Do You Have a Roadmap Guiding Your Marketing Efforts?

If you’re an entrepreneur preparing to bring a new brand to market or an existing business re-introducing a product or service, a Go to Market plan is crucial to your sustainable growth.

A Go to Market Plan acts as a roadmap, detailing the specifics of your offer—including what problem you’re solving, who you’re solving it for, and what makes your product or service uniquely better than what is currently available. This deliverable should outline where and how to engage with your target audience and speak to them in a way that not only catches their attention but compels them to action. Another important feature of a Go to Market Plan is that it sets expectations in terms of what “success” will look like so that you’re the first to know if the strategy is working or falling short. 

Here are three reasons why your business needs a Go to Market plan.

Brings Clarity to Your Sales, Marketing, and Operations Teams 

Successful leadership requires a united front, but can you really lead a team effectively if the team isn’t clear on the mission? While entrepreneurs and business owners may have a clear vision of what they’ve set out to do, the strength of that message is lost as it is disseminated across the leadership, sales, marketing, and operations teams—especially when that message is conveyed verbally or in snippets. 

A Go to Market Plan helps capture those key takeaways and translate them into marketing language that anyone can understand—and then repeat! After all, don’t you want the people who are driving awareness, chasing sales, or engaging with existing customers to all be on the same page?

Beyond message clarity, a Go to Market plan helps unify your team and create goals that are dependent on one another. This is much easier done when there is a common understanding of the goal and a visual of who is working on what to get there. 

Helps Reduce Wasted Effort, Energy, and Dollars

Business owners without a Go to Market plan likely had a “trial and error” period that they look back on with little fondness. This can also manifest in the creation of frenzied sales pages, executing haphazard ad campaigns, and feeling like you’re constantly throwing tactics at the wall to see what sticks. 

While gathering data via A/B testing is important, it can be especially frustrating when every aspect of the campaign is up for discussion (i.e. who to target, how to tweak pricing, copy, creative, etc.). There is only so much money you can justify spending without conversions! 

The core of your Go to Market Plan should include industry, competitor, and audience research that can be referred back to and utilized no matter the channel. Dig into the nitty gritty when it comes to the state of the current industry, what your competitors are putting out into the world, and what seems to really motivate your intended audience. It’s during this deep work that you may realize the market is oversaturated, your offering isn’t truly unique, or that there is actually a better-fitting customer than initially imagined. 

The conclusions that come from this work are foundational and energizing, as opposed to the discouragement experienced after another fruitless campaign where you’re unsure whether anything was really learned.

Avoids Natural Founder Bias

While a Go to Market plan can certainly be executed in-house by your marketing team, we highly recommend bringing in a consultant or agency that is not “too close” to the brand or product launch. It is natural for thought leaders to view their own ideas as great, and it is also natural for employees to agree with their boss. In this case, a marketing partner should be able to evaluate those core pieces as well as your intended roadmap and call out any potential threats, biases, or inflated success metrics.

For new brands or established businesses that do not have strategic marketers on staff, we offer a Go to Market plan delivered in 30 days that couples an in-depth brand and digital audit with industry, competitor, and target market research. Our team leans on this research to then create a written narrative and set forth a “Go to Market” strategy, detailing the next steps to be taken across Brand, Platform, and Digital Marketing and identifying the target metrics that will mark our efforts as successful. Following delivery, the brand is then able to make informed decisions on who to hire in-house versus what to outsource to a digital marketing agency. Regardless of who is doing the execution, we are all able to reference the strategy and work toward a common goal.

Interested in a Go to Market plan for your business? Reach out to us here.