Go-To-Market - How to craft a winning marketing plan

A primer on GTM marketing plan

Jan 17, 2021

In my last article, we started to discuss about Go-To-Market plan and it’s core components as follows -

Target audience
- Buying center
- Buyer persona
- Buyer’s journey
Marketing Plan
- Acquisition channels
- Pricing and payment models
- Value matrix
- Message testing
- Brand awareness and Demand generation
- Content marketing
Sales Strategy
- Choosing the right sales strategy
- Analyze and optimize the pipeline
- Tapping into the existing customer base

We covered the first core element of GTM - “Target users.” We discussed three critical tools (Buying center, Buyer persona, and Buyer’s journey) that can help us identify our target customers.

Next comes how can we create awareness and generate demand for the product. In this article, we will focus on GTM marketing. We will discuss the essential marketing plans and activities you need to launch a product successfully.

We will start with the Acquisition channels.

Acquisition channel

Once we have identified our target audience, the next important task is to figure out the medium through which you will reach out to your audience, known as channels.

The core element of a GTM is figuring out the right channels for your product. Channels could be both online (emails, SEO, Digital content, Digital ads) and offline(WOM, outbound, inside sales, etc.).

Here is a typical list of channels that a business can leverage to reach its customers-

Credits - Caroline Clark

The power law of channels says that a company that has product-channel fit will get 70%+ of its growth from one channel at a given moment in time. Thus, to get an optimum ROI, companies should invest in at most 3-4 channels at any given point in time. Beyond this, it starts to provide diminishing returns. Companies often try to diversify into different channels without establishing product-channel fit and channel-model fit, which often leads to failure.

The core part of a GTM marketing plan is to figure out those high-performing channels that give you the maximum ROI.

NB - In this article, Brian Balfour talks about how to test different channels and find the right ones for your product.

You can also explore this article, which talks about the product-channel fit and this one for channel-model fit.

Pricing and Payment models

“Good pricing is not about the price. It’s about getting in each customer’s shoes and knowing exactly how they derive value from your product.”
- Ian Clark, Pricing Consultant @ YC, Signal Fire, & Alpine Investors

Pricing is a broad topic and deserves a separate post for itself. I will cover the pricing concepts separately in another post.

Having said that, to give a heads-up on pricing - here are the three typical ways how we can approach pricing -

Value pricing - Determine the Willingness to pay. How much money users are willing to pay for the product or service.
Competitive pricing - Explore the pricing from competition for a similar product or service. Then decide the pricing based on your product’s positioning.
Experimental pricing - Experiment with different price points and correlate price with the sales volume. But remember, fluctuating pricing may frustrate the customer.

The most effective one is to determine the customer’s willingness to pay. Here are some of the methods used to achieve that -

Credits - Caroline Clark

Payment models -

Along with pricing, we need to determine the appropriate payment model for the product. Here are some examples of various payment models used by well-known players -

Free, Ad-supported - The product is usually free for the customer, and revenue is generated via Ads on the platform. Typical examples of this type of model are internet companies like Google, Facebook, etc.
Tiered - Also known as T-shirt pricing. There are multiple tiers of pricing based on volume.
Subscriptions(per time or volume) - Pricing is done based on a subscription per time(per month or annual) or per volume (per 100 emails or Gb data).
Free Trial - Free product access for a limited time period.
Razorblade model - This is where the company sells its essential product at a cheaper rate and then generates profits from refill or complementary products. Think - iTunes.

Value matrix

Ok, by now, we already know who our target audience is. We are also familiar with channels and pricing models. Now, it’s time to position our product and craft messaging for our target audience.

Value matrix is a useful framework that we can use for this purpose. Value matrix defines various persona present in the buying process, their business problems, corresponding product solutions/values, and catered messaging for each persona.

Here is how it looks like -

Credits - Hubspot

Note: Positioning is a fascinating and diverse topic and will be covered in a separate post.

Message testing

Not all messaging is perfect from day one. Thus, the best way to nail the messaging is to test your messaging with the target audience and refine them continuously till we reach the perfect pitch.

There are primarily three variables to test - the acquisition channel, the audience you target, and the message you share.

For example, you may want to reach out to your target audience through the paid channels such as - LinkedIn, Google Ads, Facebook, and Twitter. The key is to test various channels and determine the suitable ones with high conversions.

Brand awareness and Demand generation

The next crucial element of a GTM marketing plan is to generate leads through promoting brand awareness and demand generation.

There are primarily two ways to generate demand - Inbound and Outbound.

With Inbound methods, prospects discover your brand through various presence that you have over the internet. It can be through your website, social media posts, search result, or different contents that typically lead to a landing page. These are called organic traffic. This is more of a pull method.

Inbound channels (Website, content through Blogs, ebook, webinars, social media, search ads) 👉 Landing Pages 👉 Sales funnel

Outbound demand generation is primarily done through inside sales. A salesperson contacts a lead through cold outreach tactics - by sending emails or cold calls or gathering leads at an industry conference, etc. This is more of a push method.

Outbound(Emails, cold calls, conferences) 👉 Sales funnel

Once there is a qualified lead (both inbound or outbound), the lead enters into the sales funnel, and the sales conversation begins.

Content marketing

The conversion rate of inbound demand generation is often higher than outbound demand generation because the inbound leads are already partially educated on the business problems, are cognizant of your product, and usually show interest in buying your product.

One of the key tools to generate inbound leads is content marketing. Great content often drives significant traffic to your website.

The core element of content marketing is SEO, which is how a search engine ranks the content once a user queries something on the internet related to your product.

The content marketing team's primary responsibility is to research the searched keywords related to the product, analyze their volume, and then design, create and distribute contents that include those keywords.

The content can be in the form of a Blog, article, whitepaper, ebook, PR, etc.

If you wish to learn more about content marketing, please check these resources -

Conclusion

Congratulations if you have reached this far. To sum this up, marketing plans and activities are the core part of any GTM. A GTM marketing plan consists of both strategic and tactical elements. Channel determination, pricing, positioning, and messaging are more strategic and typically requires a long term approach.

Whereas demand generation and content marketing typically focus on attracting customers, creating demand, converting them to potential leads, and making them enter into the sales funnel.

Sincerely,

Arkapravo

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That’s all for this article. Thanks for reading. If you wish to read more, please check out the catalog to discover other articles.

I will see you with the next article of the GTM series. Till then, I would love to hear your thoughts on this article.

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