5 Go-To-Market Strategy Considerations

Face it, nobody really cares about your company. And why should they? They just want to know if and how your company can help them.

We recently posted a great guide from Judy Loehr, Venture Partner with Cloud Apps Capital Partners – Nailing Your Go-To-Market Positioning, the core of your go-to-market strategy. Check out the full guide for help crafting your positioning and messaging, and aligning your company around this shared vision.

Before you dive in to positioning and messaging, Judy recommends considering these 5 go-to-market strategy factors:

1. Audience. It may sound obvious, but this is really the root of it all: Who is your audience?

  • Define the customer segment. Make sure these segments are distinct and discrete.
  • Construct specific use cases. These should be very short and to the point statements, of just a few words, summarizing what these specific customer segments need to do.
  • Identify the current challenges the customer segment is facing. What is getting in the way of their use case?
  • Target the specific reasons this customer segment should choose you and what specific impact your solution will have on their business. What benefits will they get from your solution?

2. Channels. Once you’ve sketched out your target audience segments, the next step to your go-to-market strategy is identifying the best channels – direct and indirect – for reaching them. Where are they hanging out and what channels are going to lead straight to them? You don’t want to just throw your message out and see where the winds take it; marketing channel selection needs to be a thoughtful process.

3. Pricing and packaging. Unfortunately, there’s no one-size-fits all best practice for pricing and packaging. You need to find the best solution for your offering – and this is iterative. When your product is feature rich, I recommend the “52 card pick-up” approach wherein you take all your features and throw them up in the air. When you begin the process of “picking up” the features, you can start forming them into different piles, each aligned with a specific value. These piles then become well thought out feature sets, or modules, which you can market – rather than trying to message out every single product feature, bell, and whistle (which, honestly, nobody wants to hear about).

To begin to break out your content into product modules:

  • Create different modules with very short feature descriptions.
  • Craft a leadership message in which you detail the biggest impact value of the module, pointing to specific proof points. This messaging is a gateway to intro copy for your product pages.
  • Outline the reasons to choose your company. This should be brief, and will include a short headline for the product module and a summary of the product capabilities. This content will nicely transition to headline and bullet copy on a product page.

4. Customer acquisition cost (CAC) strategy model. No go-to-market strategy is complete without working through your acquisition model and costs. Your CAC (customer acquisition cost) is directly related to the previous consideration: pricing and packaging. If it costs you more to acquire customers than you’re getting from these customers, you have a serious problem. Your ability to monetize your customers is critical. Calculate your CAC and your LTV (lifetime value of a customer) to ensure that there’s not an imbalance towards sky high CAC.

5. Messaging. When you’ve nailed down your target audience segments, marketing channels, right pricing and packaging, and your CAC model, then you’re ready to message – crafting a comprehensive company narrative.

  • Start with what’s happening in the market that’s affecting your target customers. What’s creating pressure? What’s being disrupted?
  • Frame their current situation and how it’s hurting / challenging them. What are they currently facing, and what are their options for dealing with this situation?
  • Define the ideal, utopian solution for the times in their terms, for their needs and goals. Tee up what an ideal solution would look like – without name-dropping your company. This is still about the general solution within the context you’ve laid out.
  • Finally…introduce your company’s vision and the high-level value of your product. Without going into great product detail, go straight to how your product helps your target customers. A one-line overview of your product is enough here.

Great go-to-market positioning delivers your core narrative which will accelerate your business. Check out the full guide, Nailing Your Go-To-Market Positioning, for Judy’s go-to-market strategy framework, some helpful positioning exercises, a guided messaging structure, and more.

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