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- 26 :: 3 Innovative GTM Strategies
26 :: 3 Innovative GTM Strategies
I just came back from holidays (sorry for this CINO In the Making absence for the past 3 weeks!) but right before leaving for Asia I was invited to go to Católica Lisbon SBE as a guest lecturer to the Go-to-Market Strategy course for the Business and Entrepreneurship Master students. I was asked to share the GTM strategies I have tested or seen prove successful across the different innovation projects and roles I have worked on in the past, as well as the learnings I have collected on the way. The timing sounded right to dive a bit deeper into the topic and share some of those insights here too. From more conventional strategies like account-based marketing or online referrals and loyalty programs with promotions, to more tech-driven approaches like product-led growth (PLG), content as social-proof, or even voice search optimization, there is no shortage of options when it comes to GTM. Here are 3 that I find particularly innovative and that I have either observed directly or implemented myself:
Micro-Marketing 🎯
Micro-marketing is all about hyper-personalization. It is more often referred to for the strategies’ target, but can also be, for example, for timing (targeting customers in real-time based on their immediate needs and behaviors to provide instant solutions/capture interest) or local (focusing on a very specific geographic area with tailored marketing efforts), for example. As such, this is where AI plays an important role, ideally through zero-party data, to deliver the absolute most relevant message or offer for each customer every time.
There is a great example of this in Amazon's recommendation engine, which uses AI to analyze individual user behaviors, preferences, and purchase histories in real-time, to deliver highly tailored product suggestions at the precise moment of intent. This approach not only enhances the shopping experience by providing relevant and timely recommendations, often influencing purchase decisions during critical micro-moments but also drives higher engagement and sales. Amazon benefited from this capability so much that Amazon Web Services (AWS) subsequently commercialized this technology through Amazon Personalize, allowing other businesses to integrate advanced personalization and real-time recommendation features into their own platforms.
Community-Led 👩👩👧👧
A community-led go-to-market strategy centers around building and nurturing a community of engaged users, customers, and advocates who play an integral role in the growth and success of a product or service - through loyalty, word-of-mouth, and feedback. It leverages the power of groups (typically online, in platforms like Reddit or Discord, but not only) to drive awareness, adoption, and retention through authentic, organic interactions and relationships.
For example, when I was trying to build a new product and brand from scratch at my own startup, the community was the main pillar of our GTM strategy. Our product was a turn-key business for micro-entrepreneurs and our ICP were middle-class, hardworking, white-collar women who wanted to monetize some of their interests, skills, or talents to have their own business but did not know how to do it. Turns out that there are multiple, quite big, and highly engaged communities of women around this topic to share and support each other on the journey. Back then those communities were mostly Facebook groups and in Portugal alone, there were over 100,000 members. So we used those groups to learn all about our ICP (e.g. customer interviews recruiting) and to position our product as the right solution for their biggest needs.
Scale Through Others 🔗
Not all GTM efforts have to be fully owned by the organization that builds it. Even though the multiplier effects of leveraging others’ expertise and networks are not necessarily very disruptive, it can still be very innovative as a strategy to scale more efficiently and cost-effectively. It involves leveraging external partners, resellers, distributors, or other third parties to reach new markets, scale operations, and grow the customer base. Instead of building out a large internal sales and marketing team, these organizations rely on these partners to expand their market presence, drive sales, and support customers.
As a new technology that demands a complete shift in the way traditional businesses’ IT teams and operations work, the cloud is a great example of this strategy. All cloud providers rely heavily on it, as those businesses need service providers (e.g. consultancy) to support their cloud journey, designing and implementing those changes. Based on their business model, by default, those service partners are already incentivized to sell the cloud, but if additional incentives are added by the cloud providers (which they do), those partners easily become some of the biggest business drivers for companies like AWS, Microsoft or Google.
Bonus: The Web3 world is also offering some interesting decentralized marketing approaches with blockchain technology - the Brave browser that uses BATs (Basic Attention Tokens) to reward users for viewing ads is a good example of that. I have not directly interacted with this but could not leave it out of an innovation-driven list of GTM strategies. Feel free to let me know if you have as I’d love to learn more about it.
See you next Tuesday! 👋