Go-To-Market - How to identify the target audience

A note on exploring Buying center, Buyer's persona, Buyer's journey

A Go-To-Market (GTM) strategy defines how a company plans to bring a product to market. It typically includes a business plan outlining the target audience, marketing plan, and sales strategy.

In the next few articles, we will cover the following core elements of a Go-To-Market plan -

1. Target audience

   • Buying center

   • Buyer persona

   • Buyer’s journey

2. Marketing plan

   • Acquisition channels

   • Pricing and payment models

   • Value matrix

   • Message testing

   • Brand awareness and Demand generation

   • Content marketing

3. Sales strategy

   • Choosing the right sales strategy

   • Analyze and optimize the pipeline

   • Tapping into the existing customer base

This article will explore the first element - the Target audience and discuss the tools that can help us identify the right target audience.

Target audience

“I should have spent more time on finding out who the typical buyer of Front is. Without this information, outbound or paid acquisition cannot be successful.”

- Mathilde Collin, Front

Just as for product design, we start with the end-user and work backward to build products. For GTM, everything starts with the buyer, regardless of whether it’s bottoms up or high-touch sales. For a B2B product, sales often involve decisions and influences from various stakeholders. These people make up what is called the “buying center.”

Buying Center

On average, for a B2B organization, there are typically 6.8 decision-makers who have a say in a product purchase decision. Here are those 7 personas (Please note here - there may be a single person who plays multiple roles depending on context) -

• Initiator - Typically initiates the buying process. Reaches out to the product, show interest.

• Users - The real users of the product

• Influencer - Influences others on the need for the product.

• Decision-maker - Gives the final approval of the purchase.

• Buyer - Owns and approves the budget.

• Approver: Final approver who pushes the initiative on a larger scale (typically someone at the highest level)

• Gatekeeper: Create blockers in getting a product approved or implemented

Buyer persona analysis helps in understanding and analyzing these roles better.

Buyer Persona

Like a user persona, a buyer persona is a depiction of your target customer(s). A buyer persona defines who your target customer is and includes demographics, representing org type, priorities and pain points, willingness to pay, etc.

Here is a sample Buyer persona for reference.

Credits - Caroline Clark

We can use both qualitative and quantitative methods to determine a buyer persona. Typically a customer interview reveals a lot about the roles and responsibilities of key stakeholders in an organization. We can also use surveys to the user base to get an idea about the buyer persona. For an early-stage startup, usually, customer interviews are something we will only need.

Credits - Caroline Clark

Buyer’s Journey

Once you have the personas identified through buyer center and persona analysis, It’s time to analyze the Buyer's journey.

The buyer’s journey defines the process that a buyer experiences to become aware of, consider, evaluate, and decide to purchase a new product or service.

It typically consists of three stages -

1. Awareness Stage: In this stage, the buyer realizes the problem. Contents, at this stage, typically grabs a potential customer’s attention. Contents can be in the form of blogs, whitepapers, ebooks, press releases, or videos. Typically, a lead gets here by clicking a link on a social media post, search engine result, or an ad. However, these behaviors do not indicate that this lead is ready to make any purchase yet.

2. Consideration Stage: In this stage, the prospect acknowledges a problem and researches options to solve the problem. It is usually seen from behaviors such as downloading an ebook, requesting a demo, or joining a webinar.

3. Decision Stage: At this stage, the prospect decides to buy the solution. The prospect has likely asked for a quote or a trial period and is nearing a decision whether or not to purchase.

The following graphic illustrates a sample buyer's journey -

In a typical buyer’s journey, marketing is responsible for the awareness and consideration stage, generating interest, and educating the relevant audience on a product’s value through messaging and content.

Once a lead falls into the decision stage, the sales team takes over, and the lead enters the sales funnel. This is where a lead seriously considers purchasing your product.

The various stages of the typical sales cycle are as follows -

• Contact: Conversation between the lead and the sales rep begins.

• Qualification: The sales rep learns more about the lead’s problems and qualifies the lead to see if the lead belongs to the target audience.

• Business case: The prospect tests the product through a free trial or POC to see if it fits their expectation.

• Evaluation: The organization's decision-makers weigh the product's cost and its results during the business case.

• Negotiation: Both sales rep and decision-makers discuss pricing details, promotional offers, discounts, and feature needs.

• Close: This is when a deal is sealed, and you have a new customer.

• Renewal: Your customer renews their license or subscription.

Conclusion

There we go. So we discussed the first key element of a GTM plan - The target audience. We spoke about the various personas that influence the purchase decision making and then, we discussed how to build the buyer persona and journey.

In the next article, we will see how marketing plays a critical role in influencing the first two stages of a buyer’s journey - Awareness and Consideration. We will understand what are the typical elements and activities of a GTM marketing plan.

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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