Taking your Startup to Market: A Go-to-Market Strategy for Success

By Jacques Hart, CEO of Roar Media

Crystallizing your go-to-market strategy and marketing plan around your products or services’ unique value proposition is critical to the success and launch of a start-up. All too often, entrepreneurs get caught up in the innovative features and disruptive technology or rush to release their product without taking the time and effort needed to develop an effective messaging platform and marketing plan. Keep in mind that the marketplace is hyper competitive and unforgiving- in many cases, start-ups only have one chance to get it right. In addition, pressing the reset button and trying again is simply not an option for start-ups operating on bootstrap budgets and tight timeframes and all too often customers simply will not return to trial the same product twice. As such, it is mission critical to spend the time upfront to correctly price, position and promote your new product or service.
In marketing management, the term go-to-market strategy refers to the set of integrated tactics which a company uses to connect with its customers and deliver their unique value proposition (USP) to their target market from initial contact through fulfillment. Here is a quick visual schema to visualize an effective go-to-market methodology:

So, now you are sold and are ready to develop your go-to-market strategy, it is best to answer a few questions first to guide your decision making:

•  What will be your product portfolio for target customers?
•  How much will you charge for your products for different customers?
• How will you promote your products to target customers?
• Where will you promote and sell your products to target customers?
• With these critical answers in mind, let’s begin!

1. Define your market value proposition:

As USP is the set of factors or considerations presented by a seller as the reason that one product or service is different from and better than that of the competition.
Take the time to establish a messaging and positioning platform that all of the company’s different stakeholders agree to. Make sure that these messaging features the unique value propositions for each of your products and services and is curtailed to different groups of stakeholders. For instance, if your product or service has both B2B and B2C applications, customize messaging that is specific to each — don’t try to blanket both at once. If you want to reach multiple demographics, you need to address those demographics independently through your positioning.

The process of crafting a core messaging and positioning platform will give you and your decision makers the opportunity to build consensus around the fundamental brand components, and should also yield your thirty second elevator pitch and provide the baseline for all of you marketing collateral through the establishment of a clear tone, voice and direction. You’ll be able to use this document and repurpose its content for your company boilerplate, news releases, web copy, email marketing, social media and more.

2. Identify your primary target market

With limited budgets and resources, it is best to evaluate which potential audiences (B2B, B2C, specific verticals, etc.) will most easily become your first customers with the least amount of resistance and barriers to entry. For example, let’s say that you want to roll out a SaaS based home automation system. In this case, the end customer would be home-owners using your system to control their important home systems such as lights, air-conditioning, home security, lights. etc. Instead of trying to sell your system to individual home-homers after they have already purchased their home or condo, you may be better off selling your system to home builders and developers. That way, you would be able to sell multiple systems and solutions to one client who in turn will sell too many. As a result, your marketing and sales plan and presentations will vary drastically considering you are now selling directly to another business as a sales channel as opposed to the one-off end consumers.

When sizing up the right target audience, be sure to ask yourself:

1. What’s in it for them?
2. How does your product or service enhance their business, sales cycle and bottom-lines?
3. How can you provide them the best sales and customer service to make it easy for them to buy your products or services?
4. What is the most advantageous pricing structure for them and for you? Remember, a large volume sale with the right margin is always better than many incremental little sales.

Once you answer these questions, take the time to meet with them and really get to know their business. Make sure to review their marketing material, website and understand their sales processes so that you can find ways to bolt right in to their business platform. Be the solution, not another vendor. While you are at it, build that interpersonal person relationship that will keep giving throughout the years.

Also, after you have successfully identified and reached one segment, use this experience and leverage the case studies as “beachhead” strategy to tap into others.

At the end of the day, the perfect mouse-trap is only as good as knowing where the mice are and what type of cheese they like.

3. Identify and assess marketing and distribution channels

At some point in the startup process, you had to develop a proof of concept supported by real client data. These clients may have been acquired through a variety of means, free trial, friends and family, direct marketing, etc. Ask yourself, how did I get these initial clients? Can I scale this up and get a lot more this way? If the initial client acquisition channels were fruitful, then put them on list. As a startup, if you have not had much experience leveraging a variety of marketing stratrgies and tactics and don’t have much to look back on to evaluate, then consider consulting an experienced marketing professional who can shed some light on expected results and save you a lot of time and money in the long run.

Again choose the marketing channels that you know your target market actively frequent and are closet to the point of sale. Evaluate the audience, rates, placements, creative, expected results of many different channels. The sales representatives for the media vendors will be able to answer these questions, but be sure to bounce their feedback off of others that have used these channels before, Ask to speak to their current clients and to obtain current case studies.

4. Create a detailed marketing plan

The final step is getting your message out and launching your product or service with a strong marketing plan. Here are the key ingredients that you need to answer and detail in such a plan:

1. Target audience: Who is the target audience? B2B, B2C, channel partner and/or end consumer?
2. Audience profile: Who is their demographic? Where do they live and work? What is the target audience motivated by? What problem do you solve? Where do they spend their time? How can you reach and connect with them?
3. Channel distribution: What marketing channels and medium s are best going to reach your target audience?
4. Budget: You need to define a 3-month, 6-month and 12-month budget. Remember, without a budget you won’t be able to determine how the pieces fit together and won’t be able to make critical decisions as to what channel to prioritize and how much you can get. You also need a budget in order to best negotiate rates with media vendors.
5. Marketing channel: Is your product better suited to reaching people in traditional offline channels or in new digital media channels. One way to look at this it to understand where your products are bought and sold. For instance, if you sell mobile apps then perhaps leveraging a mobile advertising buy is the best choice since your end consumer is already in that channel and only a few clicks away from purchasing your app. being close to the point of sale is always a smart choice.
6. Marking mix: What mediums will you choose- email, search marketing, social marketing tradition PR, billboard advertising, content marketing, etc.? This can best be answered by looking at your previous assessment above.
7. Marketing calendar: Develop a marketing calendar the fits within your roll-out plan and marketing budget. Be sure to sequence things appropriately and line them up with any seasonality variables.

Once you have defined these variables, take the time to put them on paper. Build a PowerPoint presentation that clearly lays all of these variables out. Along the way, make sure to do some ROI modeling to ensure that if you go down this road it will result in the desired outcome and provide the return needed to justify the marketing investment.
While there are many other considerations to developing an effective go-to-market-strategy and marketing plan, following the game plan outlined above will get you out of the gates and on the road to achieving your marketing goals. Make sure to adjust your strategy and pivot along the way, but at least now you have a sound strategy and game-plan that will pay off dividends down the road.