The Essential Components of a Go-to-Market Strategy: 6 Key Aspects You Can't Ignore

The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that 20% of new businesses fail within two years of being open, 45% fail within 5 years, and 65% fail within 10 years. The statistics are even more staggering for startups:

20% of startups fail after just one year
30% of startups shut down within two years
50% of startups shut their doors within five years

What’s the best way to lower this risk, you ask? To develop a killer go-to-market strategy. HubSpot defines a go-to-market strategy (GTM) as “a step-by-step plan designed to bring a new product to market and drive demand.” Essentially, a well-designed GTM strategy will drive your marketing initiatives and sustain your ability to maximize revenue and business growth.

But where should you begin? How will you know what aspects you should include in your GTM strategy? Don’t stress, we’ve got you covered. In this article, we’re sharing the top 6 must-haves of a go-to-market strategy that wins. Let’s dive in.

1. Lead Nurture Campaigns Keep Audiences Engaged

According to HubSpot, when executed well, email marketing has a whopping 4,200% ROI. That means email generates $42 for every $1 spent! Lead nurturing campaigns are automated email sequences that offer up personalized and relevant content to leads that take them through their buying journey. As the leads engage with your emails and any downloadable content provided inside the emails, they convert into marketing qualified leads (MQLs).

Below is an example of a lead nurture campaign targeting marketing leaders interested in improving their organization’s SEO.

an example of a lead nurture campaign targeting marketing leaders interested in improving their organization’s SEO.

Best practice is to automate your email nurture campaigns to send every 8 business days, approximately. This will help ensure your emails aren’t bombarding recipients day after day.

➡️ Read the inspiring story of How One IT Automation Start-Up Experienced a 68% Uptick in Monthly MQLs via Lead Nurturing.

2. Paid Search & Paid Social Advertising Attract New Leads

Pay-per-click ads generate twice as much web traffic as SEO alone. It’s true! Not only do they boost web traffic, but they can increase brand awareness by up to 80%. There are two advertising options we recommend to implement into your go-to-market strategy: Paid search and paid social advertising. Let’s look a bit closer at both.

Paid Search Advertising Benefits:

Great for web searchers who are actively looking for what you're offering
Best for companies seeking to target a wide audience
You can set the budget to suit your goals best
You’ll only pay when someone clicks on your ad

Paid Search Advertising Options Include (to name a few):

Paid Social Advertising Benefits:

Great for social users who are passively taking in content and may be interested in something that catches their eye
Best for companies looking to hyper-personalize their advertisements and target a specific subset of people
The price varies based on your end-goal objective for the campaign

Paid Social Advertising Options Include (to name a few):

Yet, both paid search and paid social campaigns help you:

Get more eyes on your brand
Drive traffic to your website
Generate leads most likely to convert

➡️ Which ad platform—Google Ads or LinkedIn Ads—is best for your business goals? Find out here.

3. Quality Content Makes a Quality Go-to-Market Strategy

Today, your customers are being bombarded with uninspired marketing content. And they lack the bandwidth and tolerance for it. 55% of today’s buyers move on if a piece of content does not pique their interest within the first minute. To outpace competitors and win in today’s over-saturated market, you need a data-driven content marketing strategy that cuts through the noise and:

Increases your web traffic
Drives visitor-to-lead conversions
Nurtures your database to identify marketing qualified leads (MQLs)
Provides your sales team with sales qualified leads (SQLs)

To improve your go-to-market strategy and maximize engagement, it’s best to diversify your content in various ways, including:

Ways to diversify your content

Source: 17 Steps to Build an Effective Marketing Engine for Startups: The Ultimate Playbook for CMOs

Pro Tip: Use A/B testing throughout your content—subject lines, titles, calls-to-action, etc.—to pinpoint which messaging resonates most with your audience and garners increased engagement.

4. Social Media Maximizes Reach

Today’s B2B buyers are not only interacting with your website and sales reps, they’re mainly engaging with your social media platforms and content. Now more than ever, it’s essential for marketers to leverage the power of social media marketing within their go-to-market strategy to:

Maximize brand visibility
Garner best-fit leads
Engage buyers

To do this, it’s best to optimize your social media marketing strategy for social media algorithms. Social algorithms are a way for social media platforms to organize and present posts to users based on relevancy. And each social media platform has its own algorithm! For more information on how to do this, check out our blog How to Optimize Your Marketing Strategies for Social Media Algorithms.

The Dos and Don’ts of Organic Social Media Marketing

Do…

Analyze and track metrics to measure post engagement
Keep your brand consistent across all of your social media marketing
Create a social media schedule to plan your posts and align them to your overall marketing strategy

Don’t…

Use every existing social media platform (only use the platforms your target audiences use!)
Ignore comments, DMs, and other interactions
Assume each social media algorithm is the same (each platform has its own)

5. Great Graphic Design Can Make or Break Your Go-to-Market Success

80% of CMOs at small to midsize businesses report graphic design is moderate to very important to the success of their marketing strategy. A way-ahead-of-its-time psychology study in 2004 determined that poor designs on a website are over 15x more likely to divert site visitors than poor content.

Even today, utilizing clear and easily consumable graphics enables brands to:

Communicate a message effectively
Tell a story with visuals
Engage audiences with attention-grabbing images

Below, we’ve listed some great design tools and some great outsourced graphic design teams that can help you bring your go-to-market strategy to life. Check them out!

Design Tools:

Outsourced Graphic Design Teams:

6. Marketing Performance Analysis is Vital to Adapting Your GTM Strategy

The most critical component of your marketing strategy is the data that drives it. Yet, 87% of marketers say data is their most under-utilized asset. Below are the top 5 marketing KPIs B2B marketers must measure to monitor their go-to-market strategy’s success.

Determining the ROI of Your Tech Stack