Introduction
Whether small, medium, or large, all kinds of enterprises require B2B SaaS tools to ease their workflow. That's where your product steps in as a solution! However, your innovation needs to be brought to light in front of your target customers.
To do that, you need to have an action plan for marketing that will help you make informed decisions. The Go-To-Market Strategy stands as the commonly used name for this action plan.
Even 85% of executives believe that a successful SaaS Go To Market Strategy is crucial for their organization's success. Ready to dive in, understand the basics of GTM strategy, and learn how to build one for your company? For more clarity, I have also included real-life examples of the components of the GTM strategy of some B2B SaaS companies.
What is GTM Strategy?
Let's just say your SaaS product is ready, and you are excited to launch it among your target customers - developers, product managers, CTOs, or data scientists. Before launching the product, you will need to create an action plan, covering the 5 W's and 1 H:
- What are you going to create a GTM strategy for - a B2B SaaS Product
- Why are you building this strategy - Brand Positioning and Revenue Growth
- Who is it being developed for - ICPs and Buyer Personas
- Where will it be utilized - Target markets
- When will it be brought into action - Timing
- How will you do it - by making a Pricing Strategy, Marketing, and Sales Plan
These parameters will help you create your GTM Plan. I mean, creating this strategy might feel like doing homework, but it's the kind that pays off in actual growth.
Key Benefits
A SaaS GTM strategy helps you define a roadmap for the sales and marketing of your product's pre- and post-launch.
It ensures that you identify your customers' pain points and develop a strategy that effectively aligns your marketing efforts with your ICPs, leading to a higher adoption rate.
It offers scalability and flexibility in how you launch your SaaS product, test the strategy, and make desired adjustments to evolve in the market.
5 Key Elements of a B2B Go To Market Plan
While developing a GTM Plan for your B2B SaaS product, you need to ensure that you integrate some key elements that will bring you more clarity. These elements are:
Market Segmentation: Segment your target market based on the company's size (e.g., 51-200 employees), industry verticals (Technology and Software Development), and buyer personas (CTOs, developers).
Distribution Channel: Choose the relevant distribution mediums to increase product awareness and eventually sell it.
Product Positioning: Plan how you want to position your product in the market, differentiating from the competitors.
Product Messaging: Develop a Unique Selling Proposition (USP) to highlight why your product is better or superior to market alternatives.
Product Pricing: Find a competitive price for your product that will match the market competitive rates yet support its defined value proposition.
From segmenting your market to deciding on your product's price, positioning, and messaging strategy, these key elements will ensure that your strategy is aligned with your goals and objectives.
Types of Go-To-Market Strategies
Several GTM strategies exist in the marketing landscape; however, the primary ones have been discussed here, specifically for B2B SaaS products.
1. Sales-Led Go-To-Market Strategy
A Sales-led go-to-market strategy involves a purely selling process where the sales team explains the product to the potential customer through live demonstrations.
The KPIs of this strategy include customer acquisition cost, customer lifetime value, etc. Additionally, the sales team focuses on sales-qualified leads (SQL), aiming to convert them into paying customers.
2. Product-Led Go-To-Market Strategy
A Product-led go-to-market strategy leverages the product as a driving force for product adoption. It ensures that the potential customers have a limited hands-on experience of the SaaS product for free, encouraging them to buy it for further use.
This strategy focuses on product-qualified leads (PQLs), converting prospects into paid customers with fewer touchpoints. Its KPIs include activation rate, CLV, feature adoption rate, etc.
3. Content-Led Go-To-Market Strategy
A Content-led go-to-market strategy leverages content to reach the target customers. It focuses on producing high-quality content to attract and educate the buyer personas and eventually convert them into paying customers.
This strategy focuses on addressing the pain points of the target customers while subtly pitching the SaaS product. Some of the KPIs of content-led growth include click-through rate, website traffic, and MQLs.
Practical Tips for SaaS Go To Market Strategy
As a Technical Content Marketing Agency, Infrasity has contributed to developing a SaaS Go To Market Strategy for 50+ Early-stage Startups. We have discussed some GTM Plan tips that have worked effectively for our clients and might be useful for you as well.
Let's say you have developed an authentication platform for organizations to ease their auth problems.
To enhance your GTM strategy, run a competitor analysis to identify what your competitors are doing, which keywords they are ranking for, and how you can make a difference to take the lead.
Now, here's what you can do to build a robust go-to-market strategy for your B2B SaaS product:
1. Create a Content-Led Growth Strategy
Create a content calendar, wherein you will be creating a topic cluster and identifying focus keywords. Pick keywords that your competitors have utilized to overlap your content with theirs and be a part of the league. This will help you reach your ICPs and Buyer Personas better - Developers, Lead Engineers, CTOs, and CEOs.
Segmentation
Segment the content into the following categories:
- Developer-focused technical content
- Product/Market-focused content
- Thought leadership and opinion pieces
Developer-focused technical content is created for developers to try out your SaaS product. It will comprise the implementation of the product with code snippets, screenshots, workflow, architecture diagram, etc. For example, an article on how to create a Single Sign-On (SSO) system using Python.
The product/market-focused content is meant for decision-makers (CTOs, CEOs, and Lead Engineers). It discusses how your product will mitigate the challenges the target customers face. For instance, a blog article on guiding the audience with the right M2M authentication method by comparing API Keys vs JWTs regarding security, scalability, and implementation trade-offs.
The thought leadership and opinion pieces will include articles on original perspectives or bold predictions to shape industry thinking. For example, content on challenging the status quo of M2M auth and urging SaaS teams to prepare for a future dominated by non-human users like AI agents and bots.
You can also create authentication guides and comparison articles for developers, helping them to understand your product's relevancy among the tech giants in the market.
Once you have created and published content, it is essential to distribute it on various distribution channels.
Distribution
Utilize distribution channels like Dev.to, and Daily.dev to improve visibility and direct the audience to your website. You can repurpose your existing content by posting it in a crisp form with your website's link. Also, you can write additional content around the topics from the designed cluster.
2. Create Landing Pages For SEM
Search Engine Marketing (SEM) is one of the vital aspects of your SaaS marketing strategy. It allows the organizations to reach their target audience faster. However, it is equally important to create landing pages for better conversion.
These landing pages should consist of crisp information and elements with CTA buttons, such as "Book a Demo" or "Request Pricing". These elements could be:
- A value proposition
- An architecture diagram
- Testimonials
- Your product's impact in terms of metrics
Additionally, since these pages are mainly designed for paid advertisement, you don't have to care about it being ranked down.
For example, this is Infrasity's landing page for paid advertisement.
3. Develop Use Case Examples
Use case examples help in communicating the ways in which your SaaS product can be utilized by the customers. It highlights the product capabilities; for example, the product supports multiple tech stacks. Use case examples help translate your product's value into real-world outcomes.
For instance, a use case example on how to create a Single Sign-On (SSO) system with Python that supports multiple sign-in options, such as Google, Microsoft, Facebook, and other platforms. It demonstrates how Python can seamlessly integrate these authentication methods, offering flexibility for users to sign in with their preferred identity providers.
4. Practice Dogfooding and Create Public Recipes
Use your SaaS product internally and showcase through public recipes how your team utilizes the product features with other tools, evidently proving that your platform can handle security needs.
For example, a public recipe on how your customer success team uses the SSO to log into Zendesk with Slack credentials without any password resets and confusion.
5. Cold Email Outreach
Cold email outreach is an effective strategy to reach potential B2B SaaS customers. Here's what you can do:
- Conduct thorough market research to identify your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) and Buyer Persona, such as C-suite executives.
- Collect their email addresses using platforms like Apollo and create an organized list based on different verticals (Fintech, SaaS, E-commerce).
- Focus on writing personalized emails, and tailor each one to address specific pain points and needs of the persona.
- Use a catchy subject line and a clear value proposition. Mention how your product solves their specific challenges.
- Add a thoughtful CTA at the end of the email to encourage response or demo requests.
- Utilize automation tools like YAMM and Mailchimp to send emails based on the vertical.
By combining personalized messaging with automation, you can create a scalable and effective cold email outreach strategy that resonates with decision-makers.
6. Launch Your Product on Product Hunt
The Product Hunt platform serves as an excellent platform to launch new products, which enables discovery by early adopters among developers and tech enthusiasts.
Your goal should be to become the "Product of the Day," because it helps your products become more visible and also attracts traffic, leads to demo requests, and establishes product awareness within your target market.
Engage with the community and reach out to your buyer personas directly with focused messaging instead of just relying on the upvotes. Gather feedback from the buyer personas and community members so you can understand what the customers are expecting from your product. Additionally, you can receive some feature suggestions and collaboration opportunities from them.
Conclusion
A thorough go-to-market strategy functions as an excellent planning method for B2B SaaS product launch. This document functions as a strategic guide for marketing activities, which includes descriptions of target audiences along with their profiles, product messages, and pricing approach.
You can decide to implement product-led, sales-led, or content-led strategies as your go-to-market approach. Most early-stage startups utilize product-led and content-led GTM strategies. You can create a hybrid strategy where you will be using both strategies.
Additionally, utilize the discussed practical tips while creating your SaaS go to market strategy. Some of them include creating developer-focused technical content, use case examples, launching your product on Product Hunt, and reaching out to your potential customers via cold email outreach.
FAQs
1. Does Product-led Growth Only Apply to B2B SaaS Companies?
Even though a product-led growth strategy is being adopted by B2B SaaS companies, especially early-stage startups, it does not just apply to this domain. It can also be utilized by B2C SaaS companies, such as Spotify.
2. Through a SaaS Lens, What is the Difference Between a Go-To-Market Strategy and the Overall Market Strategy?
While a go-to-market strategy focuses on how you will launch and sell a specific SaaS product to potential customers, an overall market strategy defines how you will position and market your products for the long term.
3. What's an Effective GTM Strategy That Costs $0?
Profitable GTM strategies that cost nothing include sharing valuable content through platforms like Medium and Dev.to as well as using email outreach, Reddit, and LinkedIn Community engagement with target customers.
4. What Are Some Good Tools to Use While Building and Executing a GTM Plan?
HubSpot, Google Analytics, ChartMogul, Notion, Apollo, and MailChimp are some of the tools you can utilize for your SaaS go to market strategy.
5. What Are the 5 pillars of GTM Plan?
The GTM Plan consists of five essential pillars which include market segmentation, product pricing, distribution, product messaging, and positioning.