Guide
What is a go-to-market strategy?
Meaning, importance, examples, and how to build a GTM plan
A go-to-market strategy is an extensive plan designed to help launch, position, price, and promote a product or service to a target audience. A go-to-market (GTM) plan often includes marketing research, a full marketing and promotional strategy, and a strategy for sales.
Start using Amazon Ads to display your products and create campaigns.
If you have limited experience, contact us to request services managed by Amazon Ads. Budget minimums apply.
Help increase sales and conversions with actionable insights and efficiency.
Think of a go-to-market strategy (sometimes referred to as a GTM strategy) as the north star that guides your product launch. In the same way you wouldn’t set off on a trip without directions, you shouldn’t embark on a product or service launch without a GTM strategy that takes into consideration the competition your brand faces, the marketing and promotional strategy that will bolster the launch, and a sales plan that makes sure your message and product are distributed appropriately.
What is a go-to-market strategy?
A go-to-market (GTM) strategy is a step-by-step guide that helps you define, develop, and deliver your start-up’s business strategy. Its purpose is to help you plan what to do to make the launch process successful by providing a road map for the actions you need to take. Every start-up’s GTM strategy will be unique in some ways, but many of the broader steps are almost always common.
Why is a go-to-market strategy important?
A go-to-market (GTM) strategy demonstrates that you’ve done the planning on the front half of a new product launch to ensure you have the best chance of success when you decide to execute your marketing strategy.
Specifically, a GTM strategy can help your brand understand its place in the larger industry you’re marketing within. Not only will a comprehensive GTM strategy take your competition into account, it will also look at research that helps your brand better understand its audience.
Benefits of a go-to-market strategy
Understanding your audience
Before identifying a specific buyer, your brand should look into its customer base and what needs they’ll need to meet. Research into a customer base will help your brand understand the buyer, the value proposition you need to present to create a relevant and meaningful marketing experience, and a pricing strategy (with help from your sales team) for the new product that best fits the potential customers’ needs. If a GTM strategy isn’t created with the potential customers in mind, that target audience will likely find someone whose marketing strategy was.
Understanding your market
Nailing down a target market can be tricky, but putting together a GTM strategy is a solid way of launching a brand into a new market or rethinking how your brand exists in a current one. While your brand understands your new product and the value proposition it can offer, better understanding your target market will help you analyze how that new product fits into the larger market. It can even reveal if there’s a better way to market your product.
Understanding your marketing plan
By putting together a GTM strategy, you’ve effectively started the first part of your marketing plan. By understanding the audience and the market you’re entering, you are able to better identify the potential pain points you could run up against and set a more realistic benchmark for key performance indicators (KPIs) your brand hopes to achieve. Even more, it helps you figure out where you should be: Is there a need for a social media strategy? What kind of content marketing should you do?
From there, you can use the marketing plan to help build out a more robust sales strategy to take customers from interest to sales conversion, supported by your pricing strategy and sales team.
How to create a go-to-market strategy
Step 1. Research, and then research again
Many start-ups begin with an insight, which is usually stated as a market opportunity. The fact that this opportunity exists tends to come down to one of two factors: Either no one else has seen the opportunity, or others have seen it and tried to fulfill it but failed. If the latter is true, that may be because the opportunity was not as good as it appeared.
To establish whether there is a viable market for what you’re planning to offer, your GTM strategy must start with solid marketing research. If you are solving a problem, how much of a problem is this for the people who experience it, and what might they be willing to pay to solve it? At this stage, it's important to determine your total addressable market, serviceable addressable market, and serviceable obtainable market (TAM SAM SOM).
Step 2. Understand the competition
Secondly, you need to understand the true state of your competition, including their strengths and weaknesses, even if it appears that none of them do exactly what you will do. Never underestimate the difficulty involved in wooing a customer away from a tried-and-tested alternative, even when that alternative doesn’t work as well as what you’re offering. A strong GTM strategy understands the competition as well as your brand itself.
Step 3. Connect with your target audience
Thirdly, you need a solid plan for reaching your target audience. This must cover both the practical aspects of distribution, along with the strategies you will use to ensure they are familiar with your brand or product. Amazon Ads has a number of solutions that help everyone from small and medium-sized businesses to start-ups and more.
Your GTM strategy needs to include an understanding of where your customers are, the channels you will use to reach them, and the messages you will send to gain their attention.
Step 4. Be first (or close to it)
Although each GTM strategy is unique, there can be great similarities between their different stages, so there is no harm in borrowing innovative ideas from the kinds of businesses you want to emulate. So, while there may be no perfect GTM strategy that already exists for your start-up, it is worth studying how many of the world’s best start-ups worked their own way through the stages of development.
Borrowing proven ideas is a good way to reduce the risk in launching a start-up by reducing the number of unknowns involved. The one factor that is common—and critical—is their willingness to try out many different ideas and then carefully analyze the feedback.
Another one of the techniques commonly used by start-ups is to create a minimum viable product, or MVP. This is essentially a stripped-back version of the proposed product or service, which includes enough features and benefits to attract interest, and it can be used to gather early feedback from customers.
Go-to-market strategy examples
Case Studies
Zumi’s Magnum Matcha unboxing and tasting was a two-hour custom influencer broadcast. The stream was amplified with Twitch advertising products like Twitch Premium Video, Homepage Carousel, display ads, and programmatic video. Through these methods, Magnum was able to reach a wide audience. The program received about 2 million video impressions, with a 0.66% video click-through rate, and generated an 85% video completion rate.
By collaborating with Twitch, Magnum introduced their new Asian-flavor-inspired ice cream to a relevant audience, reached a wide group of potential consumers, and promoted their product in the streaming community. Food brands that want to bring awareness and consideration to their products while connecting with a live and engaged audience may consider using Twitch’s advertising solutions for their product needs.
Blog
For the first time, Coca-Cola, which owns Smartwater, came to Amazon’s custom advertising solutions for a product launch exclusively in Amazon’s store. Coca-Cola brought a product idea to the Custom Ads team, “and from there we went on to help build the new product’s look, feel, and tone,” said Joseph Delhommer, the creative director for custom ads at Amazon.
The campaign, called “A Smarter Way to Hydrate,” is made up of custom 15-second animated videos, premium sample boxes sent to 100 influencers, a custom landing page, and Amazon DSP and Streaming TV ads across Amazon. On the landing page, customers can discover more ways to use the types of Smartwater+, as detailed through vibrant animated videos.
Case Studies
To build awareness for their new product, True Roots, Marico leveraged Sponsored Display ads to reach potential customers in two cohorts: brand browsers who had not yet purchased, and customers suffering from premature graying of hair. Creatives with relevant messaging guided customers to the True Roots Store.
Their Store was designed to educate the potential customers on the product benefits and usage including dermatologist recommendations and customer testimonials. This led to an increase in dwell time for this content in the Store, as compared to the product’s page, and thereby helped drive 3x conversions.
If you have limited experience, contact us to request services managed by Amazon Ads. Budget minimums apply.