A go-to-market strategy is a crucial part of your plans for starting a business. This is the specific marketing plan that helps you bring your new product to your target audience, and most importantly, ensures that people buy it. Whether you are a brand new company or you are an established business launching a new product, you need a go-to-market strategy. Businesses also need one when they introduce an existing product to a new market. 

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A lot of businesses run into trouble and find that their product releases are a flop and this is usually because their go-to-market strategy isn’t in place. So, if you are launching a new business or expanding an existing one, here’s how you can create the perfect go-to-market strategy. 

Create Buyer Personas

The first step in creating your go-to-market strategy is to create buyer personas. Buyer personas are basically outlines that describe common characteristics of people who buy your products. You want to make sure that you have a detailed description of the types of people, or types of businesses, who will be buying or using your product. The more detailed you can get with this process, the better off you will be when it comes time for creating marketing material later on. If you neglect this step, you will miss the mark with your marketing strategies. 

Define Your Sales Funnel

A big part of your go-to-market strategy is the sales funnel. Basically, this is how you plan to sell your product and bring those buyers from becoming prospects to customers. This step is all about communicating the value of your product, as well as what features will appeal to different buyer personas. For example, if you are selling software for accounting purposes, you might want to create different funnels depending on whether business owners who use QuickBooks or accountants are making the purchase decision. 

Before you start marketing to potential customers, you need a clear strategy in place for moving them along the sales funnel and turning leads into paying customers. If you don’t, you will end up generating a lot of leads without actually making that many sales. 

Generate Buzz About The Product

Once you have defined your buyer personas, you can move on to creating an overall marketing strategy. If you are launching a new product, you will want to create some buzz about it so that people understand what it is and why they should care about buying it. You don’t need tons of publicity or tons of name recognition right away, but that is not the point. These buyers will be hearing about your product for the first time, so they probably won’t trust brands immediately; they need to see real information before making their decision. 

You also want to target influencers in your industry who can write blog posts or make videos highlighting the features of your new product/service (or existing one). Getting these kinds of third party endorsements will help you build up a loyal customer base and create some excitement around your product. 

Plan A Content Marketing Strategy

Content is a vital part of any marketing strategy. It helps you drive more traffic to your website and it also shows customers that you are an expert in your field, which means that they will trust in your products. You should consider outsourcing to companies like Mabbly digital marketing agency because they will have a wealth of experience in content marketing. If you post high-quality content on a regular basis, you will start building a strong customer base before your new product goes to market. 

Focus On Customer Retention

Lastly, you want to make sure that the customer retention process is in place and working for your business. Getting new customers is obviously important, but it’s repeat customers that keep the business afloat and facilitate long term growth. Unfortunately, a lot of businesses don’t put enough effort into customer retention, so they do not have long term stability. 

If you want to retain customers, you need to make sure that your product is top quality. People won’t come back if the product itself is no good, but that is only part of the battle. 

You should also offer incentives for customers who buy multiple products or sign up for monthly subscriptions. You want to focus on retention, so think of ways that you can reward people for sticking around. For example, if someone buys 3 different products from you, they get the fourth one free. 

If you follow these tips and develop a winning go-to-market strategy, you will see long term growth.