Every company has to figure ways and means with which its product will be introduced into the market. Defining the market is usually the most critical decision to make before taking your product to the market. It helps you define the size of the market, its location, preferences, purchasing power and the barriers to market entry. So experts have been constantly working on a go to market strategy.
No product or service is fit for every market. You need to understand your target market its demographics, ethnographic, attitudes, geography, buyer personas and their online/offline behaviors.
What Is Go to Market Strategy?
A go to market strategy translates into the steps through which you plan your production, sales, pricing, distribution and brand development. Your go to market strategy will hugely influence the reception and success or failure of your product.
The strategy simply provides a plan that clarifies how you’ll reach your target market based on consumer insights and competitive analysis. Go to market strategy can be applied to new products and services as well as existing products. The strategy enables you to decide when and how to enter the market. But you will do this in a way that will be least expensive to deliver the highest influence possible.
Who Uses the Go-to-Market Strategy
The end goal of go to market strategy is to reach the customer with your product or service at the least possible cost to yourself. This means you need to have an in-depth understanding of your target customer. The truth is that the purpose of business is to create a customer. The force behind this aspect is to develop a customer intelligence policy. You have to create a cost-effective, meaningful and efficient data analytics. You will also have to collect, critical data through focus groups, one-on-one interviews, and web surveys.
To be able to make the most of your go to market strategy there are a number of questions you need to raise.
- Who is your business for?
- Who will be the most profitable clients?
- What needs are you trying to meet/solve?
- What features of your products meets their primary needs?
- What is the ideal experience you are trying to craft for your potential clients?
- What is the best possible way to reach these clients?
- Are those ways and means available and accessible to your firm?
The better your consumer insights are, the higher the likelihood you’ll make a sale and raise revenue from the product.
Ways In Which the Go to Market Strategy Can Help Your Business
There are many advantages that accrue from following a go to market strategy.
- It enables you to assess your product fit regarding market expectations and potential.
- Also, it allows you to define your market and clients in ways that make it easy for you to engage them what the best cost implications.
- Then it allows your firm to prepare every step of market entry which minimizes the impact of market barriers on your success.
- You can also define your market strategy. In line with that, you have to put up prompt evaluation and metrics in place to gauge the effectiveness and reach of each of your strategies.
4 Tips to Help You Build a Go to Market Strategy
1. Define Your Brand Positioning
Branding is always about creating positive memories in the minds of your target clients. Whether it is a product/service launch or relaunch you might have to carry out a bit of advertising. You do this to let them know of the upcoming product or service.
The positioning means you have to structure the description and messaging of your product to reflect a certain value or to elicit a particular emotion. You have to decide on the call-to-action of the ads if you are going to elicit enough curiosity that will result in conversions.
2. Discover Your Offering
This is simply an issue of the value proposition. What new, improved or differentiated value is your product bringing into the market? Is it exploiting a gap or adding features to existing value proposition? To be able to hack this, you will need to understand your products strengths, features, and weaknesses.
Armed with that understanding, you can then market the product based on its unique proposition to the target clients. You should be ready to easily and quickly articulate the context of its use, its practical benefits, and the solutions it provides.
3. Focus on Your Channels
This simply defines the distribution network that will bring the product or service to where the target clients are. It could be a call center, salesperson, a retail store, a seminar, a portal or a direct partner. The presence of multi-channel network of distribution means that you’ll most likely need more than one channel of distribution if you are to optimize the target market.
The most important issue is to make sure that the clients have a consistent brand experience irrespective of the channel with which the product or service gets to them.
4. Build Your Budget Model
One of the critical issues you have to grapple with is the pricing method and the associated costs of go to market strategy. There are a number of pricing models. These include premium, psychology, economy and value-based pricing.
Pricing decisions are the most critical issue as they will greatly influence production and revenue. Research shows that a 1% change in pricing could influence up to an 11% rise or fall in profits. The questions to ask include, How much competitive advantage lies in my pricing model?
To the Market
A well thought out go-to-market strategy would create significant success for your product or service. There is no use having a great product if there is no plan of availing it and advertising it to the target markets. There may be other steps that are industry specific that you may have to integrate into the overall go-to-market plan.
Think through every step and as much as possible stick to your strategy. While at it learn to be flexible and make the necessary changes as you go.
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