Here at Triggerfish we strive to help companies form a Marketing Operations mindset.
This means moving away from a project-driven or “set it and forget it” way of thinking and evolving your marketing function to operate on a weekly, monthly and quarterly basis.
Your MarTech will never be “done”, so instead of reaching for the holy grail end result, think about identifying the right things to work on and making incremental progress over time.
To help organisations start thinking operationally with respect to their marketing function, or help them build a marketing operations team, we have created this 12-part blog series. We will be covering everything from Sales & Marketing alignment, growth marketing, digital strategy, creating ROI, cross-functional teams, and much more!
Today, Go-To-Market Strategy
So, go-to-market strategy, what is it?
Simply, it is our ability to be clear about what we want to get done at a campaign level so that customers understand about our capabilities. Go-to-market is also about defining the success of a marketing strategy especially in relationship to things like revenue targets. There is a lot of big-picture thinking involved in a go-to-market strategy.
What you want to start with, when thinking of go-to-market, is your capability area – what your product or service does. We talk about how that capability area is going to achieve success for our bigger picture in-market, but also linking that clearly to business metrics, financial metrics, market geometrics, and other measurable objectives. Because we’re spending all this time, effort and energy around one capability area, we want to make certain that we define success in demonstrable ways.
We then think about how to build a funnel as relates to our capability area. Our goal is to funnel people who are interested in our capabilities towards our marketing and sales efforts. This means attracting awareness by making sure we're providing content and context for people to realise that they might need our capabilities. Often, what we provide is educational content, which is what leads our prospects down the next part of the funnel.
Providing broader context to the market
Part of a successful go-to-market strategy involves making sure that your prospects are able to compare your product to ones they might already be considering. Prospects usually do plenty of research before purchasing a product, especially in the B2B space, so it’s important that you have plenty of material allowing them to read, understand, and consider your opportunities.
Another important consideration is you may try to start the conversion process as soon as the customer looks at your product – but from the prospect’s perspective, they’ve been on a customer journey for quite some time. This can make people nervous. The question then becomes one of how do you help the customer understand and realise value from that effort that you're going to put in.
Sometimes it's about making sure that you’re clear about the value you can offer to the customer as part of the funnel. In other words, you want to be clear that you’re selling more than just a widget. Once you understand the funnel steps in relation to your value engagement, you can then build narrative around what your content needs to look like.
Narrative often helps direct content
Telling a story about your product is often the best way to connect with customers. Case studies, for example, in which you can demonstrate previous success with other clients, can really resonate with prospects who are doing research. We can also talk about assessments, offers, conversion points, calls to action, and so on.
We like to be able to look at this visually, all on one page, all the topic areas we're going to focus on for each go-to-market. This gives us clarity to make judgment calls to decide how we execute the single go-to-market, rather than the overall go-to-market strategy. You can download our go-to-market plan on a page template here.
Clearly, we have them as a way to come back to the table and really think about this as a plan on a page.
Go-to-market is a fundamental piece of the puzzle for Marketing Operations
Customers have a choice. Trying to say that a product is good for everything often communicates that it’s good at nothing. So, in order to go-to-market properly, we need to be clear about what our value is in a particular area. Customers just want to hear about the things that they worry about.
When it comes to marketing operations, the clearer we are about what those individual funnel journeys are, then the better data we're going to have. We know that funneling is a big part of inbound marketing, but we will only tackle it after agreeing a one-page plan to help us get clear on those aspects, before communicating that to cross-functional teams. We're big fans of one-page plans because quite simply - when you need to communicate things to people it's better that they can see everything at once rather than flip through a bunch of pages and get lost.
We strive to provide companies with a best-in-class experience that can supercharge marketing efforts and realign them towards business goals. If you’d like to learn more about how we plan go-to-market strategies for our clients, download our GTM template today!