6-Step Proven Go-to-Market Strategy Framework for Remarkable Agency Growth

A go-to-market (GTM) strategy is a holistic plan detailing how a company will successfully launch and market its offerings to achieve its business objectives.

This strategy offers a clear path from point A (where you are now) to point B (where you want to go) with an understanding of the required people, process, & tech to achieve success.

For agencies, a GTM strategy is crucial as it enables differentiation, target audience engagement, and the establishment of a strong market presence to build relationships with prospects and drive new business.

A well-crafted, thoughtfully designed GTM strategy provides practical solutions to challenging questions, such as:

1. Which unique business challenges can you solve for clients?
2. Which audience segments offer a higher-than-average probability of success?
3. What does the buying journey of your prospects look like?
4. Which content is most suitable for each stage of their buying journey?
5. How can you incentivize prospects to take desired actions?
6. Which marketing channels are most effective for reaching your prospects?
7. What KPIs should be monitored to measure success?

Go-to-market strategies are often associated with B2B SaaS companies targeting specific markets during product launches. Compared to SaaS companies, agencies face unique challenges, such as complex purchasing processes that are further complicated by intangibles like expertise instead of tangible products that can be easily defined and compared. The added complexity makes developing a GTM strategy for professional services more challenging but even more critical.

Why a GTM Strategy is the Missing Link to Your Business Development Program

A well-crafted GTM strategy is instrumental in guiding agencies toward success by offering clear focus and direction. It enables optimal resource allocation and accelerates time-to-market, ultimately driving new relationships and growth.

• Clear Focus and Direction: A well-defined GTM strategy provides a clear focus and direction for the entire organization by outlining the target market, customer segments, value proposition, and competitive advantages. This helps align the agency’s efforts and resources toward achieving its goals.
• Optimal Resource Allocation: A GTM strategy helps agencies allocate resources efficiently by identifying the most effective marketing channels, sales strategies, and partnerships. This ensures that time, money, and effort are invested in the areas that will yield the highest returns.
• Faster Time-to-Market: With a GTM strategy, agencies can streamline their business development processes and service offering design, accelerating their time-to-market. This enables agencies to seize market opportunities, stay ahead of the competition, and generate faster revenue growth.

How To Create a GTM Strategy that Builds Relationships with Ideal Prospects

1. Pick Pivotal Problems

A pivotal problem is a pervasive challenge that companies or prospects face, which they consider urgent and important, and are willing to pay to solve. Identifying and addressing pivotal problems is essential for agencies, as it becomes the foundation for their GTM.

Consider a pivotal problem in the alcoholic beverage industry as an example. Younger generations have recently experienced a significant decrease in alcohol consumption, posing a challenge for brands to maintain relevance with this crucial demographic.

For an alcoholic beverage brand manager, addressing this problem is urgent and important, as the shifting preferences of this demographic directly affect sales. Consequently, this issue is one that the company would likely be willing to invest in solving, given its critical impact on their business.

Agencies frequently grapple with differentiating between the problems they solve for clients and the solutions they provide. “We need a website” is not a problem; it’s a potential solution. The actual problem might be “We are struggling with sales,” which could be addressed by creating a new website.

To pinpoint the problems you solve for clients:

1. Take a client inventory: Document your client wins, losses, and no decisions over the past three years. Incorporate essential firmographic data such as industry, geographic location, and revenue. Outline the primary challenge faced by the client, your solution, and the results.
2. Assess urgency and importance: Review the problems. Are these problems urgent and important, not urgent but important, urgent but not important, or not urgent and not important to resolve?
3. Consider impact: Examine the outcomes—how did your work impact the client? Were results weak? Average? Very strong?
4. Evaluate differentiation: Assess your solution and determine how unique and distinct it was compared to what similar agencies might have offered.
5. Analyze the data: After completing this exercise, patterns will emerge. Do you notice any recurring problems among the clients you win or lose? What are the similarities between these companies?

Picking pivotal problems (and demonstrating a unique point of view on how to solve it) is the first step of a go-to-market strategy. With this foundation, agencies can create content and campaigns that educate on tackling these challenges, pinpoint the target audience segments facing the problems, and begin the relationship-making process.

2. Research Audience Segments

While identifying your pivotal problems, you’ll notice recurring themes around audience segments. Your firm might possess deep expertise in a specific vertical, such as healthcare, or a particular audience group, like Gen Z, or have a focus on companies within a region, like the Northeast.

Select audience segments where your agency has a right-to-win, as opposed to those where you merely want-to-win. A right-to-win audience is a segment where your agency has a better-than-average chance of success in winning business due to experience.

Agencies often create wish lists, fail to gain traction and blame their new business person. The problem might not be the individual but the process. Although most agencies would love to work with brands like Apple, Nike, or Google, your business development efforts will likely fail if you lack experience solving problems for similar companies.

So, what should you do?

1. Develop an ideal company profile: An ideal company profile (ICP) describes a company that is a perfect fit for your agency. Look for characteristics such as industry, geography, and revenue. To do this, refer to the client inventory you created for pivotal problems. Identify commonalities between the clients you’ve won and lost, and determine which clients have been most profitable and had the longest tenure to build the ICP.
2. Create buyer personas: Buyer personas are profiles that represent the best-fit decision-makers or influencers within a company to target. They include job titles, title rank, and years of experience. Examine your current clients, RFI/RFPs, inbound inquiries, and other touchpoints with prospects to develop these personas. Analyze their characteristics, and incorporate this information into the persona, along with assumptions about other potential decision-makers or influencers in the organization to target.
3. Build a target account list: A target account list is a master list of companies and relevant data points used for prioritizing business development initiatives. Include the company name, firmographic data, past engagement history, relationships with stakeholders within your agency, and any possible intent triggers. Aim to create a comprehensive list of all companies that fit your ideal company profile for each audience segment, as this will become your target list.

With this information, you can start to plan the content, channels, and offers for each audience segment and the specific content for each stage of the buyer’s journey.

3. Own the Journey

The process a potential customer undergoes to acquire advertising or marketing products or services is known as the buyer’s journey. This journey is not linear, as prospects independently research through various channels and platforms, transitioning between stages without the seller’s awareness.

Due to heightened competition and information overload, an increased number of interactions are needed to generate and seize demand.

The buyer’s journey, or path to purchase, can be divided into three stages: awareness, consideration, and decision.

• Awareness Stage: The buyer recognizes they have a problem.
• Consideration Stage: The buyer identifies their problem and starts exploring possible solutions.
• Decision Stage: The buyer assesses different solutions and decides the best vendor to address their issue.

Research indicates that only 3% of companies currently need and actively seek partners. Meanwhile, 7% have a need but do not actively search for options, 30% have a need but not enough to take action, and 30% have no need. The remaining 30% of the market is incompatible with your brand and will not purchase from you.

Companies should approach business development in two ways: demand creation and demand capture. Demand capture targets the 10% of companies that are active buyers or plan to change within the next 30 to 90 days. Demand creation focuses on the 60%-90% of companies that may require your services in the future.

To develop a buyer’s journey:

1. Identify and map topics: Determine the questions, problems, and challenges concerning your buyer by conducting customer interviews/surveys, attending events/conferences, and consulting internal subject-matter experts. Associate these concerns with each stage of the buyer’s journey.
2. Audit and evaluate content: Perform a content audit by listing your existing content and its types (e.g., videos, slides, press releases, case studies, etc.) and assessing its relevance to your buyer’s concerns.
3. Plan and prioritize content: Determine what content can be used as-is, identify gaps, and decide which content can be updated or repurposed to fill those gaps. Collaborate with your subject matter experts to create original, insight-driven pillar content that presents your unique perspective on addressing crucial problems. After identifying the necessary content, proceed to develop and implement it.

When you understand your buyer’s journey, you can meet prospects where they are with your content. Understanding their wants and needs will provide a better experience for prospects, build trust and relationships, and influence their purchasing decision.

4. Provide Value

Connecting with prospects is more challenging than ever. Simply offering a 15-minute demo, scheduling a “getting acquainted” call, or presenting your capabilities will not be enough. Adopting a relationship-building mindset and approach, you should embrace the idea of “give to get” by providing value to prospects and presenting them with an offer.

An offer is a proposal extended to a prospect that captures their attention and motivates the desired action, usually scheduling a meeting. Generally, for agencies, the offer involves exchanging knowledge, which may include sharing insights, inspiration, creating publicity, or establishing connections.

LinkedIn research reveals that the top three factors influencing a buyer’s willingness to engage with a vendor include understanding their company’s business model, being a subject matter expert or thought leader, and offering valuable consultations, education, or tools.

Delivering value helps you stand out from the crowd, establishes your expertise, creates a platform for discussing client challenges, and initiates the relationship with reciprocity. In fact, 64% of buyers claim that an organization’s thought leadership content is more reliable for evaluating its capabilities and competence than marketing materials or product sheets.

Common offers encompass:

• Workshop/inspiration session: A complimentary workshop or inspiration session where your firm shares its unique or differentiated point of view on addressing a critical issue the prospect is likely facing.
• Virtual panel/fireside chat: An invitation to participate and network in a virtual panel or fireside chat alongside their peers, discussing a pressing challenge or trending topic.
• PR opportunity: An invitation to be featured as a guest on your firm’s podcast or contribute to a published article on a relevant topic.
• Audit: A complimentary or significantly discounted audit that gives the prospect insights into weaknesses, opportunities, threats, or competitor benchmarks.
• Original research: Sharing exclusive insights from your agency’s research that is relevant to the prospect and not publicly available.

Effective B2B thought leadership significantly impacts brand perception and purchasing behavior throughout the entire decision-making process. The key is to present an offer perceived as valuable by the prospect. It should be innovative, unique, and leave the prospect in an improved position.

5. Evaluate Channels

With a content strategy for each buyer journey stage and an offer that provides value to prospects, the next step is to evaluate and select the appropriate marketing channels to reach them.

These marketing channels enable agencies to educate prospects, drive awareness, create demand, capture demand, and give them a positive experience with their brand. Some of these channels include:

Cold Calling
Cold Email
Conferences/Trade Shows
Direct Mail
Display/Retargeting
Email Marketing
Live Events
Paid Search/PPC
Partner Marketing
Podcasts
Public Relations
SEO
Social Media
Webinars
Website

A strong marketing channel strategy is imperative for businesses to flourish as it creates a blueprint for how an agency will fill its pipeline with prospects and qualified leads.

However, what works well for one business might not work for another. The best B2B marketing channel is any repeatable, scalable channel that delivers a profitable return on marketing spend.

To develop your marketing channel strategy,

1. Define Marketing Goals: Consider your overall objectives when adopting a new marketing channel and establish measurable KPIs. Understanding your goals will guide your marketing channel investments.
2. Establish a Budget: Creating a marketing budget is vital for responsible spending and monitoring ROI. Marcel Petitpas, CEO of Parakeeto, suggests allocating 8-14% of adjusted gross income to sales and marketing.
3. Create a Revenue Attribution Report: This report assigns marketing costs and channels to sales revenue, offering insights into the effectiveness of your marketing initiatives. By analyzing revenue attribution, you can better allocate resources to high-performing channels.
4. Research Your Audience: Develop a comprehensive buyer persona by researching your audience’s online behaviors, content preferences, events attended, and group affiliations. Focus on marketing channels where your target audience is already present.
5. Investigate Your Competition: Analyze your competitors’ marketing strategies for inspiration and insight into effective channels. Examine their social profiles, search results, website content, and newsletters to gauge their approach and identify potential channels for your business.
6. Select Your Channels: Armed with a budget, buyer persona, and competitive intelligence, choose the most relevant channels for your audience, considering the resources available and potential returns.

With numerous marketing channels at your disposal, selecting the ones that best suit your target audience and your agency’s situation is crucial.

6. Launch, Experiment & Scale

In many instances, ideas will outnumber available resources. As a result, it’s crucial to identify the optimal combination of pivotal problems, audience segments, content types, offers, and channels based on research and experience. With this in mind, the Go-to-Market launch should involve a series of small experiments rather than a single, significant investment.

The three primary reasons for this approach are:

1. Cost: Generally, small-scale experiments are more cost-effective than large-scale campaigns. By testing concepts on a smaller scale, you can pinpoint the most successful tactics and minimize resource waste on ineffective strategies.
2. Time: Small experiments allow for faster adjustments to your GTM strategy. You can learn from the results, make necessary changes, and enhance your campaigns iteratively.
3. Risk: Small-scale experiments help mitigate risks associated with substantial marketing investments. If a specific tactic fails in a small experiment, the negative impact on your business is minimal.

Your GTM strategy will require ongoing monitoring, testing, and optimization. While maintaining agility, allow experiments time to develop, which may take 3 to 12 months.

How to Identify Success

During this process, seek indicators of success, validate through repetition, and then scale up. Positive signals can vary, such as increased social media engagement indicating the content is resonating, target accounts visiting to your website, or booked meetings with ideal prospects demonstrating successful outbound prospecting.

Once you’ve identified positive signals, attempt to reproduce the success consistently. For instance, is your email newsletter generating similar engagement every month? Are you converting prospects into meetings at a consistent rate? If so, you are observing recurring positive signals.

If positive signals are lacking or irreproducible, pivot to another experiment. However, it’s time to operationalize and scale if they are present and repeatable. Establish processes, assign the right personnel, and incorporate technology for scaling.

To continue growing, evaluate results, identify optimization opportunities, and initiate new experiments.

Conclusion

No longer just for B2B SaaS companies, a GTM strategy empowers agencies to differentiate themselves, engage their target audience, and establish a robust market presence.

The strategy encompasses identifying the pivotal problems you solve, audience segment research, understanding the buyer journey, creating relevant content, providing value, the right marketing channel mix, and launching, experimenting, and scaling.

By providing a clear focus and direction, enabling optimal resource allocation, and accelerating time-to-market, a well-crafted GTM strategy is vital for agencies looking to differentiate themselves, build relationships with ideal prospects, and drive remarkable growth.