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?
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:
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.
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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