The Ultimate Go-to-Market Guide for Startups

Overview

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Founders frequently use the terms “go-to-market plan” or “go-to-market strategy,” but it can mean very different things depending on who you talk to.

At the highest level, your go-to-market strategy brings together all of the key elements that drive your business: brand development, consumer insights, competitive understanding, sales and marketing, pricing, and distribution. It’s a living, breathing thing that evolves as your learnings deepen and your business evolves.

In this six-step guide, we’ll walk you through how to:

1. Define your marketplace
2. Identify your target audience
3. Clarify your offering
4. Fine-tune your brand positioning
5. Focus on your channels, distribution, and marketing
6. Create an effective marketing strategy

There’s value in taking the time to learn and master these six steps. After all, you can apply this iterative thinking to new business and product launches as well as existing products and services that aren’t quite landing the way you’d hoped. You can also turn to these steps whenever you need to pivot based on consumer, category, or competitive changes.

Let’s begin!

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Developing a go-to-market strategy in 6 steps

Having a strategic action plan can help you clarify how to reach your target consumer and better compete in the marketplace.A comprehensive go-to-market strategy also allows you to:

• reduce time to market
• minimize waste in your launch ecosystem
• increase your ability to adapt to change
• strengthen the customer experience
• establish a clear path for growth for your team and investors
• reinforce your brand proposition at all touch points

You’ve likely already thought about many of these things along the way. But there is tremendous value in pressure testing your assumptions, crystallizing your thinking, and taking the time to document and institutionalize your learnings.

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Step 1: Define the market in which you operate

This step is a fairly straightforward activity, but accurately defining your market is critical. Markets are changing faster than ever with evolving consumer behavior, competitor activity, and innovation. Given the amount of competition for share of wallet, it’s important to be as specific as possible in your definition of the market in which you operate.

Ask yourself these key questions:

• Are you building a category where nothing exists today, or are you improving the consumer experience of a current category with a better product or more value?
• Which market(s) best match your core competencies and what you’re building?
• What are your market’s biggest and most urgent pain points?
• What are the competitors today? Where are there gaps in the market?
• Is there a path to easily reach this market?

Which markets have the largest market size and least competition?

Template: Market Mapping Tool

Steps 1 to 3 are usually done in parallel and all lead to and are summed in Step 4: fine-tuning your brand positioning.

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Step 2: Identify your target audience

Before you jump to creating a go-to-market plan for communications, it’s helpful to take a moment to develop some hypotheses first.

Occasionally we see brands put advertising out via paid channels to see what lands and who gravitates toward the brand in an attempt to define their audience. While in-market pressure testing, iteration, and evolution is always a good thing, we recommend putting work into defining this audience first.

A crisp definition allows you to create your brand positioning, ethos, communications, language, aesthetic, and claims that will resonate.

Can you have more than one target audience? It’s generally best to focus your energy on one core target so as to not spread yourself too thin, particularly early on. One framework to think about is your audience as concentric circles with your core target audience at the middle.

These are people who you are really fulfilling a need for and are relatively easy to find and convert—think insane product-market fit.Each circle radiating from that core is a slight variation—maybe it’s a different age group, you’re fulfilling a slightly different need, or their usage is different. But there should be a thread between the layers that will allow you to show up in market with consistency.‍

Ask yourself these key questions:

• What is the consumer profile who will be most in need of your product?
• What are their pain points?
• What is their relationship with competitors or with this category?
• What is their day like outside of just interaction with your category or product?

This exercise is most relevant for B2C, but it’s also applicable for B2B, even with complex sales cycles. As you develop your understanding of your target audience, it’s worth keeping in mind that.You are rarely your target audience. Take yourself out of your shoes (this is where bias tends to creep in), and put yourself in the customer’s shoes.

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Step 3: Clarify your offering

This tends to be a tricky step, particularly for product-oriented founders. Why? Because the work here is not about defining your feature set in a technical way—it’s more about understanding how what you’re building actually fits into the life or work of your customer.

‍To bring clarity to your offering, ask yourself:

• What needs or tensions are you aiming to solve for your target customers?
• Which features in your offering best address these tensions?
• How will customers use what you’re offering?
• How are you differentiated in the marketplace?
• What do you want your customers to think, feel, believe, and remember?
• What is the value proposition for your customers?
• Is there a way to create a competitive advantage with your pricing model?

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Template: Clarify Your Offering

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Step 4: Fine-tune your brand positioning

This is the process of establishing the position of your brand in the minds of consumers. By combining the thinking you’ve done in Steps 1 to 4, it forces you to step back and reflect on whether all of the above “hangs together.” Is what you’re building logically going to address a big enough market’s needs in a differentiated way?

Ask yourself:

• How are you different from the competition?
• What do you stand for?
• How are your competitors positioning their brands?
• Does all of this hang together in the minds of consumers?
• Are your company’s values achieved through this positioning?

There are four essential elements of a best-in-class positioning statement:

1. Target customer: What’s a concise summary of the attitudinal and demographic description of the target group your brand is attempting to appeal to and attract?‍
2. Market definition: What category is your brand competing in? In what context does your brand have relevance to your customers?
3. Brand promise: What’s the most compelling (emotional/rational) benefit to your target customers that your brand can own relative to your competition?‍
4. Reason to believe: What's the most compelling evidence that your brand delivers on its brand promise?

After thoughtfully answering these four questions, you can craft your positioning statement with this formula:

For [target customers], [company name] is the [market definition] that delivers [brand promise] because only [company name] is [reason to believe].

You can also use this template to craft your own best-in-class brand positioning statement:

Template: Brand Positioning Statement

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Step 5: Focus on your channels, distribution, and marketing

Think through your channel strategy early because it will impact your marketing strategy and business model. It’s no surprise that many brands are leveraging direct-to-consumer as a primary channel given the ability to test and learn easily along with the benefits of owning first-party data and relationships. Even if your startup’s early focus is on DTC, it’s good to think early on about an omnichannel roadmap outside of DTC.

This is intertwined with marketing strategy because it can affect where you prioritize spend, content creation, and getting eyeballs. For example, if you’re planning to use long-form video to tell your brand’s story, you’ll want to think through—and have the resources to maintain—a YouTube strategy.

‍Ask yourself:

• Where are your target customers?
• How do these customers want to interact with you?
• What level of interaction do your target customers require? How “considered” of a purchase is it?
• What are the economics of this channel strategy, and do they work with your operating model?
• Does the channel fit your offering?
• Can you create a competitive advantage?

There’s an easy-to-use framework that can help you think about changing your customers' behavior.

1. The upper left: Use real-life information, data, and insights to fill in what your customer is doing today
2. The lower left: Jot down how they feel about that experience—this can be both positive feelings and negative sentiments.
3. The lower right: Describe how you want them to feel. Or better yet, explain how they tell you they want to feel.
4. The upper right: Highlight the desired action, which is generally to use your product.

It's simple, but the beauty is in the discussion it facilitates and the fact that all of these factors need to make sense together. If your product is solving for a feeling that consumers don't have, you may have a fundamental problem.

Template: Task Map

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Step 6: Create your marketing strategy

Now it’s time to put all of the pieces of this massive puzzle together. Starting with your brand positioning, your goal is to create competitive advantages for your product offering.One way to think about this is to ensure there is a “thread” throughout your go-to-market activity system. Craft the strategy at the top, then work your way down to identifying the tactics that you will execute.But then ask yourself if that all makes sense from the seat of your consumer. And if it does, you’re ready to:

• execute
• test
• learn
• iterate

And if your GTM strategy doesn’t make perfect sense from a consumer’s perspective? Go back, and tweak your tactics.

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To develop your marketing tactics, consider:

• How do you reach the buyers and influencers of your target markets? (We’ll share some best practices in an upcoming influencer marketing guide.)
• What messages will motivate them to advance to the consideration phase—and ultimately purchase?

Understand where—and how—your brand fits into the customer journey: In our customer acquisition guide, we walk you through the typical customer journey and acquisition funnel. You’ll also get tactical tips like how to measure the success of your customer acquisition strategy and how to leverage paid, owned, and earned media.

‍Always be developing your funnel: Based on the customer acquisition funnel, it’s easy to assume that the customer journey is linear. While the journey from awareness to purchase can be short and direct, remember that your go-to-market strategy should also account for a long and meandering journey. And once you do acquire a customer, keep in mind that your company’s work is actually just beginning. Learn best practices for nurturing your sales cycle in our customer retention guide.