Many small to medium sized companies have grown quite successful without investing heavily in marketing. This is especially true for business to business (B2B) companies that have found solid initial product/service to market fit and relevance. Companies can grow quickly by leveraging relationships and providing a great product or service – this is the proving period and if you find yourself here, congrats, you have built something remarkable! 

The next phase of your company’s growth will be built on taking what you’ve proven and using that data to create a foundational marketing strategy. Clarifying your brand strategy and designing a measurable blueprint in a Go-To-Market plan will help you avoid inconsistent messaging and missed opportunities.

Brand Strategy

Crafting your company’s brand strategy involves creating the identity that will interact with your customers. The goal is to knock down the barriers that keep your customers from recognizing and trusting your brand. Included in this exercise is visual identity, tone of voice, messaging, values, and market positioning. A well executed brand strategy will leave the target audience clearly understanding what makes your company positively different from the competition. 

Creating a unique brand visual identity including logo, colors, and visual guidelines will help the organization prove its credibility through a consistent use of visual elements that support the brand. How a brand deploys language is just as important. A brand’s messaging and tone of voice should be unique to the company’s perspective, story and values.

A cohesive brand strategy with all of the elements above will set a company up for consistent growth but the real secret is almost fanatical application of these elements to the website, advertising, recruiting, and communications (internal and external, pre-sale and post-sale). You must also consistently be testing these brand strategy assumptions about your business and be willing to make adjustments if some elements no longer are representative or accurate.  

Go-To-Market Strategy (GTM)

A GTM plan strategically details how to launch a product/service and reach target customers effectively. A successful GTM plan plays an important role in defining your audience and channels, achieving early traction, setting sales objectives, and ensuring measurable results.

Arguably, the most important element of a company’s marketing strategy is a documented understanding of your Customer Persona Alignment. This process has two parts. First, you’ll need to understand and document significant attributes of your Ideal Customer Profiles (ICPs) and segment them into types. Types are commonly characterized as industries or verticals but can be any identifier significant to your business. 

Second, you’re going to need to create a Product/Service to Customer Type Matrix that will clearly define which of your products/services are relevant to which of your ICPs. 

The next objective is to select the channels that will reach your ICPs with your messaging. Spending time understanding where your customers gather and consume impactful information will inform where to make impressions and find leads. There is a wide array of options in channel selection and price per impression so making educated selections, testing, measuring results, and correcting will be parts of successful marketing channel management.   

A significant portion of your ability to turn attention into revenue hinges on the relationship between marketing and sales. Our friends in sales are responsible for opening and managing the person-to-person side of the pre and post-sale interaction so clean baton passes and clear feedback loops are necessary. Well organized marketing campaigns are designed with sales objectives in mind. The more informed a potential customer is about your product/service prior to talking to a salesperson, the higher percent chance they will become won business. You have the chance to craft a message that the prospective customer sees that focuses on mowing down objectives in your marketing campaigns. Marketing and sales leadership will need to coordinate customer outreach and share what messaging is working through the customer relationship management (CRM) system.  

A clear GTM plan helps you create the blueprint for achieving product-market fit, efficiently using resources to reduce wasted marketing spend, and gaining valuable market insights and iterating based on feedback.

Brand Strategy Provides the “Why,” GTM Strategy Provides the “How”

One of these strategies alone won’t deliver on your goals. Your brand strategy will tell your customers why they should care about your company and your product/service. The GTM strategy explains how you’ll deliver that message to market and measure success. The combination of these strategies will help your team deliver a consistent, relevant message at a frequency that keeps your brand and product/service in your customer’s mind when they need a solution like yours.

Having these strategies in place will allow your business to more rapidly adjust to market changes. For example if certain industries/customer types that your business serves grow during certain market conditions while others wane, having documented gameplans for each market will allow you to pivot without wasting plan development time. Your company’s brand strategy elements will remain the same, you’ll simply adjust your GTM driven tactics to more heavily target a few of your market segments.    

Next Step: the Build

It can be daunting to build these strategies, but no matter where you are in your business’s lifecycle, there’s no bad time to invest in solid brand and GTM strategies. Due to lack of expertise or bandwidth, many companies can’t lean on an in-house marketing team for the development of these plans and could be a great indicator that it’s time to bring in outside support. 

If building brand and go-to-market strategies are the next logical step to igniting the growth you’re looking for, Branch would love to get to know what makes your company unique and help you build the plan to nail your goals.

Written by Chris Dennen, Co-Founder & CMO