After I slept on my “trust funnel” post, I decided that it was too long and took the entire “go-to-market” section out. But I saved it and am sharing it with you here.
This little piggy went to market
(Yes, I know that the little piggy didn’t go to market to do their own shopping. But bear with me here.)
If you are creating content as part of the formal launch of a product or service, you are creating SOME type of go-to-market (GTM) plan.
- Perhaps it’s a well-defined plan.
- Perhaps it’s a simple document.
- Maybe it’s a haphazard dictate to “go to market in three days.”
About the “three days” thing
(C, I told you I was going to write this.)
Oh, and by the way, you can’t go to market in three days, even if someone says you can. You can’t. Or if you do, there will be significant gaps or inaccuracies.
In her LinkedIn Learning course, Deirdre Breakenridge prefers to define a four-month go-to-market plan, with specific deliverables for every one of the months in the plan. Of course, she admits that this is ideal, and sometimes you can’t take a full four months to bring a product or service to market. Whether you take four months or six months or even two months, GTM execution for any robust product or service needs a significant amount of time to get all the pieces together.
One of the reasons that it takes months to execute a GTM plan is because a GTM plan requires inputs from several departments, including
- product,
- marketing,
- product marketing (if it is separate from the first two departments),
- engineering,
- customer success/customer service,
- finance,
- sales, and
- legal.
You won’t get all of THEM to produce inputs, or even agree what the inputs should be, in three days. It takes time.
But there ARE teeny tiny GTM efforts
One exception to the four-month guidance: if your “product” or “service” is VERY small (like a single blog post), you can obviously go-to-market much more quickly.
For example, here’s my Asana-based “GTM plan” for a single blog post, “I Changed My Mind on Age Estimation.“
Sometimes. At other times I skip Asana altogether and just take pictures and post stuff, like what I did with my “Coldest Beer in Town” and “Classy by Definition” posts from earlier today. Variety is good.
Back to normal GTM
But when your product or service is more complex, then you need to plan your GTM campaign and make sure that it answers all questions about your product or service.
There are all sorts of GTM guidelines out there, and I was part of a team who collaboratively created three different flavors of GTM guidelines over the course of several months, starting with the complex and ending with the ridiculously simple. And the team STILL couldn’t get the other teams to agree on the parameters of the guidelines.
I’m not going to dictate MY ideas on GTM guidelines, but I will say that whatever guidelines you create, make sure that by the time a GTM effort created under these guidelines is finished, both your prospects and your employees will gain the appropriate understanding of your product or service, and the GTM content will answer all of their questions.
(UPDATE OCTOBER 23, 2023: “SIX QUESTIONS YOUR CONTENT CREATOR SHOULD ASK YOU IS SO 2022. DOWNLOAD THE NEWER “SEVEN QUESTIONS YOUR CONTENT CREATOR SHOULD ASK YOU” HERE.)
If you don’t know what questions to ask, my six questions (why, how, what goal, benefits, target audience) can be adapted for GTM purposes.
What about your GTM content?
Are you executing a go-to-market plan and need to create some content?
- Do you need customer-facing external content (blog posts, white papers, whatever)?
- Do you need employee-facing internal content (FAQs, battlecards, whatever)?
Regardless of the content you need, Bredemarket can help you. Here’s a list of the types of content I’ve created over the years:
Articles • Battlecards (80+) • Blog Posts (400+) • Briefs/Data/Literature Sheets • Case Studies (12+) • Competitive Analyses • Email Newsletters (200+) • Event/Conference/Trade Show Demonstration Scripts • FAQs • Plans • Playbooks • Presentations • Proposal Templates • Proposals (100+) • Quality Improvement Documents • Requirements • Scientific Book Chapters • Smartphone Application Content • Social Media (Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Threads, TikTok, Twitter) • Strategic Analyses • Web Page Content • White Papers and E-Books
Whatever you need, talk to me. And be prepared for me to ask you six (or more) questions.
- Email me at john.bredehoft@bredemarket.com.
- Book a meeting with me at calendly.com/bredemarket.
- Contact me at bredemarket.com/contact/.
- Subscribe to my mailing list at http://eepurl.com/hdHIaT.
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