As we forge ahead in our journey from ‘Idea to Scale,’ the launch phase stands before us like an open sea, vast and unpredictable. Here’s how to chart a GTM strategy that will weather storms and sail smoothly.
The ideal time to start building a GTM strategy is in parallel with product development. Understanding how the product shapes up, creating a pricing model and a plan to hit the market is what GTM is all about.
1. Understand Your Market
Segmentation:
- Demographics: Analyze the age, gender, and income levels of your potential customer base.
- Geographics: Are you targeting a local, regional, national, or global market?
- Psychographics: What are their attitudes, preferences, and what do they value? (Eg: Money vs Time)
Market Research:
- Competitive Analysis: Assess your competitors’ strengths and weaknesses.
- SWOT Analysis: Identify your Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats in the market. It could be as simple as having a better product(strength), or not having the capital to compete with market leaders (weakness).
A clear understanding of your competitors and your own limitations and superpowers serves as the foundation for making informed decisions that drive customer acquisition, market penetration, and sustainable growth.
2. Craft Your Value Proposition
Pinpoint Value:
- The problem-solution statement: Clearly articulate the problem your product aims to solve. Showcase the alignment between the problem you aim to solve and the solution you propose with your product.
- Unique Selling Proposition (USP): What sets you apart from competitors?
3. Choose the Right Channels
Choosing the right channels is crucial for successfully launching and scaling your product or service. The channels you select will determine how effectively you can reach your target audience, engage potential customers, and ultimately achieve your business objectives. Usually, the right answer is a mix of channels that work for your business. It depends on multiple factors including – where your audience is primarily active, stage of the product, ease of communication and usual sales cycles for your product. Here are a list of popular channels for pushing your product.
Online Channels
- Social Media
- Email Marketing
- SEO/SEM
- Affiliate Marketing
Offline Channels
- Direct Sales
- Retail Partnerships
- Events and Trade Shows
Hybrid Channels
- Webinars
- Influencer Partnerships
4. Pricing and Positioning
Pricing and Positioning are interconnected when it comes to the GTM strategy, how your position your product can decide your price range or vica versa. These elements should be strategically aligned to ensure that your product attracts its target audience and delivers on its value proposition. Here’s how to approach each:
Pricing Strategies
- Cost-Plus Pricing: Calculate the cost of production and add a margin for other costs and your profit. This is the simplest but not always the most effective strategy.
- Value-Based Pricing: Price your product based on the value it provides to customers rather than the cost to produce it. This requires a deep understanding of your customer’s needs and the perceived value of the solution you are providing, but based on your product, it could create higher margins for your business.
- Competitive Pricing: Set your price based on what competitors are charging. This requires a thorough market analysis.
- Freemium: Offer a basic version of your product for free and charge for premium features.
- Dynamic Pricing: Adjust pricing based on various factors like demand, usage, time, or customer type.
Positioning
- Differentiation: Highlight what makes your product unique in comparison to competitors.
- Quality Positioning: Emphasize the quality and reliability of your product, often used to justify a higher price. Eg: The Macbook
- Value Positioning: Highlight the cost-effectiveness of your product, often used for budget-friendly options. Eg: Redmi phones
- Lifestyle Positioning: Align your product with a particular lifestyle or set of values. Eg: Any luxury brand – Prada
5. Marketing Mix
The Marketing Mix, often referred to as the “4Ps” (Product, Price, Place, Promotion), with recent iterations expanded to the 7Ps to include People, Processes, and Physical Evidence is a model used by organizations to execute their marketing strategy. This requires it own dedicated post but here is that the elements are and how they interact with each other to create a marketing plan.
This is a combination of everything covered so far and how they come together to form a marketing plan for your product or business.
- Price: This involves determining the right pricing strategy. It should be aligned with the product’s perceived value, production cost, and what the market is willing to pay.
- Place: This refers to the distribution channels where your product will be available. This could be online platforms, retail locations, direct sales, etc.
- Promotion: It involves all the methods you will use to promote the product. This could include advertising, sales promotions, public relations, and social media marketing.
- People: This refers to the people who are a part of the organization (employees, management, etc.) and the target audience. Staff training and customer service often fall under this category.
- Processes: These are the operational aspects that will deliver the product to the customers, like the sales funnel, supply chain and logistics, customer service, and other mechanisms that ensure a smooth transaction.
- Physical Evidence: Thess are the touchpoints of your organization, like the layout of a retail store, website interface, or any other experience that customers can see and feel.
6. Launch
The launch is the BIG Moment for your business. A successful launch can mean the difference between success and failure for your business. It can set the tone for the product’s lifecycle, create momentum, and generate early revenue. Based on your product/ business, you can take a call on what is the ideal launch path for you. However, the launch is just the beginning, using the launch to gather feedback and iterate on your product and service continuously to keep the momentum going.
Soft vs. Hard Launch:
- Soft Launch: Target a narrower audience to collect data and make adjustments.
- Hard Launch: Full-scale release after refining the product based on soft launch feedback.
7. Monitor and Tweak
Post-launch, use Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) to monitor the success of the launch. This could include metrics like sales, website traffic, customer engagement, sales number etc.
Continuously collect feedback from customers and make necessary adjustments to the product, pricing, or marketing strategies.Based on the feedback and performance metrics, iterate on your product and marketing strategies for continuous improvement. A few common KPIs to focus on;
- Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC)
- Lifetime Value (LTV)
- Net Promoter Score (NPS)
A great product is just the beginning for the business. Having a well crafted GTM strategy ensures that your product reaches the right people who will appreciate it, buy it and help your organization grow. With the right combination of market knowledge, strategic pricing, and continuous iteration, your product will find acceptance and growth in the market and consequently make it successful.
Up next in our series, we’ll look into the mechanics of scaling your startup. Because Getting to Market is only the first phase of organizational success.
Stay tuned!
This is post #6 in the series Idea to Scale, to view other posts click here.