Crafting success: Delivering a best-in-class go-to-market strategy

In today’s ever-evolving and turbulent business landscape, creating an effective and cohesive go-to-market (GTM) strategy is paramount to business success.

With mergers and acquisitions or joint ventures, it’s even more important to get this right. When multiple businesses converge, each with its unique culture and identity, the challenges become particularly intricate. In such scenarios, the success of a GTM strategy hinges on aligning internal culture while delivering a compelling narrative to external audiences.

Announcing a new entity requires a careful balancing act: being mindful of each individual organization’s culture and pride in the business, while aligning all involved businesses and taking the new brand externally to market with communications that resonate with customers.

Cultivating internal alignment for business success

Internal alignment is just as important as external communications. How the employees feel about and understand the new brand has to completely align with the story that is being told externally. Fostering a sense of pride and ensuring there is no disconnect between the internal and external brand is crucial.

Great attention should be paid to the building blocks for nurturing a new shared culture through the formulation of values and behaviors. Employees need to understand the benefits and the rationale for the new entity – having a strong purpose helps rally the team toward a shared mission.

To build momentum in the lead up to launch day, a well thought through strategy will likely include an informative and bottom-up employee engagement campaign, helping them to understand the new brand story from day one. An on-going communications program can help sustain this momentum thereafter.

Humanizing external communications

External GTM communications should resonate with customers' needs while reflecting the benefits of the new brand.

Bringing an emotional engagement component to all communications is particularly important in joint ventures, to ensure that all companies are represented equally in the launch materials, so that one company isn’t being valued more than the other.

Most importantly, these external communications should help customers understand the new entity and what it stands for. Why is it being created? What are the benefits for customers? Bringing the positioning of the new organization to life is key.

To take the brand story to target audiences, each communication channel should be given its own consideration. When working with clients, we develop channel strategies with insights into what will drive the most engagement – leveraging the strengths of each communication channel while maintaining consistency in messaging and branding. Distinctive visual identities and high-quality communications help in conveying the narrative effectively – every asset should be native to its particular environment in order to most effectively bring the brand to life.

Moments of organizational change are complex: there can be a temptation to over-explain the business context and rationale, which can mean the storytelling becomes compromised due to businesses saying too much. GTM strategies should focus on relaying a simple message in a creatively compelling way that showcases why these organizations have come together.

A fully-integrated approach

All communicatoins across editorial, PR, paid, and owned media (including the website) should make sense as a whole and jointly add up to a single story. Having everything feel harmonious can be incredibly challenging but it is essential to think carefully about how every element will work together.

Special consideration should be given to the customer journey and how the story evolves and adapts. For example, are there ways to utilize motion and video to add value to the website experience? Working out how all the different aspects of the customer experience might work in sync also demands partnering with different teams to find smart solutions.

This often means adapting the core creative for specific channels and audiences to help land tailored messaging that ladders seamlessly back up to the core positioning.

Key takeaways for a best-in-class GTM strategy

The biggest challenge we’ve come across when businesses are starting their GTM strategy is underestimating the need for simplicity.

Most people inside an organization are passionate about the work they do, so it’s only natural to spend a lot of time thinking about your product or services. And because you understand things in great depth, it's hard to appreciate how little the rest of the world knows about your brand and how hard it is to get them to pay even a little attention to the things you care deeply about. But the more messages you put in front of people, the less likely they are to notice or remember any of it.

Often, saying one thing well is the most effective way to hook people’s attention. And that can be the biggest challenge with B2B businesses that are trying to appeal to many different audiences.

A well-designed GTM strategy manages this dilemma well, balancing the need for simplicity and consistency with the necessity of also tailoring messaging for diverse audiences and native formats.

To help resolve these inherent tensions, a truly best-in-class GTM strategy should focus on three things: a fully-integrated client and agency team working with total transparency and trust; a well-considered channel plan that takes into account the strengths and weaknesses of that channel; and a compelling, creative platform that’s rooted in a big idea that’s directly aligned to your brand positioning.