For any company launching a new product or service, the right “Go-To-Market” (GTM) strategy is essential to success. More than just a plan for sales and marketing, a GTM strategy helps companies define their target audience, and position their solution as the most effective way for customers to achieve specific goals and overcome certain pain points.
Used correctly, a GTM strategy can mitigate some of the various risks of taking a new product to market, and pave the way for rapid growth. However, there’s no one-size-fits-all approach to creating a go-to-market strategy. The methods you use will vary depending on your business, the solution you’re offering, and your target audience.
Here, we’ll explore 6 of the most common (and effective) GTM strategy options used by growing businesses and the benefits they can offer.
1. The Inbound Led Strategy
One of the most popular GTM strategies for modern businesses, the Inbound-led strategy is essentially the opposite of the traditional “outbound” approach of taking products and services to the market. With an Inbound-led strategy, companies don’t reach out to potential customers through emails and sales calls. Instead, they focus on finding ways to attract their ideal buyers to them.
An inbound strategy helps to position your company as a trusted authority in your industry. It involves using content to answer customer questions, educate potential buyers about your solution, and attract new customers to your business organically. Your strategy might include writing search-engine optimised blog posts, designed to target customers at various stages in the purchasing journey.
It could also include social media marketing and other forms of content marketing (like video creation), to drive traffic to your website, and facilitate sales. The great thing about this strategy is that it reduces the need to spend time and resources cold-calling potential prospects.
2. The product-led strategy
A product-led GTM strategy focuses on drawing attention to the solution you offer, and the value it can bring to customers. Companies that follow this approach focus on developing a unique product that addresses a clear market need. This ensures the product itself can act as the primary driver of customer acquisition, retention, and expansion.
Typically, in a product-led strategy, the focus is on ensuring customers can see and understand the benefits your product or service offers. The methodology is particularly popular in the software industry, as companies can provide customers with free trials or demos of their solution, showing them first-hand what the technology can do.
By prioritising product excellence, and delivering clear results to customers, a product-led strategy can even support organic growth, through word-of-mouth referrals.
3. The Community-Led Strategy
Community-led growth has emerged as a powerful option for business leaders in recent years. The digital landscape means consumers have more access to “community” experiences than ever before, from social media platforms to forums. Additionally, 82% of community leaders say they’ve seen increased interest in community experiences in recent years.
The key to success with a community-led strategy is building strong, and lasting relationships with your audience. Businesses need to develop strategies for nurturing and engaging a loyal base of customers, who can provide access to feedback and market data, and even act as advocates for a brand. Some companies take advantage of the existing community-building and nurturing capabilities of social media platforms, while others design their own community forums and websites.
A community-led strategy can be an excellent way to reduce customer acquisition costs, by turning your existing clients into an extension of your marketing team. It can also help to foster loyalty and improve customer retention rates, improving your chances of long-term growth.
4. The Event-Led Strategy
Event-led growth can be a particularly powerful GTM strategy for B2B businesses. This is particularly true for organisations that leverage in-person events. Around 8 out of 10 B2B buyers say they build stronger relationships with experts when they meet them in person.
An event-led strategy focuses on building connections with your audience through powerful experiences. You might host conferences, webinars, workshops, and even hybrid events to deliver valuable content and insights to your target audience and collect data about your customers.
Events provide you with a platform where you can showcase the benefits of your product, and demonstrate thought leadership. Plus, they’re an excellent opportunity to align your company with other experts and leaders in your space. To succeed with this strategy, businesses need to focus on creating memorable experiences and offering tangible value to event attendees.
5. The Partner-Led Strategy
The right relationships make all the difference to your company’s chances of success. Sometimes, it’s not just the connections you have with your customers that matter, but also the relationships you build with partners and other vendors. In a partner-led strategy, you extend the capabilities of your marketing and sales teams by working with other leaders in your industry.
By forming alliances with other organisations that can sell and promote your products, you open the door to opportunities for rapid and extensive growth. Companies using a partner-led strategy experiment with everything from co-marketing efforts to reseller agreements and joint ventures.
The idea is to take advantage of the existing reach, capabilities, and resources other companies have, so you can break into new markets, expand your relationship with existing customers and more. The biggest challenge here is finding the right partners to work with.
6. The Outbound-Led Strategy
Finally, we come to the outbound-led GTM strategy. Perhaps the most traditional option on this list, an outbound strategy positions your company as the initiator of conversations and relationships. With this method, you proactively reach out to potential customers and prospects, to introduce them to your solution, and the value it can offer.
Outbound-led strategies are often considered some of the most “aggressive” GTM methods, associated with tactics like cold calling and emailing. Most companies include at least some outbound efforts in their GTM campaigns, to ensure they can reach as many customers as possible.
Often, success with an outbound-led strategy hinges on your ability to identify your target audience, and personalise your offering to their specific needs. This is why ABM (Account Based Marketing) is one of the most valuable sub-strategies in the outbound landscape.
With ABM, companies can focus on attracting and building connections with the prospects that are the most valuable to their business. What’s more, companies using ABM methods improve their chances of long-term relationships, by building strong connections with personalised content, tailored messaging, and highly targeted campaigns.
Choosing the Right GTM Strategy for Your Business
Ultimately, companies have a wide range of options to consider when selecting the ideal “go to market” strategy for their product or service. Each method mentioned above has its own unique advantages, and these strategies can be tailored to suit different business models and situations.
Choosing the right solution for your business means carefully evaluating your target audience, your resources, and even your competition, so you can implement a data-driven approach. The more time you spend exploring your options and examining the individual benefits of each GTM strategy, the more likely you are to choose a solution that contributes to long-term business growth.
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