining the value of the integration, and to this day we use them in our customer prospecting efforts."

Co-marketing

"We also worked closely with the IFTTT team on marketing efforts. We were included in their GIFTTT Guide for 2016, which drove an incremental 15,000 visitors to our service page and connections. More recently, we were included in the February IFTTT newsletter. It brought us a spike in traffic and doubled our sales for a period of 4 days.”

"Focus on use cases — you need to be descriptive and explain exactly how your users will benefit from this integration. Some may be aware of IFTTT, but many may not be, so it’s an opportunity to educate."

Read the full case study here

Powerpoint slideshares and templates of go-to-market strategies

6. fitbit gtm for their premium product.

This includes the value proposition, strategic overview, brand and audience strategy, GTM costs, expected campaign ROI, CAC by channel.

See FitBit’s full GTM Strategy here

7. Cisco's GTM communication plan for a learning game

Cisco had GTM communication plan for a learning game to put users in the shoes of a telecoms company leader.

The slideshare includes the strategy, tactics, assets, phases and social media strategy.

See the full go-to-market communication plan slideshare here

8. Symyx GTM strategy includes the ROI and benchmarks

This slideshare shows how Symyx ran a GTM strategy that grew revenue and bookings and along with the before and after numbers.

It includes notes on their print advertising, media relations and establishing themselves as a thought leader, brand equity metrics and sales enablement.

See the slideshare on Symyx's numbers and strategy

9. Go-to-market best practices for startups by a16z

I added this slideshare as it's by a16z and contains a lot of images that might be useful structures for that wonderful presentation you're planning ;)

See Go-to-Market Best Practices for Startups

10. Slideshare on product-led GTM strategy

This is an interesting addition simply because the cost of acquiring customers is greatly reduced if the product does the work rather than a sales rep.

This slideshare quotes that 65% of b2b buyers prefer not to deal with a sales rep.

I went through this slide with interest but one thing came to mind. There's a reason companies like Intercom also assumed they could do without sales people and then came round to hiring them. The product should do as much of the work as possible but good sales people are not in a zero sum game with product, they're a boost and, on enterprise deals, companies expect to talk to sales people.

See the slideshare on a product led GTM strategy

What to read next?

Eye opener: Creating a Sales Narrative that Compels People to Buy

Essential read : Positioning is a Company Building Superpower

Pardeep overlooks growth at Upscope and loves writing about SaaS companies, customer success and customer experience.

Minh's journey with Upscope

A day in the life of Pablo: Our Lead Software Engineer’s code & coffee routines

These 5 Companies Show You How They Use Net Promoter Score (NPS) to Improve Their Businesses

Go-to-Market (GTM) Strategy: What It Is, Examples & Template

• by Apostle Mengoulis
• June 17, 2021
• 15 minute read

Are you a marketer, a startup founder, or simply a motivated business owner looking for ways to get things off the ground?

You may be looking for ways to raise awareness for your early-stage company or planning to launch a new product and naturally want to generate buzz around it. 

No matter why you need a go-to-market (GTM) strategy, we’ve created a concise guide to help you understand how such a strategy works and how you can get the most out of one. 

To be more specific, in this guide we’re going to take you through the following:

• What a GTM strategy is
• Differences between a go-to-market strategy and a marketing strategy or marketing plan
• Examples of go-to-market strategies for inspiration
• How to build your own go-to-market strategy

What’s more, we’ve created a template that you can download and use to save you both time and money. 

Seems like we’ve got lots to cover. 

Let’s get right into it. 

Choose the Section You Want

• What’s a Go-to-Market (GMT) Strategy?

5 Go-to-Market Strategy Examples to Inspire You

How to build a go-to-market strategy for your startup, our proven go-to-market strategy template, what is a go-to-market (gmt) strategy.

A go-to-market strategy is a tactical plan that includes and summarizes all your moves in order to hit the mark in a new market when you’re launching a new product or company. 

Put another way, a GTM strategy is an action plan that’s compiled using the main elements of your new business move, such as:

• Identifying your target audience and target market
• Identifying solutions that your product offers
• Defining your unique value proposition (UVP)
• Defining your acquisition strategy
• Defining your buyer personas
• Defining your messaging 

And so on and so forth. 

To sum up, we’d say that a GTM plan is basically the steps you will take to bring your product or service to the market. 

With under 50% of businesses making it to their fifth year , we can see that, when it comes to new businesses or new products, the odds aren’t quite stacked in your favor. 

Moreover, startup failure rates in 2020 tell us that 90% of all new startups fail , which clearly shows that having a great product might not be enough; you need to have a well-defined go-to-market strategy in place. 

The statistics present you with a challenge as a new business or a business that’s launching a new product. 

That’s why you need a solid strategy that’ll help you hit the ground running. 

We’re not saying this to put extra pressure on you, but we encourage you to be realistic as to how difficult it’s going to be to survive as a new business.

As promised a little further up, we’re now going to discuss the difference between a GTM strategy and a marketing strategy. 

What’s the difference between a go-to-market strategy and a marketing strategy?

In case you thought that a GTM strategy was the same as a marketing strategy, we need to set a few things straight; firstly, they’re not. 

A marketing strategy is an ongoing process that includes all the marketing efforts , from digital marketing activities — such as content marketing, inbound marketing, paid acquisition or referral marketing — that your business is making. 

On the other hand, a GTM strategy, as we’ve already discussed, is a far more specific, one-time process that focuses on a specific event , such as a new product launch . 

Let’s get into more detail about the characteristics of each of the two strategies. 

A marketing strategy:

• Includes all marketing actions a business plans to take
• Encapsulates marketing actions in relation to distribution channels as well as the target audience for the whole business
• Is based on a long-term approach that aims to make sure that a business will keep up with existing products and upcoming trends in the market
• Often includes marketing elements and analysis such as SWOT analysis and detailed market research
• Covers actions on brand positioning as well as how to attract the audience that’ll appreciate the brand and will engage with it
• Is usually undertaken by an entire marketing team
• Is an ongoing process  

A go-to-market strategy :

• Is usually built in the context of launching a new product or business
• Can be different for each of the products that a company sells
• Will be different based on the type of the business. e.g. B2B or B2C
• Will have a marketing strategy as part of it for a specific product a company’s launching
• Includes an analysis of the buyer journey as well as a segmentation of the audience into sub-audiences
• Focuses on covering new product launches and activities around a specific product’s lifecycle, from the creation of a product to the distribution process and its eventual discontinuation
• Is based on a short-term approach in relation to a segment of the market that’ll be interested in the product
• Covers actions in relation to communicating a product’s competitive advantage
• Will generally have every step targeted towards a specific buyer persona or target customer
• Usually involves members of a company’s product marketing team, customer support team, and sales team
• Will have a fixed timeline .

After seeing some of the main characteristics of each strategy, let’s get into the examples we’ve prepared for you.

We’ve now established what a GTM strategy is and exactly how it’s different from a marketing strategy. 

As we covered a little further up, the vast majority of startups sadly don’t last long after they’ve launched, partly because they lack a well-defined go-to-market plan. 

There are, however, some companies that have managed to not only have a successful launch, but also find a product-market fit (PMF) and subsequently start growing and scaling. 

In this section, we’re looking at six different examples of inspiring GTM strategies from some interesting and innovative companies. 

Let’s dive right into the first example we have for you. 

Example #1: Visme for Desktop Launch

Image Source: Product Hunt

The first inspiring go-to-market example we want to share with you comes from Visme, which is a modern graphic maker .

Earlier in 2021, Visme launched a new product, Visme for Desktop; an all-in-one design platform that can be used on both Mac and Windows. 

As you can see on the screenshot above, part of the company’s GTM strategy was to launch on Product Hunt and raise awareness for the product and the overall brand. 

In fact, the product was voted as Product of the Day on April 13, 2021. 

The enthusiastic comments say it all:

Pretty neat, isn’t it?

What’s more, Visme’s founder, Payman Taei, made sure to share the news with his social media audience by posting about the product on his LinkedIn account. 

Have a look:

Image Source: LinkedIn

Both the Product Hunt page as well as Payman’s post include all the relevant information to appeal to their target audience. 

More specifically, as we can see, there are nods towards the new product’s use cases as well as the pain points the tool aims to address. 

As you can probably imagine, these are essential components of a go-to-market strategy that take into consideration important customer needs and provide potential customers with solutions. 

Additionally, given that an effective GTM strategy needs to present a new product in a detailed and well-defined way, it comes as no surprise that the Product Hunt presentation provides users with images of how the desktop app looks. 

Here’s an example:

Let’s get to the next go-to-market strategy example we want to show you. 

Example #2: Challenger Bank Monzo Launch

Image Source: Monzo

Our second example of a successful company with a truly smart GTM strategy comes from app-based challenger bank, Monzo, established in the UK in 2015.

Before we get into analyzing their strategy, let’s have a look at the following screenshot:

What we see above is a step-by-step illustration of the logic behind their strategy when people were joining the waitlist for a Monzo online bank account.

As you can see, the new users needed to join a waiting list with a queue of over 15,000 users registered before them. 

If someone wanted to take a lead and get ahead of all those others, they could use their unique referral code and share it with people they know. 

Every time you shared your code and Monzo got a new user signed up from your referral , the app moved you up the queue by several thousand places. 

You might have heard about it before – it’s called the leaderboard giveaway – and it’s basically as simple as inviting people to get higher on the leaderboard.

Sounds pretty exciting and intriguing, right?

The reason we’re including this example in our GTM guide is because the core of the company’s GTM strategy lay in some very interesting tactics which can be summarized in the following elements:

• The power of a well-structured referral program  
• The power of virality starting from one person inviting another to join the app
• The benefits of community marketing and building a community prior to launching your product

Building a waiting list that gives users the opportunity to get an advantage over the rest of the queue can be very efficient.

Why wouldn’t you want to be in front of others? 

When it comes to Monzo’s launch that we just saw, the initial launch targeted residents of London, which helped make the experience more focused and tailored to individual users. 

Since their Alpha launch in 2015 – the one where they made good use of the leaderboard giveaway – Monzo has managed to grow a lot and achieved revenues of £67 million in 2019 – which is equal to around $95 million.

They must have done something right!

Example #3: Robinhood’s Pre-launch

Image Source: Robinhood

Building a pre-launch campaign might sound like a challenging task, but if done right, it can help your business find great results from its product launch. 

With the goal of making the stock market accessible , Robinhood, which was then a small startup, entered the market in 2014.

Their go-to-market strategy was heavily based on the following elements:

• Creating  a VIP experience that built anticipation and FOMO
• Gamifying the experience of getting access to the product
• Targeting millennials who didn’t have as much access or exposure to investing and trading products up to that point

All three elements written in the list above were accompanied by the company’s main messaging, which was, as we said a little further up, to “ democratize finance for all ”.

This strong messaging, along with some interesting and engaging tactics, like building a signup waiting list with a strong referral incentive , had high chances of hitting the mark. 

Similar to what we saw Monzo doing earlier in this post, Robinhood created a waiting list that allowed users to get priority access by being invited by those already in the queue and then spreading the word about the product, thus getting its first users to sign up for the app.

The more friends that joined, the sooner you’d get access . 

This tactic made users want to engage with the product and also made them feel that the product was exclusive, which made their willingness to join even stronger. 

Let’s now move on to the next great example we have for you.

Example #4: TaxJar Focusing on Killer Content

Image Source: TaxJar

Different companies have different cornerstones for their GTM strategies and that’s the way it should be. 

Each company has a different business plan, business model, values, ambitions, and different decision-makers and stakeholders involved in different company activities. 

For eCommerce business TaxJar, the way to deal with competition was pretty clear and straightforward. 

To be more specific, TaxJar, which brought the dynamic of automation into sales tax reporting and filing and was launched in 2013, was able to identify a key competitive differentiator. 

From what TaxJar CEO Mark Faggiano told Nicole Shimer , we can easily pick up the following two points as core elements of the startup’s GTM strategy:

• Educate the world on sales tax by creating and sharing easy-to-find and easy-to-understand content around sales tax
• TaxJar was based on the approach of being a technology company rather than a tax company

As Mark Faggiano puts it:

“ Before we existed, most of the content that was available was either hard to find or hard to understand. Therefore, we decided to build the best content we could to help people wrap their heads around sales tax, which feels like an insane problem that’s changing all the time. As a result, we were able to build trust and customers began to try the product because they trusted and understood what we’re saying. This also helped us succeed through word of mouth , which has been a tremendous lever for growth.”

Want to have a look at what TaxJar’s content looks like?

Here you go:

We’ve grabbed a few blog post titles that clearly show us just how easy it is to get informative content around sales tax and what that might look like. 

One of the objectives of content is to inform your target customer, just like how TaxJar is doing here by creating articles that speak to different industries, such as telehealth and online pharmacies. 

By creating content that resonates with your target customer, you’re hitting some of the key functions of a GTM strategy that we talked about, like reaching out to your ideal buyer and pointing out your competitive advantage.

As simple as that!

Keep reading to find out more about the last example we’re showing you. 

Example #5: Lemlist Launch on Appsumo

Image Source: Lemlist

Lemlist, an email outreach platform to send personalized outreach emails, launched on Appsumo in early 2018. 

Since its launch, it managed to achieve $250K annual recurring revenue (ARR) in 2018, which increased to over $4 million by early 2021 , and they’re planning to take it to $10 million by the end of the year.  

The main point around Lemlist’s GTM strategy lies in its move in 2018 to launch on Appsumo – a marketplace for early-stage startups that want to get some attention and traction by offering very special deals such as lifetime access for $X. 

As you can probably imagine, such a space allows businesses to get things off the ground and grow big, and fast. 

In fact, Lemlist went on Appsumo twice in their first year – the second time was with a Black Friday deal:

Image Source: Appsumo

We can clearly see that part of their go-to-market strategy was having a special deal on Appsumo which allowed them to get some capital that they could then use to build the product and grow the business.

What’s more, Lemlist’s GTM strategy also included going on Product Hunt in an attempt to generate buzz around the product and spread the news within a tech product-loving community. 

As you can see, the product was voted Product of the Day on January 24, 2018, demonstrating how popular it was and making more and more people aware of it. 

We’re now done talking about our five SaaS go-to-market strategy examples that’ll hopefully inspire you to create your own. 

Because we understand that you might need a bit of help in terms of putting some of these tactics into action, we’re taking you through a simple but concise, step-by-step process of creating your very own go-to-market strategy. 

Here we go…

We’ve already established that having a well-organized go-to-market strategy is a must, especially for startups. 

If you’re wondering how to create a go-to-market strategy for your startup, we’ve got you covered. 

In this section, we’re taking you through a step-by-step process of building a go-to-market strategy for startups. 

To illustrate the process, we’ll be using screenshots from our GTM strategy template you can also download – for free! – and implement yourself. 

Here’s step number one. 

Step #1: Understand the target market

The first step for an efficient go-to-market strategy is to understand your target market . 

First things first; your target market is basically defined as the segment of potential buyers that your product or service will be targeting. 

Put another way, your target market is the group of people that are most likely to become your new customers. 

Understanding the characteristics of that group allows you to craft your sales strategy, sales process, pricing strategy, customer onboarding process, customer support process as well as map out the whole customer experience, end-to-end. 

Understanding your target market encapsulates a wide range of actions that your startup needs to take, including the following steps:

The actions highlighted in the template screenshot above are:

• Conduct a SWOT analysis
• Create a list of your direct competitors
• Competitor analysis and creation of a competitive matrix
• Identifying partners and collaborators that can help your startup get early traction

Once you’ve completed all the actions in this first step…

…you’re off to the next one. 

Step #2: Understand the target customer

Following up on the first step of understanding your target market, looking closer into your target customer is yet another important step in the process. 

This step, which, by the way, is one of the most fundamental things you’ll do, is all about identifying and understanding your target customer, which will allow you to create a product that’ll meet their needs and standards. 

When you get to this step, you’ll need to:

• Conduct detailed and rigorous research into the ideal customer profile
• Define your goals and value matrix
• Conduct demographic and psychographic analysis
• Define the pain points and challenges you might face in relation to your product and how it might be perceived by the target customer
• Create an ideal customer journey map. AKA a buyer’s journey

Some questions to consider when working with the idea of your ideal customer should be along the lines of:

• Who might be the people buying from me and why?
• Are there common characteristics and interests between the people who’ll be buying from me? 
• What will my customer base look like?

Finding the answers to those questions, as well as others you might find useful to consider, will allow you to understand your core customers better, making it easier for you to guide them down the sales funnel when your product launches. 

Keep reading to find the next step in the process of building your go-to-market strategy.

Step #3: Define your positioning

The third step we want to bring your attention to is to define your positioning . 

A simple definition of positioning will provide you with a deeper understanding of the main elements of this process. 

Have a look at this definition by Entrepreneur:

Image Source: Entrepreneur

In other words, positioning is all about how a product or service differentiates from competitors and what kind of niche it can fill. 

To put it simply, when we talk about positioning, we basically talk about where a product fits into a market as well as the business roadmap.

The way you position your product is always in relation to the target market and target customer you’ve previously identified. 

Here are some key actions companies need to take when they get to this particular step:

• Define your brand positioning statement
• Come up with your unique value proposition
• Define your unique brand identity
• Create your main branding elements

You may have noticed that the bullet points above are touching upon how a product is going to be branded, which is one step further than just where it sits in the market.

When you’re in the steps of positioning your product or service, keep in mind that this step also includes telling people about your brand and product. 

This one takes us to the final – big – step of the process. 

Let’s get into it. 

Step #4: Define your marketing strategy

After you’re finished with the previous step, you can get into defining your marketing strategy . 

Your marketing strategy is one of the most important elements of your GTM strategy.

As you can see in the screenshot above, defining your product marketing strategy is a key action that’s included in this step. 

More specifically, before launching your startup, you need to get your product marketing strategy straight. 

Once that’s done, you can define your pricing strategy: 

• Are you planning to test different pricing strategies or pricing plans?
• Will you be offering freemium accounts or free trials?

These are vital questions you need to answer before you get started with your actual launch. 

Additionally, you need to decide on the distribution channels for your products. 

Will you be investing in sales and hiring salespeople? Running content marketing, paid advertising, opening physical stores, organizing webinars ? Or maybe you’ll invest in branded swag and promotional products?

Defining the marketing channels you’ll be using for raising brand awareness and acquiring customers is an integral part of your GTM strategy.

Moving forward, having defined some success metrics and key performance indicators (KPIs) will make it more likely that you’ll efficiently keep track of your progress. 

Additional actions in this final step are:

• Define your pre-launch campaign
• Define your launch campaign
• Define your post-launch campaign

Last but not least, your GTM wouldn’t be complete without defining your full marketing funnel – from customer acquisition to retention and referral – as this can help your startup get some early traction and build some lead generation activity after the product has been launched. 

We’ve said quite a lot about what elements a go-to-market strategy includes. 

If you can’t wait to start working with our go-to-market strategy template for your own startup, wait no more!

It’s right here. 

As you’ve already seen in the previous section of our blog, we’ve created a GTM strategy template that’s free and easy to use. 

Here it is:

The template includes all the steps we analyzed just a moment ago, along with all the individual actions companies in need of a GTM strategy can take. 

What’s more, it comes with a dropdown menu that allows you to customize the status cells depending on your progress through each of the actions. 

The options in terms of the status are the following three:

• In Progress
• Not Started

Last but not least, if you feel like keeping additional notes for streamlining the process and keeping track of your progress, then you can also make the most out of it by using the comments section. 

Download the template and give it a go.

We’re closing this up. 

Before you go

There you have it. 

In this post, we’ve given a simple go-to-market strategy definition and also talked about how it’s different from a marketing strategy. 

We’ve also shared a downloadable GTM template that you can use for free to save yourself some time and money. 

Moreover, by sharing several successful GTM examples, we identified some key components of a GTM plan, including launching a referral marketing campaign. 

Feel free to try Viral Loops for free ,  and see the efficiency of referrals yourself.

Thanks for reading!

Apostle Mengoulis

Apostle is a core member of the founding team at Viral Loops. He has worked closely with hundreds of referral marketing campaigns made with Viral Loops. Apostle has years of experience in growing and marketing companies and co-founded Growth Hacking University.

Great checklist to ensure you are not blindfolded in your GTM strategy.

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• Business strategy |
• 9 steps to craft a successful go-to-mar ...

9 steps to craft a successful go-to-market (GTM) strategy

A go-to-market (GTM) strategy is a step-by-step plan for launching a new product or expanding into a new market. It helps you launch your product to the right audience, with the right messaging, at the right time. Learn how to craft a go-to-market strategy in nine steps and set your next product launch up for success.

Oatly went straight to their target audience at the exact moment customers were smelling the espresso and ready to buy. And you can bet this innovative go-to-market strategy was the key to their success. 

What is a go-to-market strategy? 

A go-to-market (GTM) strategy is a step-by-step plan for launching a new product or expanding an existing product into a new market. It sets your initiative up for success by answering the following questions: 

What product are you selling, and what unique problem does it solve?

Who is your ideal customer, and what pain points do they experience? 

Where will you sell your product? What markets do you want to pursue, and what does the demand and competition look like in those markets?

How will you reach your target customers and create demand? 

Launching a product is a big investment. And no matter how cutting-edge it is, the way you market and sell your product can make or break its success. Creating a GTM strategy helps you ensure you’re taking everything into account and avoid costly mistakes—like launching your product to the wrong audience or in a market that’s already saturated with similar offerings. 

When do you need a go-to-market (GTM) strategy? 

Whenever you bring a product or service to market, you need a go-to-market strategy. This includes: 

Launching a new product in an existing market —for example, an established clothing brand launching a line of beauty products. 

Bringing an existing product to a new market —for example, a local grocery chain expanding into a different state. 

Testing a new product in a new market —for example, a tech startup launching their first app. 

Even established companies need a go-to-market strategy when pioneering a new product or expanding into a new market. That’s because competition and market forces can quickly change. Even if you’ve had success with a similar product launch in the past, that same strategy might not work as well now. 

Go-to-market strategy vs. a marketing plan

A go-to-market strategy is specifically for launching a product or expanding to a new market. On the other hand, a marketing plan details how you’ll execute your overall marketing strategy. Instead of being launch specific, a marketing plan is a long-term approach to help you achieve your marketing objectives—like an annual roadmap or an overarching digital marketing strategy . Your GTM strategy draws from your long-term marketing plan, but it’s tailored to a specific launch. 

Marketing plan example: Sephora’s marketing plan leverages its loyalty program , which offers discounts and gifts to customers who spend a certain amount. This plan isn’t specific to a product launch, rather it’s a long-term approach to build customer loyalty over time. 

Go-to-market plan example: Microsoft executed a go-to-market strategy when launching its third generation Surface tablet . Their strategy was specific to the tablet’s launch and addressed a particular market problem—that existing tablets didn’t have the functionality of a full-fledged computer. 

Organize your go-to-market strategy with a project management platform

Every GTM strategy involves lots of moving pieces, whether you’re launching a new product or exploring new markets. The right project management tool can help you visualize your entire plan in one place—including the status, owners, and dependencies of each task. And as team members collaborate and execute your go-to-market strategy, you can see those updates in real-time. 

9 steps to crafting your go-to-market strategy

So you’ve created an exciting new product or want to expand into a new market. You know you need a go-to-market strategy to make sure your initiative succeeds—but what exactly does that look like? 

Step 1: Identify the problem

Every great product launch solves a specific problem. For example, Blackberry phones let business people answer emails on the go, Uber circumvents the cumbersome process of hailing or calling for a taxi, and Dawn detergent cuts through grease and makes washing dishes easier. Each of those products have a unique value proposition —a way they add value for customers by addressing their pain points. And most importantly—when those products launched, there was significant demand for solutions.

This concept is known as product-market fit —the degree to which a product satisfies a strong market demand. Understanding product-market fit is essential to gain a competitive advantage and make sure you’re launching the right product to the right customers. 

Step 2: Define the target audience

In order to have a successful GTM launch, you need to clearly understand your target audience. Start by asking yourself the following questions: 

Who is experiencing the problem that your product solves? 

What are the specific frustrations your product can alleviate? 

How much is your audience willing to pay for a solution? 

The two most common ways to define your target market are with an ideal customer profile (ICP) and buyer personas. These methods work together to narrow down your customer base and specify the types of people within your audience.  

Ideal customer profile (ICP)

This approach defines your perfect customer—in other words, someone who experiences the frustrations your product solves. They’re aware of the problem, already looking for a solution, and are able to buy your product. To create an ideal customer profile, consider the following characteristics:  

Industry or demographic: If you’re selling to businesses, identify the specific industry you’re targeting—like financial, legal, or SaaS verticals. If you’re selling to individuals, define specific demographics your ideal customer falls within. For example, a child-care service may target families with kids between the ages of 1 and 5. 

Geography : Where do your ideal customers live? For example, a tour company that offers English-only experiences may target customers in the US and Europe. 

Size: This one is specific to B2B companies. Identify the size of the business you’re targeting—for example, you may market a new co-working space to funded startups with less than 20 employees. 

Budget: To shape your pricing strategy, consider how much your customers have to spend on your product. This will also influence the market’s perception of your product. For example, if your company sells luxury watches, you probably don’t want to go below a certain price point. Alternatively, a legal consulting firm may find it worthwhile to only target businesses who can spend at least $5,000 per month. 

Decision-making factors : What factors influence whether a customer decides to purchase your product? For example, do they rely on referrals from trusted friends or colleagues? Is there a primary decision-maker, like the CEO or sales manager of a company?

Pain points: What specific frustrations does your ideal customer have? For example, a company selling a financial-planning app may target customers who lose time trying to track their budget with spreadsheets. 

Preferred media: How does your ideal customer absorb information? For example, do they use social media, read print magazines, or browse the web with ease? 

Buyer personas

Not all members of your target audience are the same—each person is a unique individual with their own problems, values, and goals. Creating buyer personas helps you differentiate between the different types of people within your target audience, so you can visualize who your customers are on a human level. 

You should create multiple customer personas to fully understand your target audience. Here’s an example of one buyer persona for a tour company launching a new in-destination app:

Persona: Memory-maker

Individual between the ages of 25-35

Travels alone or with a partner

Willing to pay a higher price for premium experiences

Values booking flexibility

Wants to book high-demand experiences in advance, but also choose some activities after they’ve arrived at a destination

Can use technology and apps with ease

Buyer personas may seem similar to an ideal customer profile, but they perform a different function. Personas help you visualize who your customers are by breaking your ICP down into more specific segments—each representing a type of person with their own distinct problems, values, and goals. 

Step 3: Research competition and demand

Now that you’ve identified your product’s value proposition and target audience, it’s time to do some research. Before you invest in bringing your product to market, you want to make sure that there’s enough demand and not too much competition. To guide your research, ask yourself the following questions: 

Who already offers a similar version of your product? 

What audiences and geographic regions do your competitors target? 

How does your product differ from the competition? What do you offer that others don’t? 

Is there demand for the product, or is the market oversaturated? 

To fully understand the market landscape, conduct a competitive analysis . This method uses research to identify your direct and indirect competitors and uncover their strengths and weaknesses in relation to your own.  

Step 4: Decide key messaging

The next step is to determine the key messages you’ll convey to potential customers. The best approach is to tailor individual messaging for each of your buyer personas, so you can address their unique values and frustrations. 

To map your messaging to each buyer persona, create a value matrix . A value matrix breaks down each persona, their pain points, the value your product brings, and a key message that conveys how your product can solve their unique problem. 

Let’s continue with the tour company example above. As a refresher, the company wants to launch a new in-destination app. One of their personas is a “memory-maker”—a customer who is willing to pay for premium experiences. Here’s what a value matrix might look like for this persona: 

Pain points

It’s hard to verify the quality of experiences when booking online.

If they book an expensive tour in advance, they can’t get their money back if plans change. 

Product value

An app with customer pictures and reviews gives a feel for the quality of tours. 

A flexible booking policy allows them to cancel if plans change. 

Key message

Book quality experiences with peace of mind. 

To complete your value matrix, continue this process for each buyer persona. 

Step 5: Map the buyer’s journey

Now that you’ve identified your buyer personas and messaging, you can map the buyer’s journey—the path customers take from realizing their problem, considering your product as a solution, and deciding to purchase. Mapping your buyer’s journey is a key component of content marketing, because it helps you surface the right type of content to potential customers at the right time. 

Most often, the buyer’s journey is visualized as a funnel broken into three sections: 

Top of funnel: Customers know the problem they want to solve and research solutions. They may not be aware that your product exists yet. During this phase, you want to grab the customer's attention so they consider your product. 

Middle of funnel: Customers weigh your product against other available options. Your goal during this phase is to convince potential buyers that your product is the best option. 

Bottom of funnel: Customers decide whether to purchase your product. Your goal for this phase is to convince them to commit. 

Step 6: Pick marketing channels

Marketing channels are the different types of content you use to create demand for your product and move potential customers down the marketing funnel. For example, social media, paid search ads, blogs, SEO content, and emails are different marketing channels. The marketing channels you choose depend on two things: your target audience, and where your potential customers are along their buyer’s journey. 

Align marketing channels to your ideal audience. You want to make sure the marketing channels you choose align with the way your target audience consumes content. For example, if your ideal customer uses YouTube but not Instagram or Facebook, you may want to focus on YouTube ads rather than paid social posts. 

Use different channels for different phases of the buyer’s journey. Depending on where customers are in the marketing funnel, different types of marketing content can help move them to the next phase. For example, search engine optimization (SEO) content can direct top-of-funnel customers to your website who haven’t heard of your product before. Case studies and webinars may be most applicable for middle-of-funnel customers as they consider your product. And at the bottom of the funnel, strategies like free trial options can help convince potential customers to commit. 

Step 7: Create a sales plan

The goal of your GTM strategy is to sell your product, so it’s essential to decide how you’ll sell to your target audience and turn prospective customers into buyers. That’s where your sales strategy comes in. 

We’ve outlined the four most common sales strategies below. As needed, you can combine these strategies to fit your specific product and business model. 

Self-service model : Customers purchase your product on their own. This is a common sales process for e-commerce, in which customers can find and buy products online. While this option doesn’t require a dedicated sales team, you need to invest in marketing to drive traffic to your website. 

Inside sales model: Your sales team nurtures prospective customers to convince them to purchase your product. This is a good option for products with a medium price point that are a bit more complex, like design software for teams. 

Field sales model : Salespeople focus on closing big enterprise deals. This option requires more sales investment and a longer sales cycle, but there’s a big payoff. For example, you might use a field sales model to sell HR management software to large companies. 

Channel model : An external partner sells your product for you. While this option gives you less say in how you market your product, it’s the cheapest option and can work well if you partner with a company that sells similar products. For example, if you’re selling a new type of cereal, you could partner with a grocery chain. 

Step 8: Set concrete goals

Every great go-to-market strategy starts with clear objectives. Goals give you specific targets to aim for, a clear timeline, and a way to measure progress. Without clearly defined goals, it’s hard to tell if your strategy is working. 

Here are a few different goal-setting frameworks you can use to set measurable objectives. Depending on your business needs, you can combine these strategies or use them on their own: 

SMART goals : This acronym helps you set goals that are specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, and time-bound. For example, you could set the following SMART goal when launching a new app: “In six months, generate 1M total app downloads and 50K new user accounts.”

Key performance indicators (KPIs) : KPIs are quantitative metrics that help you track progress toward business objectives. For example, you could track total purchases and ad click-throughs when executing a go-to-market strategy for your new product. Keep in mind that you can use the SMART goal framework when crafting KPIs—for example, “Within three months, generate 100K total conversions and 1M ad click-throughs.”

Objectives and key results (OKRs) : This strategy pairs the objectives you want to achieve with the key results you’ll use to measure progress. It follows this format: “I will [objective] as measured by [key result].” For example, “The marketing team will increase awareness of a new product, as measured by the following key results: Drive 1M web visitors to the product page, increase social media engagement by 50%, and generate 50K new customers through email signups.” 

Step 9: Create clear processes

Creating a great go-to-market strategy is one thing, and executing it is another. That’s why creating clear processes is essential when bringing a product to market—because regardless of how well-crafted your strategy is, it only succeeds when you communicate and execute your strategy with your team. For example, you should consider the following when crafting your GTM strategy: 

How you’ll share your strategy and collaborate with team members. Don’t let your strategy gather dust in a drawer—instead, house the plans and projects that comprise your strategy in one easily accessible place. A robust work management tool can help you accomplish this. Asana lets you coordinate plans, projects, and processes in one central location. That way, team members can work and collaborate in the same space where your GTM strategy lives.

How you’ll course-correct and track goals . In order for goals to be effective, they need to be connected to your day-to-day work. That means instead of setting and forgetting goals for your GTM strategy, make a plan to regularly check in and track your progress—for example, at the end of each week or month. Share these updates with project stakeholders in a centralized project management tool. That way, everyone is on the same page. 

How you can standardize processes with templates . Every go-to-market strategy contains lots of components and moving pieces. But while it’s important to evaluate your strategy for each new product launch, that doesn’t mean you have to reinvent the wheel. To avoid duplicate work, create process documentation and templates to standardize your go-to-market process. For example, you could create templates outlining the steps to determine your target audience, clarify your messaging, and so on—plus an overarching template to guide how you craft your entire GTM strategy. When choosing a project management tool for your team, pick one that lets you create and share templates for processes your team uses on a regular basis. 

Ready, set, strategize

Bringing a product to market is a big investment. But you can set your next launch up for success with a solid framework to determine your audience and messaging, concrete goals, and clear processes to carry out your strategy. With these nine steps, crafting a great go-to-market strategy isn’t so daunting after all. 

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What Is a Go-To-Market Strategy? And How to Create One

Learn how creating a go-to-market strategy can prepare you for your product launch.

A go-to-market (GTM) strategy is a comprehensive plan businesses use to bring a new product or service to market. Designed to mitigate the risk inherent in the introduction of a new product, a typical GTM strategy includes target market profiles, a marketing plan, and a concrete sales and distribution strategy. 

Creating a go-to-market strategy is as important for established companies as it is for brand new entrepreneurial endeavors. In this article, you will learn more about the purpose of GTM strategies, encounter examples of them in action, and find out how to create one yourself. 

Go-to-market strategy: purpose 

Businesses prepare GTM strategies to minimize risk and optimize potential success when introducing a new product to market.

There are many risks when entering a new marketplace or launching a new product. The late advertising executive and consultant Jack Trout, for instance, once famously noted that American families have 85 percent of their needs covered by the same 150 items they purchase over and over again [ 1 ]. Whether that statistic is true or not doesn’t matter as much as the truth it highlights: entering the average consumer’s rotation of products is challenging and competition is high.

Go-to-market strategies anticipate the challenges of this competitive space by thoroughly identifying the target market, articulating the product’s value proposition, crafting a marketing plan, and developing a strategy for its sales and distribution channels. Some of the most common benefits of compiling an effective GTM strategy include: 

Gaining a comprehensive understanding of the marketplace, the target market, and the proposed product’s place in it.

Keeping marketing costs down by identifying promotional channels with the highest return on investment (ROI).  

Troubleshooting product positioning and messaging before going to market.

Concretely defining the logistics of distribution and sales channels before launch to ensure maximum market impact.

Go-to-market strategy: benefits

In addition to helping you launch a product successfully, compiling an effective GTM strategy can benefit your business in several ways, including: 

Clarifies the business mission 

Creating any sort of business strategy, including a GTM strategy, is a great opportunity to review your organization’s mission and make sure your product efforts are in alignment. Why does this organization exist? What will it achieve for its employees and customers? What values drive this mission? How do new products support this mission? 

Understanding the market 

Compiling a GTM strategy involves gaining a comprehensive understanding of the marketplace, the target market , your competitors , and the proposed product’s place in it. With more insight into customers and the market conditions, your organization will have more tools to thrive in all areas of business, from product launches to introducing a new brand identity to the world.    

Reducing costs 

With a solid GTM strategy, you can keep marketing costs down by identifying promotional channels with the highest return on investment (ROI) and developing marketing messaging and content that will resonate with your target market.  

Reducing time to market

GTM strategies also help you launch products more quickly in the following ways: 

Prioritizing tasks that are essential for a product to enter the market

Troubleshooting product positioning and messaging before going to market 

Concretely defining the logistics of distribution and sales channels before launch to ensure maximum market impact

Depending on the kind of product you are launching, you might consider the minimum viable product (MVP) approach: making sure the product has enough features to attract early adopters, validating the product, and learning what product updates or improvements could improve customer experience.

Building more brand awareness

With the launch and promotion of a new product, you have an opportunity to bring more attention to your brand as a whole, and even attract new niche markets , thereby expanding your customer base. 

Increasing growth potential 

Overall, a GTM strategy, when skillfully executed, can increase your organization’s growth potential. With access to new niche markets, organized market data, and an efficient process for launching products, you can seize growth opportunities more easily than without a GTM strategy.  

GTM vs. marketing strategy vs. marketing plan 

Although they have similarities, a go-to-market strategy, marketing strategy, and marketing plan are not the same thing. 

A marketing strategy is a long-term strategy (often many years in the future) that outlines a business’s overall marketing objectives.

A marketing plan , meanwhile, is an action plan outlining the concrete steps required to undertake a marketing campaign.

A go-to-market strategy , finally, is a strategic outline of the concrete steps and considerations required to bring a new product to the marketplace. 

While a GTM can include a marketing plan and be directed by a marketing strategy, neither a marketing plan nor a marketing strategy includes a concrete GTM strategy. 

How to create a go-to-market strategy

A go-to-market strategy compiles several other strategies and marketing methods to ensure a product enters the market with the best possible chance of success.  

To help you better understand what goes into compiling a GTM, the following guide includes key elements you should develop throughout the process. 

1. Identify your target market.

The customer is the centerpiece of any marketing strategy. 

As a result, whether you are bringing a new product to market or refreshing an existing one, it is imperative that you first research and identify the target market that will be most interested in purchasing it. 

A target market is a group of individuals who have a shared set of features, such as demographic or psychographic similarities. The process of identifying the shared similarities between groups is called segmentation and involves researching the kinds of individuals or organizations that would be most likely to purchase your product. 

As you identify your target market, answer these questions: 

Is your product being sold to everyday consumers (B2C) or to other businesses (B2B) ? 

Will you use demographic, psychographic, or other types of segmentation to define your target market?

What are the pain points of your target market? What problem are you solving with your product?

2. Clarify your value proposition.

A product’s value proposition is the benefit it provides consumers and the problems it solves. In other words, your product’s value proposition articulates why the target market should purchase the product. 

As you are preparing your go-to-market strategy, you should have a clear understanding of the value proposition that your product provides in order to direct your marketing efforts.

The value proposition that you identify should be as much about the target market you are selling to as the product itself. For example, while some products position themselves as a cheaper alternative to another product, others position themselves as the solution to a particular problem that currently has no market solution. 

The exact value proposition that your product or service will provide is dependent on what it is and who its target market is. To define your product's value proposition, answer the following:

What pain points does your product remedy?

How does your product stand out from your competitors?

What unique features or experience does your product or service provide potential customers?

3. Define your pricing strategy. 

Price is an important factor for any product. You don’t want to sell a product for too much or too little. If you do,  you’ll risk either not moving enough product or eating too much into your profit margin. 

Now that you have an understanding of your target market and the value that your product offers,  you have a better understanding of what price a consumer might be willing to pay for your product. 

As you consider your pricing strategy, some questions you might ask yourself include:  

How much does it cost to manufacture your product or service? 

What price do you need to meet in order to make a profit?

How much do your competitors charge for a similar product or service? 

What is your target marketing willing to pay for your product? 

Will you use a subscription or transactional model? 

A good price is one that fits your business objectives, matches your customer profile, and makes you competitive in the marketplace. 

4. Craft your promotion strategy.

Your promotion strategy is your action plan to promote your product to your target customers. Here, you should craft a marketing plan that outlines the exact steps you will take to reach your customer base. 

The techniques you use to promote your product will depend entirely on the product or service you are selling. For instance, while one business might use a sales team to pitch their product to other businesses, another might instead focus on social media marketing to raise brand awareness and draw in potential customers organically. 

As you craft your promotion strategy, some questions to consider include: 

What is the best channel to reach your target audience? Online or offline?

Does your customer respond better to outbound marketing methods, such as phone calls or radio advertisements, or inbound marketing efforts like SEO? 

Where does your target audience spend most of their time? What marketing channels penetrate that space?  

What marketing methods can you realistically implement now considering your current budget? 

5. Choose your sales and distribution channels.

Sales channels are where consumers can purchase your product, while distribution channels are the ways that your product actually gets to your customer.   

Often, sales channels and distribution channels can be the same, such as when a consumer buys directly from a manufacturer. In other instances, distribution channels can be much more complex, such as when a producer sells to a wholesaler, who in turn sells to a retailer who then finally sells their product to a consumer. 

Whether you decide to sell your product in-person or online, directly to a consumer or to a wholesaler, or some other variation, depends on the unique needs of your product. Whatever you pick, the buyer’s journey should be as seamless as possible to reduce friction and increase sales. 

Some points to consider when choosing sales and distribution channels include: 

What is the nature of your product and does it have any specific sales and distribution requirements? 

What are the manufacturing needs of your product and how does that impact its sale and distribution? 

Where does your target market shop or buy products?

How can you make the sale of your product as seamless as possible? 

6. Set metrics and monitor your performance.

The success of your go-to-market strategy is completely dependent on the goals that you set. In setting these goals, you are also identifying the metrics you will use to measure your success. 

As your GTM strategy goes from idea to reality, it is important to keep track of your metrics and to make any necessary adjustments as you go along. For example, if it turns out that you are paying more to acquire customers than they are paying for your product, then you will need to adjust your strategy to reach a better customer acquisition cost. 

Some common metrics for measuring the success of a go-to-market strategy include: 

Customer acquisition cost (CAC)

Cost per dollar of sales expense

Closing/ conversion rate

Length of the sales cycle

Go-to-market success story: Apple’s iMac G3

Businesses can create go-to-market strategies for virtually any product launch, whether it is a completely new product, a new iteration of an old one, or simply a rebranding of one that has already been on the market. Whatever the purpose, a business’s GTM strategy can make or break a product launch.

One example of a successful GTM strategy is Apple’s 1998 launch of the iMac G3, which effectively saved the company from financial ruin. Apple targeted three primary consumers: first-time computer buyers, loyal Apple users, and PC owners (which were 85 percent of the market) [ 2 ].  In order to reach their goals, Apple needed to convey that the company was now stable, that their product offered an experience unlike their competitors, and to create excitement around the product launch. 

Their strategy began with a presentation revealing the product, in which then interim-CEO Steve Jobs took time at the start to emphasize that leadership was strong, finances were stabilizing, and employees were hard at work [ 3 ]. In doing so, Jobs began the company’s strategy of changing the public perception of Apple as a failing company.

Later, Jobs described the unique value that the iMac G3 could bring consumers by citing its differences from competitors. Unlike other devices, which were slow, had bad displays, and often required a lengthy process to connect online, Jobs noted that the iMac had a much faster 3G chip, possessed a 15-inch display, and had a built-in internet port for a fast connection online.

Afterward, he revealed the physical iMac G3 body itself, which had a unique egg-shaped design, a transparent case that could become illuminated, and featured an eye-catching blue called “Bondi blue.” The design was a stark contrast to the grey-boxes that consumers had been used to and Job’s presentation emphasized that fact. 

“This is incredible compared to anything else out there. It looks like it’s from another planet – and a good planet. A planet with better designers,” Jobs joked to the audience of journalists, who responded with a chorus of laughter [ 4 ]. 

The presentation was a success and set off a $100 million dollar marketing blitz that reinforced Jobs’ talking points. While large inflatable Macs went up over select stores so customers knew where to buy them, television commercials were rolled out during prime-time shows to attract consumers who weren’t already techies. To reinforce the point that this was a new kind of computer, billboards and print ads read, “Chic. Not geek. [ 2 ]”

The strategy was a huge success and ultimately saved the company from imminent failure. Apple’s success hinged on a go-to-market strategy that thoroughly understood its target market, clearly articulated its computer’s value proposition, featured a detailed marketing plan, and highlighted where consumers could purchase products.

Get market-ready 

A great go-to-market strategy begins with insightful research into your customers’ needs. As you prepare to get your product market-ready, you might consider taking a flexible online course to help you meet your own educational needs.  

The University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign’s Innovation: From Creativity to Entrepreneurship specialization demonstrates how course takers can make innovative value propositions and discover new market positions to create sustained competitive advantage.

Michigan State University’s How to Start Your Own Business specialization, meanwhile, provides a comprehensive guide on the mindset, ideation, planning, action, and strategy required to create your own business. 

Article sources

Harvard Business Review. “ Why Most Product Launches Fail , https://hbr.org/2011/04/why-most-product-launches-fail.” Accessed July 29, 2022. 

MBA Knowledge Base. “ Case Study: Apple iMac Ad Campaign , https://www.mbaknol.com/marketing-management/case-study-apple-imac-ad-campaign/.” Accessed July 29, 2022. 

Apple Insider. “ How Apple went from bust to five million colorful iMacs sold , https://appleinsider.com/articles/20/04/19/how-apple-went-from-bust-to-five-million-colorful-imacs-sold.” Accessed July 29, 2022. 

YouTube [pi1.com]. “ Steve Jobs introduces the iMac -1998 , https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BiWd8ujtK5k.” Accessed July 29, 2022. 

Keep reading

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Go-To-Market PowerPoint Template

The Go-To Market PowerPoint Template encapsulates models and diagrams for marketing strategies. These slides will assist organizations to demonstrate their customer target approach and business plans. Go-To-Market involves the use of available resources to create a value proposition and gain competitive advantage. All the diagrams and marketing strategy models will help present action plans to reach target customers. These models aid marketing professionals to build assets for customers. GTM strategy also describes responsibilities of all stakeholders in the sales process. The Go To Market Strategy Template for PowerPoint will assist in choosing and demonstrating market plans.

Go-To Market PowerPoint template is an essential strategic planning toolkit for all sales & marketing presentations. There are 30 slides that will help companies to discuss new strategies for launch of services and products.

These Go-To-Market diagrams include:

• Product Definition – 6 steps chevron process cycle for product approach
• Go-To-Market Strategy – 3 steps process diagram to describe vendor activities
• Sales & Marketing Effort – Graph chart displaying mindshare and mindshare
• Go-To-Market Strategy – Triangular 3 steps diagram of market, products, and customer relation
• Market Maturity – 5 column maturity model graph
• Market Problem Identification – 4 steps circular segments with clipart icons
• Strategic Objectives – 4 Level agenda style for objectives, goals, and sales strategies
• Market Segmentation – Behavioral, Demographic, Geographic, and Psychographic segments
• Beta/Market Segment – 4 Steps connecting processes
• Go-To-Market Plan and Strategy – Two slides of 4 segments to display relevant information
• GTM Increase Direct Selling Time – Core selling and Non-core selling comparison
• Business Case – Case study, solutions, challenges, and project planning
• Sales and Support – 4 Sections with text placeholders and clipart icon
• Service Support – Curved sequence diagram to present customer support channels
• Go-To-Market SWOT – SWOT analysis diagram
• Go-To-Market Framework – strategy to tactical data analysis sheet
• Internal Market – Folding circular diagram template
• Go-To-Market Plan | Partnering – Business components related to partnering
• Product Roadmap – 5 Steps horizontal timeline template
• Partner Process – Table and hierarchical diagram slides of technical and business criteria
• Product Customers and Channels – Circular diagram with icons representing each term
• 4 Steps Staged Approach – Target market, brand, customer profiling, services.

This Go-to-Market presentation template contains blue and white colors in the PowerPoint background. Users can easily alter color themes from PowerPoint’s Design menu bar (Theme Colors). Similarly, these marketing diagram templates will assist companies to explain partnering strategies such as mergers.

With this Go To Market template you can prepare presentations on Go-to-Market Strategy. Impress your audience and capture their attention from beginning to end using this professional Go To Market Strategy Template for PowerPoint. Go To Market Strategy is a crucial concept in the world of business since this serves as the blueprint to guide companies in delivering effectively and efficiently their product or service to the end consumers.

Also, we recommend you to read our step-by-step guide on how to make a PowerPoint presentation .

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Global Marketing Strategy: Step-by-Step Guide with Examples

What is a global marketing strategy, how does global marketing differ from international marketing, global vs international marketing: which one to choose, the 4 ps of global marketing, 7 steps to a successful global marketing strategy, 1. conduct market research, 2. identify your target audience, 3. create a market entry strategy, 4. tailor your marketing mix, 5. develop a budget plan, 6. localize your brand, 7. monitor & adapt: continuous improvement, challenges in implementing a global marketing strategy, benefits of having a global marketing strategy, measuring success of your global marketing strategy, 1. define key performance indicators (kpis), 2. utilize analytics tools, 3. conduct a/b testing and optimization, 3 global marketing strategy examples, apple: a global powerhouse built on differentiation and customer focus, red bull: building a community with disruptive brand storytelling, booking.com: crushing the travel booking game with affiliates, ads, and reviews, explore localization as a part of your global marketing strategy, implement your global marketing strategy with ai-powered localization.

The internet has revolutionized global marketing, making it easier for businesses of all sizes to reach customers worldwide. But simply having online tools isn’t enough. To thrive in this competitive landscape, you need a strategic roadmap – a global marketing strategy .

Here’s why it matters: Studies show 94% of marketers believe personalized experiences drive sales, yet only 35% deliver them. This gap highlights the immense potential in international markets.

This article equips you with a step-by-step guide to crafting a winning global marketing strategy tailored to your target audience.

Let’s dive right in!

A global marketing strategy (GMS) is your blueprint for conquering international markets. It’s a roadmap outlining how you’ll promote and sell your products or services across the globe.

What goes into a GMS?

• Understanding Your Audience:  This involves delving into the cultural nuances, economic realities, and regulations of your target markets.
• Striking the Balance:  Your GMS will balance the need for  localization  (adapting to local preferences) with  standardization  (maintaining brand consistency). This ensures your message resonates with local audiences while upholding your brand identity worldwide.

While “ global marketing ” and “ international marketing ” are often used interchangeably, they represent two distinct approaches.

Global Marketing: Think of it as a standardized approach. You create a single marketing strategy for a worldwide market, offering consistent products and a unified brand image. Think Nike’s iconic swoosh logo and focus on athletic performance – that’s global marketing in action.

International Marketing: Here, you adapt to conquer local markets. Companies establish local subsidiaries and tailor products, marketing, and branding to each region’s needs and preferences. Netflix exemplifies this strategy – they offer local content, interfaces, and partnerships to resonate with audiences globally.

The best approach depends on your product, brand, and target markets. Global marketing is ideal for standardized products with universal appeal. International marketing is better suited for products requiring adaptation or markets with strong cultural preferences.

Also referred to as the marketing mix, the 4 Ps of marketing – Product , Price , Place , and Promotion – are the building blocks of any successful marketing strategy, and global marketing is no exception.

Before we discuss how to create a winning strategy, let’s explore each of these foundational aspects:

• Product: The product is your actual offering to your customers. A global business strategy involves adapting or developing products to suit local needs and regulations. This includes adjusting features, packaging, or labeling to meet regional standards and cater to cultural preferences.
• Price: Your product’s pricing strategy should align with local purchasing power, competition, and economic factors. Remember, price reflects not just cost but also your product’s perceived value.
• Place: The third element in the marketing mix is “place,” which includes the distribution channels or locations where your products are sold. This, in turn, will decide your inventory management, logistics, and market reach. The key to maximizing sales is identifying the most efficient and cost-effective methods for getting your products to new customers across borders.
• Promotion: The fourth P is how you convert your target audience into buyers. Localization is key for effective promotion. Tailor your marketing messages and campaigns to resonate with local audiences and respect cultural sensitivities.

Now that you have a fair idea about the marketing mix, here’s how you can make them work for your international business:

Analyze global market trends, economic indicators, and industry reports to pinpoint your ideal markets. This includes regions with high growth potential and a suitable fit for selling your product or service.

Another key component is to identify your competitors and analyze their offerings. Gathering information about competitors’ target markets, customer preferences, reputation, and marketing tactics can give you a fair idea about your marketing efforts.

When expanding into new regions, understanding the local community is also essential. Utilize resources such as demographic data, local brands, and community surveys to gain insights into population demographics, trends, and consumer preferences.

This knowledge helps you identify potential customers and assess whether competitors are currently meeting their needs in the area.

Through thorough market research, you can pinpoint your ideal audience – the specific group you want to transform into loyal customers.

To know your ideal customers:

• Determine who you can help with your offer (age, gender, condition, etc.)
• Don’t forget the people who influence them (parents, coaches, etc.)

Once you identify your potential customers, here’s how you can target them better:

• Leverage multiple channels to reach your audience.
• Show them how your product or service solves their pain points.
• Highlight how you can serve them better than competitors.

Once done, segment your target audience – within each potential market, identify distinct customer segments with specific needs and preferences. A good way is to conduct surveys, focus groups, or partner with local market research firms to gain deeper insights.

You should also consider the cultural context, buying behaviors, media consumption habits, and communication styles of your target audience. This will help decide your marketing message and channel selection.

Once you’ve researched who you’re selling to, the next step is to plan how to get your product or service to them.

Consider specific regulations, competition, and market dynamics to develop a plan for entering new international markets. This means:

• Evaluating various market entry modes (e.g., exporting, licensing, joint ventures, wholly-owned subsidiaries) based on your business objectives, resources, and risk tolerance.
• Identifying key players, their strengths, weaknesses, and market positioning.
• Assessing potential barriers to entry, such as tariffs, trade agreements, distribution challenges, or cultural differences.

After deciding on the above, it’s time to develop a phased approach for market entry, starting with low-risk strategies and gradually increasing investment.

• Adapt your Product, Price, Place, and Promotion strategies for each target market.
• Modify your offering (e.g., features, packaging) to meet local needs, regulations, etc.
• Set prices that align with local purchasing power, buying behavior, and competitor landscape.
• Develop culturally relevant marketing materials and messaging for each audience through localization. Localized communications are key to engaging global audiences, as more than 76% of people prefer to buy products in their own language, and 40% will  never  buy from websites in other languages. { CSA Research }

Based on your market research and chosen entry mode, allocate your resources effectively across different markets.

Consider factors like market size, potential return on investment, localization, and local marketing costs. It is good to prioritize markets based on their growth potential and alignment with your overall business objectives.

Traditionally, entering a market like Japan would require hiring expensive human translators for accurate and culturally sensitive localization. With AI localization , you can leverage machine translation and human refinement to achieve similar results at a fraction of the cost. AI translation tools, like Transifex, can significantly lower localization costs compared to traditional human translation services. This frees up resources that can be allocated towards other initiatives.

Lastly, you should also build contingency funds to account for unforeseen challenges or fluctuations in foreign exchange rates, tariffs, or other external factors.

Successful global marketing requires a balance between standardization and localization. While a consistent brand identity is important, what resonates in one market might not work in another. Localization bridges this gap, ensuring your message connects with audiences worldwide.

Here’s how localization empowers your global marketing strategy:

Imagine trying to sell a product with a culturally insensitive marketing message. Not only would it fail to resonate with your target audience, it could potentially offend them. Localization helps you avoid these pitfalls and unlock the true potential of your global marketing strategy.

Transifex: Your All-in-One Localization Hub

Transifex helps you optimize and streamline the entire localization process. Here’s what it offers:

• Accurate & Contextual Translations:  Combines AI technology with human refinement, preserving your brand voice while ensuring contextually relevant messaging.
• Rapid Market Adaptation : Speed is of the essence in global business. Transifex empowers your brand to move quickly, adapting your content to new cultural landscapes with agility and precision.
• SEO Optimization:  Optimizes your website content for multiple languages , reaching a wider global audience through search engines.
• Agile Content Updates : Transifex keeps you a step ahead with real-time updates and OTA capabilities, ensuring your global audience always has access to the latest information and offerings. This agility enhances customer experience and fosters brand loyalty across all markets.
• Scalability for Growth:  Efficiently handles large content volumes, allowing you to adapt your marketing materials as you expand into new markets.

By leveraging Transifex, you can achieve human-quality translations at scale, saving time and resources compared to traditional localization methods. It preserves your brand’s unique voice while optimizing the content for SEO and any UI design variation, and accelerating your time-to-market.

Want to try Transifex for your next localization campaign? Sign up now to try out the tools and all AI features completely for free.

To improve your global campaign, continuously monitor its performance using website analytics, social media insights, and market research tools. Also, keep an eye on local market conditions such as consumer behavior, trends, and competitors to make timely adjustments to your strategy.

Crafting a brilliant marketing strategy is only the beginning. Executing it flawlessly on a global scale poses a unique set of challenges, including:

Cultural Nuances:  Messages and visuals that resonate in one culture might not work in another. Understanding subtle cultural differences in humor, symbolism, and even color preferences is crucial to avoid unintentionally offensive or ineffective campaigns.

Localization vs. Standardization:  There’s a constant tension between maintaining brand consistency and adapting to local preferences. Finding the right balance is key – an overly standardized campaign might appear bland, while excessive localization can dilute the brand identity.

Language Barriers: Effective communication is paramount in marketing. Accurately translating marketing materials and crafting culturally relevant messaging requires expertise in both language and the target market’s nuances.

Logistical Issues: Coordinating marketing efforts across different time zones, languages, and teams can be a logistical nightmare. Ensuring clear communication, consistent brand messaging, and efficient resource allocation is essential for success.

Developing Metrics: Measuring the return on investment (ROI) for a global marketing campaign can quickly become confusing. That’s why developing a data-driven approach from the very start is necessary to accurately assess performance.

Despite these challenges, the rewards of a successful global marketing strategy can be immense. By carefully navigating these complexities and adapting your approach to each market, you can tap into potential markets and reach new customers.

Implementing a well-crafted global marketing strategy can provide numerous benefits for your business, such as:

• Enhanced Brand Awareness: Consistent messaging and branding across markets and culturally relevant marketing campaigns help reinforce brand identity. This allows you to build global brand recognition and establish a powerful presence in international markets.
• Tapping into New Markets: Many regions, such as developing economies, offer immense growth potential due to factors such as rising disposable incomes, urbanization, and a growing middle class. A well-executed global marketing strategy positions your business to seize these opportunities and unlock new scopes for growth.
• Gaining Competitive Advantage: In today’s highly competitive market, brands must differentiate themselves from competitors to capture consumer attention and loyalty. And this is exactly what a strategic marketing approach can do for you.
• Increased Market Share: A tailored global marketing strategy helps you penetrate markets and resonate with diverse consumer segments. This, in turn, allows you to build brand loyalty, boost sales, and dominate the market.

You should consistently analyze essential business metrics for effective decision-making and strategy improvement in foreign markets.

Here’s how:

To measure the effectiveness of your marketing strategy, it’s important to define key performance indicators (KPIs) aligned with your overall goals.

These KPIs should be specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound (SMART). Some common KPIs for global marketing campaigns include:

• Website traffic and engagement metrics (e.g., unique visitors, bounce rate, time on site)
• Lead generation and conversion rates
• Sales and revenue figures
• Customer acquisition costs
• Return on investment (ROI)
• Social media engagement and reach
• Brand awareness and sentiment metrics

A 2023 B2B global marketing survey revealed that conversion rates are the top metric 73% of marketers use to measure the success of their content marketing efforts.

Email engagement and website traffic followed closely, with 71% of respondents citing them as important key performance indicators (KPIs) for B2B content marketing.

Interestingly, the same study found that brand awareness and lead generation were the primary objectives achieved through content marketing by B2B marketers worldwide.

Website analytics tools and marketing automation platforms can help you track and analyze campaign performance across different channels and markets.

For instance, Google Analytics offers robust data visualization and reporting capabilities, allowing you to drill down into specific markets, channels, and audience segments.

By integrating these tools, you can visualize your global campaigns’ performance in different regions and make data-driven decisions to allocate resources more effectively.

Once you have the required data, continuously refine your strategies through A/B testing and optimization based on these insights.

A/B testing, also known as split testing, allows you to test different variations of your marketing campaigns and identify the most successful tactics. For instance, you can conduct A/B tests on elements such as messaging, visuals, landing pages, ad copy, and targeting strategies.

Additionally, you can leverage artificial intelligence capabilities to automate the optimization process. AI can analyze vast amounts of data, identify patterns, and provide recommendations for improving campaign performance.

Curious about the hallmarks of a successful global company? Let’s explore some winning global marketing strategies in action with the following three brands:

With a presence in over 150 countries and a staggering revenue of $383.29 billion in 2023, Apple’s success hinges on a brilliant global marketing strategy such as:

• Differentiating from Competitors: Apple doesn’t chase trends; it sets them. The focus on innovation allows them to create products that stand out. This differentiation strategy has fostered a strong brand identity and a loyal customer base worldwide.
• Focusing on Customer: Apple understands that cutting-edge tech isn’t enough. They craft compelling narratives that showcase how iPhones empower creativity or iPads revolutionize learning, placing the customer’s needs at the center of the story.
• Strategic Adaptation: Apple recognizes the power of localization. While maintaining a consistent brand image with core values like minimalism, they tailor marketing messages to resonate with local preferences.

Over the years, Apple has cultivated a brand synonymous with quality, innovation, and premium craftsmanship. This reputation attracts customers from all around the globe. By flawlessly executing this multifaceted marketing strategy, they ensure they’ll continue to resonate with consumers as technology evolves.

If you thought Red Bull was a USA-based energy drink, you are not alone. The Austrian company is often perceived as a local American brand with the most US market share due to its clever global marketing strategies.

Their iconic slogan and their tagline, “Red Bull Gives You Wings” might be catchy – but the true marketing genius lies in creating a lifestyle association and owning the space of extreme sports and adventure.

The company leverages strategic sponsorships, event marketing, inspiring content, and innovative media channels. This helped solidify their position as a leader in the energy drinks market and garnered loyalty from consumers worldwide.

The company’s brand image is built around the concept of athleisure and adrenaline. Red Bull associated itself with these experiences by hosting extreme sports events worldwide and promoting an active lifestyle.

This differentiated the brand from its competitors and helped create consistent messaging that resonated with a thrill-seeking audience worldwide.

Red Bull has maintained the same packaging for the past 32 years, including its iconic logo. So, whether the two bulls flash in a racing car or are advertised on a billboard, you know it is Red Bull.

Booking.com isn’t just an online travel agency; it’s a global leader that has revolutionized how people book accommodations. With over 2.7 million properties listed in more than 220 countries and 40 languages, their success story is based on three pillars:

• Global Partnerships: Booking.com leverages a vast affiliate network of travel bloggers, airlines, and other online travel agencies (OTAs). These partners promote Booking.com on their platforms, earning commissions for each referred booking. This network expands Booking.com’s reach exponentially, driving traffic and bookings at minimal upfront cost.
• Google Ads: Booking.com has capitalized on the power of Google Ads to capture user intent at the crucial moment – when they’re actively searching for travel options. By strategically bidding on relevant keywords like “hotel booking” or “vacation rentals,” Booking.com ensures its ads appear at the top of search results, driving high-quality traffic to its website.
• Customer Reviews: Booking.com understands the importance of trust and social proof in the travel industry. Their platform allows both guests and property owners to leave reviews, providing transparency to potential guests. Genuine customer reviews on property listings enhance Booking.com’s credibility and increase booking confidence.

Global giants and industry leaders like Red Bull, Booking, Hubspot and so many others dominate the global marketplace by prioritizing localization as a core part of their marketing strategy.

Effective localization requires:

• A deep understanding of each market’s linguistic, cultural, and social nuances
•  Willingness to adapt your marketing strategies accordingly
• Choosing the right localization partner and the best tools for your needs

This may involve translating content into multiple languages, adjusting visuals and design elements as well as tailoring messaging and tone to cater to local preferences.

Skipping localization can lead to misunderstandings, missed opportunities, and even offend potential customers. It hinders your global growth. On the other hand, investing in localization shows respect for diverse cultures, builds trust, and fosters long-term relationships with your global audience.

Optimizing Localization for Success:

Manually handling localization can be time-consuming and error-prone. Consider using a reliable AI-powered localization hub, like Transifex, and leverage:

• Advanced Translation Tools and Integrations: Translate and update your content automatically
• Global Network of Linguists: Access a pool of experienced professionals for 100+ languages.
• Streamlined Workflow: Simplify the entire localization process for maximum efficiency and impact.

By prioritizing localization and leveraging the right tools, you can unlock the full potential of global markets.

Take the first step towards globalizing your brand by signing up with Transifex – the leading localization software that empowers you to engage the world and lifts you over language barriers.

To try out all exclusive features at no additional cost, Sign up for a 15-day free trial now .

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