Go-to-market isn’t just the process of designing a marketing strategy for a new product. Nor can it be boiled down to the process you’ll use when promoting a new feature or entering a new market.
Instead, your GTM motion should be viewed as a set of heuristics your company follows whenever you create a new opportunity to earn revenue. These heuristics should be flexible, scalable, and fit into any new product or market you plan to enable.
For today’s guide, we’ll go over what it takes to create a winning cybersecurity GTM strategy and include some key examples to help you start building and refining.
What is Go-to-Market?
Your go-to-market strategy is the plan you have in place to enable a new revenue stream.
This new revenue stream could be anything from a brand-new product launch to an expansion into a new market.
Without a GTM motion in place, you’re essentially spending time and money to create a new product or feature, then waiting around hoping customers will find you. Creating a flexible, iterative GTM motion is key for any business that wishes to expand efficiently across markets, regions, products, and services.
What Are Examples of Go-to-Market Strategies?
Developing a GTM strategy is dependent on the following:
- What kind of revenue stream you plan to enable: This could be a new product launch, a new feature, entry into a new region, or contact with a new industry.
- How you plan to market your product: whether you plan to rely on inbound, outbound, or product-driven marketing.
- Who you’re competing with: how different is your solution?
- What niche you’re trying to fill: are you entering a saturated market or trailblazing a new one?
In general, you can plan a GTM motion based on the following strategies:
Product Led
In a product-led motion, your product will be the main driver. You will position the product as market-leading or defining in some way, then design marketing materials that reinforce this message.
You could use this motion when you have competitors with obvious disadvantages, including price, history, or technological inferiority.
Market Led
You may be creating a new market with your product or feature. At any rate, you may want to give that appearance.
With a market-led GTM, you’ll position your newest revenue stream as innovative or market-leading in some way, then design marketing around this idea.
Inbound Led
With an inbound motion, you’ll prioritize content and social media marketing to attract attention to your company.
This kind of motion is one where you’ll want to quickly demonstrate value to potential customers and establish yourself as an authoritative voice on whatever subject you’re discussing.
Why Cybersecurity Firms Need Unique GTM Strategies
Cybercriminals constantly invent new ways to attack vulnerable businesses, while security firms hope to develop new ways to deter attacks before they become a problem.
Since cybersecurity is theoretically a problem for businesses worldwide and in every category, cybersecurity firms need particularly flexible GTM motions for a diverse range of products.
When crafting a GTM strategy for your network security product, we recommend focusing on the following:
- Flexibility: Your products are capable of protecting businesses in a wide array of industries, niches, markets, and regions. Your GTM strategy must be capable of reaching them.
- Adjustability: With every new campaign, you will generate data on what works and what doesn’t. Your GTM motion must be capable of being quickly modified in the face of this data.
- Scalability: The more effective you are at scaling, the faster you’ll grow.
A Guide to Creating a Cybersecurity Go-to-Market Strategies
Here are 5 steps your cybersecurity firm can follow when designing your GTM strategy.
1. Get Familiar with Your Market
You’ll want to understand your prospect’s current security concerns, their current solutions, and their interest level in additional cybersecurity protection. You’ll also want to understand how your competitors address these issues.
Example: Let’s say you’re interested in developing a new ransomware solution for those vulnerable to these kinds of information-hostage attacks. You’ll need to research who the largest ransomware protection services currently are, who they market to, and what their solution entails.
Do this for a wide range of prospects from large to small and medium businesses and a diverse range of industries. Through this research, you’ll identify soft spots in the market that your company can fill.
2. Determine What Kind of Revenue Stream You Want to Enable
Are you releasing a new product or just a new feature? How best to go to market will depend on this.
Example: Perhaps your new ransomware solution is efficient enough that it can be layered into your existing cybersecurity protocol. In this case, it could be an additional paid (or unpaid) feature on top of your primary software. Alternatively, maybe it’s extensive enough that it needs to be its own product.
This kind of determination will also help you find out what pricing model best fits your new revenue stream.
3. Plan to Engage Customers on Multiple Fronts
The best marketing plan engages customers through multiple channels at once. This means reaching customers via email, social media, and inbound marketing efforts like content marketing.
The best kind of content will depend upon your new solution.
Example: Let’s say your new ransomware protection utilizes brand-new technology. You’ll want to showcase this technology in an industry-defining whitepaper that will establish authority and position your new product as market-leading.
4. Establish a Team of Experts for All Industries
You should have point people for each industry you plan to engage with. These SMEs can become experts on the needs of these industries and specific laws and regulations that apply to them.
Doing this will ensure you always have one person responsible for keeping up with laws and regulations specific to each industry.
Example: Your new ransomware services must accommodate laws and regulations pertaining to healthcare and the financial industry. Rather than having one person learn all the laws for each industry, split this task up and assign one person per industry.
5. Be Ready to Iterate Based on New Data
Your GTM motion needs to be flexible.
This is because you’ll need to do this every time you plan to enable a new revenue stream. This doesn’t just pertain to product or feature launches. It also will apply when you enter a new market or region or hope to engage with a new industry for the first time.
The better you use data to refine your GTM strategies, the easier it will be to expand rapidly.
Hushly Can Bring Your GTM Strategies to Life
Hushly specializes in creating websites, landing pages, and digital marketing content for all types of firms.
We understand the need to be flexible when creating marketing content. This need drove us to create an easy-to-use solution that can be specifically targeted to unique businesses in your sales pipeline. Like cybersecurity, Hushly’s solution is one we hope to market to businesses in all industries.
Everything from ABM emails, account & visitor analytics, and website experiences can be curated using Hushly’s platform.
Let us create a demo for your cybersecurity business today and see how Hushly can help your team grow.