What is a go-to-market strategy? And tips and tricks to help you create yours

A go-to-market strategy is a comprehensive, step-by-step plan for introducing a new product or service to the market. In this week’s blog we will talk you through the process of creating your go-to-market strategy and give you advice to help you get started with yours. Its primary purpose is to mitigate risk and ensure the product reaches the right audience at the right time, preventing wasting of resources. A well-defined go-to-market strategy aligns internal teams and provides a clear, shared vision and roadmap for launch.

Go-to-market strategy vs. marketing strategy: clarifying the confusion

Before diving into the detail of a go-to-market strategy we wanted to take the time to distinguish the difference between a go-to-market strategy and a general marketing plan or strategy. A go-to-market strategy is a short-term, tactical blueprint specifically focused on a single product launch or entering a new market. Whereas a marketing strategy is a broader, long-term approach to build brand awareness and grow overall market presence over time. The go-to-market strategy is a component of the overall marketing strategy, focusing on the "how" and "where" of the initial launch.

Aligning teams and encouraging collaboration

At the point where you are creating your go-to-market strategy you have developed your product and are ready to push it out into the world. There are two approaches business tend to take when developing new products, they start with the customer needs and take a customer-centric approach, or they start with an internal view and then think about the market after they’ve developed their product. Depending on how your organisation develops products will shape what additional information you need to gather to develop the go-to-market strategy.

The thing about marketing is that we can very rarely work in isolation, nor should we and developing a strong go-to-market strategy is no different. You want to ensure that you’ve captured the insight and knowledge from a variety of stakeholders, including, but not limited to sales, marketing and operations.

Therefore, one of our top tips to create a collaborative space and a working group for a product launch. Set out upfront the expectations of the working group and how you are going to work together. Creating your vision and shared objectives for the product launch together to ensure everyone is bought in and pulling in the same direction.

One of the things that we have often found is that there is a lot of assumed knowledge from different members of the team and therefore it might be worth putting everything you know on the table at the beginning of the planning stage. This is a good way to ensure that you’re not missing any parts of the picture. For example, you might want to run a workshop on the market using tools such as PESTLE, Porters Three Tests and Porters Five Forces, to quickly get a depth of information.

We would also recommend that you run a second workshop where you define your customer personas and give people an opportunity to share their customer insight that goes beyond demographic information.

The core components of a winning go-to-market strategy

We think that there are four essential elements that need consideration when building a go-to-market strategy. The first is target audience. Clearly identify your ideal customer profile and create a persona. This is a semi-fictional portrayal of a customer group, it blends insight and data your organisation has with assumptions to help you bring your audience to live. We have spoken more about how we can help organisation create personas here.

The next is to clearly define your value proposition and messaging. Defining what unique problem your product solves and why customers should choose it over competitors is crucial for differentiation. This is often the bit that people find difficult and one way to narrow this done is to consider in terms of jobs to be done by your persona, what social, emotional and functional needs is your new product meeting.

You also need to include a section dedicated to your channels and tactics. Selecting the most effective marketing and distribution channels (for example, content marketing, social media, direct sales, partners) to reach your target audience. We are going to do a separate blog post where we talk about how you might use these channels differently for new product launches.

Our fourth essential element is one that is often forgotten, but really important. Because the reality is that not every product idea is a good one and is going to work and you need to know when you’re going to bail, when you’re going to stick and when you’ve been successful. This is why you need to create strong success criteria with clear go-no-go decision points during the launch phase.

We hope that you’ve enjoyed reading todays blog post, we are going to do a future post where we expand on go-to-market strategy more covering useful tools and selecting your marketing approach. If you are launching a new product or entering a new marketing in 2026 and would like help at creating your go-to-market strategy please get in touch.