Six Components of a Successful Go-to-Market Strategy
The objective of a go-to-market strategy is to bring a product to the marketplace, win customers and their loyalty and meet revenue and profit targets in the process. An effective go-to-market strategy includes six key components that will inform the marketing and sales tactics used to capture market share.
Markets
The first step to defining your go-to-market strategy is determining the target market for your product. Think about your product or service and the solutions that you provide to your customer’s problems – who can benefit from those solutions? Defining your target market is the first towards identifying your ideal customer and how to market to them.
Customers
To successfully bring a product to market, you need to go beyond understanding your industry or marketplace and start understanding your customers. Here, it helps to drill down to the details and construct elaborate buyer personas based on everything you can learn about your target customer.
What is their job role? What are their most important success indicators? What motivates them? What problem can you help them solve? How do they make purchasing decisions? If there will be several people involved in the purchasing decision, constructing buyer personas for all of them will help you market to the group.
Value Proposition
As you develop customer segmentation, you must clearly delineate your unique value proposition for each unique buyer persona. Building an IT product? How does it benefit IT agents and operators? What about developers and security teams? What about IT managers?
Creating a UVP for each role will help your sales staff position products correctly and emphasize the appropriate features and benefits when interacting with prospects.
Price
Developing a functional and profitable pricing model is a key aspect of marketing a product. A product that is priced incorrectly will fail to meet its revenue and profit expectations, even if it is otherwise marketed successfully. Key considerations for pricing include:
- How should the pricing model work? Should we sell the product, license it, or offer a subscription-based service with value-added features?
- What should the product cost?
- How will our costing compare to our competitors?
- How will our pricing support our business strategy? Are we trying to maximize profit, profit per customer or market share?
Positioning
The goal of effective product positioning is to gain a competitive advantage by differentiating a product from its competitors in the marketplace. Products and services can compete on several dimensions – pricing, customer service, ease-of-use, speed, functionality/features and many more.
Product positioning is all about understanding how your unique feature-set makes your product different and emphasizing the most positive aspects that are different from your competition.
Channels
The final element of a go-to-market strategy is identifying the most profitable marketing and distribution channels for your product. Most marketing channels are either some form of direct selling (you sell products directly to your customers) or selling through intermediaries (you form relationships with agents, wholesalers, and retailers who distribute your products to customers).
Potential channels for promoting your products include traditional media (television, radio, print) as well as digital channels (website, social media, pay-per-click advertising, search engine marketing, etc.)

Leverage Digital Channels in Your Go-to-Market Strategy with Directive Consulting
At Directive Consulting, we’re experts at creating go-to-market strategies that work. We leverage digital marketing channels along with the latest technology in marketing automation and analytics to help you access the right prospects for the right price and secure a strong competitive advantage in your niche.
Contact us for a proposal and we’ll create a customized go-to-market strategy to help you dominate the marketplace.