Are you struggling to make your marketing campaigns hit the mark with prospects?
Even great ideas can fall flat when you miss out on an essential factor: successfully identifying and utilizing buyers’ interests and intent.
If that sounds like a challenge, don’t worry—a successful go-to-market (GTM) strategy could be the solution for these critical areas.
With integrated sales and marketing teams, and essential lead prospecting tools like sales intelligence, you can stop wondering about your buyer’s needs and interests.
Here's an overview of the GTM strategy in B2B.
What is a GTM strategy for B2B companies?
A go-to-market strategy clarifies several concerns about launching a product or service into a specific industry. Product/market suitability, buyer personas, marketing channels, competition, pricing, and more is on the list.
The GTM approach is for the new-age B2B world where traditional tactics do not give desired outcomes.
Plus, developing a thorough GTM plan benefits your company through the following:
- Improves campaign messaging.
- Prevents costly blunders during launches.
- Provides a superior buyer experience.
- Shows a competitive advantage in your market.
- Increases chances of a successful product or service launch.
How to build an effective GTM strategy?
1. Define your ICPs and buyer personas
Identifying and setting buyer personas or an ideal customer profile (ICP) is a method of defining the qualities of your potential buyers. Then, they are qualified with these defined data and automation tools by integrating with systems such as CRMs.
For example, defining:
- Who are your buyers, and why do they conduct business with you?
- What are their common hobbies, characteristics, or other buying traits?
By doing so, prospects are better informed about your new product or service, and you can better understand your target market and broaden your reach to gain new clients.
2. Map your buyer journey
Now, map your buyer journey, which is equally divided into three steps each for the marketing and sales team to handle.
Here are the steps for the marketing team to handle:
- Awareness – The prospect has an issue or a specific requirement and is exploring it further.
- Consideration – The prospect has defined the problem or need and is now considering suitable solutions.
- Decision – The prospect has compiled a list of potential solutions and is ready to select the most suitable one.
Now it's the sales team's turn:
- Intent – When someone expresses an interest in your product or service, it's time to stand out.
- Evaluation – Prospect is currently weighing all possible solutions they have listed to make a decision.
- Purchase – The rep closes the deal, converting the prospect into a client.
3. Analyze your competitors
Knowing your product's or service's place in the current market is a significant aspect of any GTM approach. By studying your competitors, you can better understand what they offer and recognize the value they add.
- You may start by reviewing the popular reviews page and filtering by relevant business segments like SMEs, mid-sized, or large enterprises.
- This lets you get a clear view of their likes and dislikes about most of your competitors' platforms and what matches your ICP.
- Also, consider how macro and micro changes can affect your launch now and in the future.
4. Set your marketing goals
First, set goals that are achievable in both inbound and outbound marketing.
Primarily, content marketing based on research and promotion drives inbound marketing. It includes:
- Keyword research.
- Creating and promoting different content types.
- Building backlinks.
- Tracking content marketing efforts.
Outbound marketing is all about building interest and generating leads through outreach strategies. It includes:
- Cold calling and cold emailing.
- Direct email marketing.
- Display ads, social media ads, and Pay-Per-Click (PPC) ads on search engines.
5. Utilize your intent prospect data
According to 69% of marketers, poor buyer experience is a significant issue due to inaccurate data. (source).
Thus, having your GTM approach data-driven helps in identifying your potential target accounts. To convert prospects' intent into action, you need intent data.
Intent data helps marketers understand prospects' interests, desires, and issues through the content that they utilize.
- Further, marketers use these insights to give highly targeted offers and solutions in their outreach, from email nurturing programs to virtual meetings.
- These can be done using lead prospecting tools like sales intelligence for buyer insights and prospecting, which are essential for GTM tactics.
In short, GTM allows you to diversify and test different tactics.
However, to succeed in today's market, you must understand how to attract buyers, sell your product or service, and measure performance. Follow these five steps to build your GTM strategy and make changes where necessary.
