Today’s guest is an ICON.
Marketing bestie, meet Go-to-Market expert AND Marketingland favorite, Rebecca Shaddix.
From Go-to-Market trends you need to be keeping an eye on to the fundamentals of excellent Go-to-Market strategies, we break it ALL down.
Here’s what Rebecca had to say in her own liiiiightly edited words.
1️⃣) Brands crushing it with their GTM strategy, and why?
“Figma and Adobe by extension, do an impressive job layering effective content marketing on top of their product-led growth strategy. I highly recommend checking them out.
Their pricing/packaging models, product-driven growth loops, and clear positioning reflect strong understanding of the attributes and pain points their target market prioritizes, and command over the full lifecycle of their funnel.
Now I’ve also been impressed with OpenAI’s effective launch events and demos, and the way their GTM strategy effectively leverages pricing and packaging strategies that appeal directly to both developers and consumers.
OpenAI’s pricing and packaging prioritize usage and adoption of the platform over strict monetization goals in the near term, tailored to attract both developers and end consumers with competitive pricing.
Instead of a narrow focus on immediate monetization, they prioritize the widespread adoption and usage of their platform.
By offering competitive, value-based pricing with a distinct value proposition, they encourage developers to integrate with their platform, a sharp contrast to companies like Reddit that have sometimes priced out developers. This approach not only promotes growth but fosters a loyal developer community.
On the brand values front: Tiffany & Co. has impressively evolved its brand to resonate with a younger audience, strategically employing influencers and messaging that align with Gen Z values,without sacrificing its historic prestige. In a similar vein, Abercrombie & Fitch has shed its reputation for elitism and limited diversity by embracing new ad campaign tones that blend authentic, modern diversity, smaller logos, and hallmark ‘old luxury’ quality.
Those are just a few of the brands knocking it out of the park
2️⃣) What are the must have parts to a successful go to market strategy
- Market Segmentation – who are you winning for? Who are you winning against?
- Positioning, Messaging & Differentiation
- Distribution Strategy – who are you reaching, through which channels, with what offer?
- Success Metrics and KPIs
- Feedback & Iteration Plan
3️⃣) What pitfalls do you see brands making in their go to market strategy, and what would you change?
In 2023 especially, brands are over-indexing on industry or historic benchmarks to make decisions. This leads to rigidity in GTM strategies and tactics. Q3 2023 doesn’t look like Q2 2022 for a variety of reasons, and we have fewer year over year comparisons.
But do be careful, it’s easy to also go the exact opposite way and make the mistake of trying too many brand new things when conversions and revenue decline, as opposed to going back to your core and finding relevant ways to strengthen what you do best for your most profitable segments.
Another pitfall of brands in 2023 is in choosing noisy metrics that can’t be isolated or failing to define the right leading and lagging KPIs.
You need both as early indicators in order to say strategic pivots are needed.
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Now if you’re choosing metrics because they’re easy to measure, they may not necessarily be best aligned with our GTM strategy.
This can give you a false sense of progress and can entice gaming vanity metrics without understanding the full-funnel conversion rate implications.
4️⃣) A go to market hill she would die on
Not everything that matters can be measured.
It may sound strange for a data nerd and during a time period now in which every dollar of Marketing spend is being scrutinized, but there is such a thing as too much data.
Often, building in experiments for first launches distracts resources from developing a better, more cohesive single customer journey. And can slow down page performance without yielding statistically significant data if your early sample sets are small.
Launching a v1 and then iterating with repeated high-value touchpoints is often more effective than trying to work in multiple launch iterations to test at initial launch.
Brand-building touchpoints will be impossible to fully attribute, and people won’t remember everything that drove brand sentiment and ultimate conversions. Even if something like a “how did you hear about us” survey makes us feel better about compensating for lack of visibility into some attribution models.
5️⃣) New trends and things she’s looking out for
I’m really excited for the role of generative AI in optimizing the customer journey, and automating faster rounds of iteration.
I think we’re at a watershed moment, where the very crux of what’s possible is being redefined.
As a Marketer you need to be looped in on the amazing things happening in that world.”