How to operationalize your go-to-market strategySteps to follow to position your company in the

Arriving at the brand vision, business model, or growth strategy can be messy. The process often does not have a clearly outlined steps and priorities, unclear time horizons, and lacks defined starting points, deliverables, desired outcomes. It involves multiple stakeholders and competing interests. Team structures and organizational charts shift.
Here, I address the challenge of sequencing in building a business. Each of the phases — Discover & Inform, Define, Develop, Deploy & Measure — are explored in depth, including the specific objectives, methodology, and deliverables. Duration, cost and staffing requirements are also covered, as well as the assessment of how well an organization is positioned to implement your go-to-market strategy.
Inform
Objectives:

• Understand your business and brand objectives, key consumer barriers and market opportunities
• Deep brand and product immersion to understand the brand and the business model
• Key learnings from the category, competition, culture and audience (4Cs)

Methodology:

• Business analysis (data immersion, marketing and communications audit)
• Immersion in cultural, social and economic trends and consumer behaviors
• Category review and competitive audit
• Key learnings from the category, competition, culture and audience (4Cs)
• Assessment of best practices

Deliverable:

• Competitive positioning and business and brand opportunity definition document

Inspire
Objectives:

• Take all information and insights from the “Inform” stage and amplify against the future-facing business, brand and consumer cross-category practices to win in the market

Methodology:

• Creative Brainstorms: Concept collaborative work sessions specifically around the strategic task at hand to align on a future-facing creative strategy.
• Use collaborative brainstorms as a sounding board for ideas and a way to understand your target audience to provide an additional insight on:
• Target Personas and Customer Journey
• Identification of target’s need states
• Mapping the key moments of receptivity
• Determining the hierarchy of influential touchpoints
• Users’ mindset and omni-channel behaviors, habits and expectations
• Best competitive practices and emerging trends in the market
• Digital ethnography and social listening
• Heuristic Analysis and audit of client’s social and mobile media properties

Deliverables:

• Audience Insights, Customer Personas, and Customer Journey, Market Scoping, Market Segmentation, Market Growth Projection

Create
Objectives:

• Brand creative direction, visual and verbal handwriting
• Creative asset scoping
• Creative partners engagement

Methodology:

• Brand book and creative brief
• Social media strategy and social media playbook
• Creative and art direction
• Content strategy and engagement plan
• Execution guidelines for website design, social media profiles, email templates, packaging and physical stores design

Deliverables:

• Creative assets and creative direction that provides a clear and consistent framework for all brand executions

Deploy and Measure
Objectives:

• Launch the business and the brand in a synchronized and phased manner
• Activate your existing community; attract new customers and grow and optimize your customer database
• Monitor and optimize market actions against established KPIs (key performance indicators)

Methodology:
Develop a combination of sales metrics, performance metrics, brand affinity metrics, and consumer sentiment metrics that include, but are not limited to:

• Traffic, engagement and conversion tools like Google Analytics, Omniture, Quantcast
• Consumer behavior tools like MRI
• Social media listening tools like Dash Hudson
• Custom brand affinity studies
• Track success across the three key indicators:

Brand love, measured in:

• Community growth
• Engagement
• Overall brand reach and sentiment among your desired audience

Brand breakthrough:

• Increase in organic search
• Brand Conversion
• In-store and e-commerce site visits
• Sales via organic traffic (search, social media)

Deliverables:

• Measurement dashboard, analytics reports

Analysis of how well your organization is positioned to implement your go-to-market strategy.