The modern consumer has more choices in the market than ever before. To bring your product to market, you need an incredibly precise strategy in place to cut through the noise. Getting your message heard is only half the battle. These five steps will help you ensure your message is correctly interpreted by the audience you are targeting.
Your message needs to cut through the clutter, get to the right people, and say the right thing. That means you need a strategy that organizes your ideas, your value proposition, and the essence of why customers will choose your product. The following best practices can go a long way in ensuring your success.
1. Define your buyer profiles
Before you can hone in on your target, you have to know what you are aiming at. Quantify your market through precise buyer profiles – demographics, ethnographics, psychographics, geographics and study of behavior.
Segment your audience into several buyer profiles (mid-level businesses usually have three to five profiles). If this is your first product launch, focus on one or two buyer personas. Each buyer profile highlights a specific KPI within your company; your most loyal customers showcase these trends in their characteristics.
2. Assess new market opportunities
It is also vital to properly assess each of these new market opportunities. Defining your audience through the metrics that are most important to you makes a difference. Most companies bringing a new product to market will consider barriers to entry, total market size, growth trends in the market, the company’s ability to compete, and the economics of the market. Once you match your profiles to your processes, you will have a good headstart on your competition.
3. Position your brand and offering
Ask yourself the following questions to help define your product’s unique value proposition:
These questions will help you form a more specific set of buyer profiles. Do not be afraid to go through this a few times until you begin to see diminishing returns in your research cycle.
4. Link your channels
Think about where most of your sales will come from. Your messaging and communication should change depending on whether it’s through your online presence, brick-and-mortar stores, or any other channels that might lead to success.
You do not have to be an omnichannel business catering to every social media outlet in the market. Part of assessing your buyer profiles is to understand where you meet your prospects in the sales funnel. No Facebook page is sometimes more helpful to your brand than having an empty one that looks bad to the few visitors who show up there. An active Twitter account may be beneficial if that is where your ideal customers are spending their time.
You must also provide a consistent brand experience to your prospects regardless of where they find you. In each platform, you should have the same brand voice, but maybe a different conversation based on who will be viewing the content. A great place to start to profile your social media choices is Pew Research’s annual demographic statistics on social media use.
5. Consistent analysis
The market is always changing, and there will always be new technologies and processes that you cannot predict. You must be able to incorporate them into your business more quickly than your competition.
Talking to your customers will help you find out how they discover and access their preferred brands or vendors. Performing analytics checks on your channels will help you determine when things are moving. You also have the opportunity to peer in on the analytics of your competitors. Looking at other successful strategies might give you inspiration for your own online strategies. For example, the keywords that people use are public knowledge, and it is par for the course to compete for the hottest keywords and phrases.
Understanding the importance of your go-to-market strategy
These best practices will keep your products moving on rollout and far beyond. Regardless of the details of your market, these steps will always remain relevant, especially for midsize businesses and new products. If you need a hand understanding how to make your message resonate, we can help.
“Plans are worthless, but planning is everything.”
We remember these words from President Dwight Eisenhower often when helping a client bring a new product to market, because a dynamic plan is the difference between success and failure when bringing a new product to market.
VOLTAGE is a digital agency specializing in eCommerce, digital brand experiences, and web apps. Get emails and insights from our team:
Every good brand has a tone; an identity. The best brands have a singular thread – a voice that links all of the in-market messaging to resonate with the intended audience.
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