Building A Successful Go-To-Market Strategy For Your SaaS Product | Full Guide

Everything you need to know to launch a SaaS product & getting your first customers.

There are so many questions that come up when you’re about to launch that it can be overwhelming. But don’t you worry, you don’t have to be a marketing guru to get that traction and growth. Building a go-to-market strategy for your product is actually a fairly straight forward process. To create one you’ll need the ever essential marketing building blocks, plus a few other SaaS specific elements that come into play. Let’s get into it!

1. Understanding Your Potential Customer, and Building an ICP.

Introduction – All modern marketing starts from the customer.

In the spirit of product-led development, we should know everything about our customers, as the products we are developing are created to solve their problems and to create new opportunities for them. 

If we don’t have a good understanding of who are customers are, and what their problems are, we’re bound to eventually run into a product-market-fit issue way before we can market anything to anyone.

Since you’re reading this, you probably have already built something, so I’m counting on you to know why and for who you built it. But If you haven’t, I strongly recommend the book “The Mom Test: How to Talk to Customers & Learn if Your Business is a Good Idea When Everyone Is Lying to You” — Rob Fitzpatrick. It will help you orient yourself during product discovery and customer interviews. If that’s the case, this guide might not align with the stage your product is in, but don’t let that stop you from learning!

Regardless weather you have a product, or not, this guide will offer you an opportunity to build your ICP in the right way – starting from your customer, their pain, and their aspirations. Understanding that will help you build a better, more oriented product, and a marketing strategy that actually works…

1.1 Building the ICP – Your product’s value proposition.

Let’s start by developing your product’s value proposition. It’s what’s at the core of any marketing message.

Here are some simple examples. We’re marketing a financial savings solution to entrepreneurs.

Pro Tip: if you have more than one answer to a question you can create alternative versions. You can A/B test those once you start implementing your strategy.

1.2 Building the ICP – Demographics, Pain-points, & Aspirations, Environment.

Moving on to the details, think about who your ideal customer is. The ideal customer is a both an idealization, and a generalization of who a customer is for a particular product.

Think about what problems your ICP is experiencing. Think about what aspirations they have. Think about how old they are, what job they have, what education they have completed, and any other internal, or external detail that motivates them.

Where you customer’ problems begin and where your product meets them is where the magic happens.

Pro Tip: More on product-market-fit here

Start by adding by adding demographic details like age, gender, & market ( location ). Then add the pain-points & aspirations. Finally, add any other relevant environmental factors, like political views, cultural background, economic conditions, or regulatory constraints that might influence their buying decisions, product adoption, or engagement with your brand.

Example:

Pain points:

Aspirations:

Clear? Now, let’s combine all of the above to formulate the final core message.

Pro Tip: Prioritize your assumptions based on how important you think they are.

2. Creating The Core Messaging

Once you’ve created a solid hypothesis of who your customer & what problem you’re solving for them, you can begin fusing all of the components you created earlier into a final core message.

I’ll show you how we do that with an example from the autonomous mobile robot industry where our ICP is an A.I. / ML / Robotics Engineer: 

And this is how it works when we combine everything into one final message.

Keep in mind that your message can, and will evolve with the placements you’re using it in. Different marketing and sales materials require different tones, and structures, so make sure your core message remains intact and is relaying that value regardless where you use it. While the angle and everything else is something that you can mold along. 

3. Determining The Right Marketing Channels For Your GTM Strategy.

By now you should be an expert in creating value propositions, and you should have a solid marketing foundation to build on.

The ICP you built earlier has everything you need to determine which marketing channels make sense advertising on.

Let’s look at a real-world example & illustrate the techniques we use to build that marketing mix.

We’ll take our AI / ML Engineer ICP,  

Pain points & Aspirations

OK, How we go about this is very intuitive, and perhaps that’s the reason why it’s very difficult for some people. I don’t think there is one way to do it. Or a right way to do it…Above all, to be successful at this stage you’ll have to use your own common sense, and general knowledge of the world to extrapolate based on what you know about your ideal customer. 

Pro Tip: The best way to approach this, is to dig in to whatever data you can find, perform customer interviews, and engage in educated guesswork.

4. Summarizing Your Findings & Creating The Final Marketing Channel List

Let’s summarize what we’ve uncovered in the previous stage, clear out any extra details that we don’t need, and add more details wherever is necessary.

General Marketing Channels:

Niche channels:

Interests:

You should now have a list of marketing channels, and places where you can reach your audience.

As always be as detailed as possible and creative as you can. The more you can expand this list, the more opportunities you’ll have to do marketing.

Now, let’s take a some time to prepare for the actual process of launching marketing campaigns on these channels, and look at what is the LEAN way to do so

5. Applying The LEAN Startup Principles When Going To Market

It’s very important to remeber that all we’ve written so far in our strategy is an educated assumption. Until we start testing these assumptions in real market conditions we won’t know if they’re accurate, or not. And that applies even when we have concrete market data that’s empirical. Therefore we should approach all marketing activities with a healthy does of skepticism. 

From our experience at least 60% of the time what we think will work turns out to be incorrect, or at least partially incorrect.

To remediate this risk we always apply the LEAN Startup principles to building GTM strategies (and generally to everything we can) and we try to validate our assumptions before we commit more resources to the process.

This helps us keep resource spending & time commitment to the minimum, which in turn allows us to be flexible and agile.

Without this way of thinking we risk investing resources in something that has a high chance of failing, and you don’t want to that as a startup because your resources and time is limited.

So, let’s talk about how we go about this in practice.

6.Validate Your Assumptions Before Committing On A Larger Scale

Before you go on and set your GTM strategy free in the wild, run a smaller validation campaign on a couple of the marketing channels that you came up with earlier.

We usually do that by running paid ads, as this is by far the fastest, and most accurate way we can validate our ICP, and marketing messages, as organic channels take time to develop, and aren’t as precise as we need them to be.

So, I strongly advise you to set aside a small testing budget of 500-1000$ for ads in order to go trough the validation phase. 

In terms of time, you should be able to gather insights in 1-2 weeks of time if you have everything else in place.

7. A/B Testing Different Assumptions 

To maximize the impact of your validation campaign you should be A/B testing the different components of your strategy.

Have 1-2 versions of the ICP, the final messaging, and run these tests several marketing channels at the same time. 

Each variant you create should be marginally different than the other one.

Focus on testing fundamentally different concepts – different brand tones, value propositions, different product formulas, and styles.

Large changes should produce big differences in results, and that’s what you’re aiming for. You’re trying to see what resonates best with your market.

8. Once You’ve Passed Product Validation

You’ve now passed trough product validation. you should now have a clear idea of where there’s an indication of product-market-fit.

Ideally you’ve spoken to a few real customers, and had your product in their hands. 

You’ve gathered more insights, preferomed more interviews, and know more about your customers than before. 

You can now approach product-development to improve your product and build something that’s even more adjusted than before. 

You also can commit to building your marketing channels for the long(er) term.

Use the same methodology we’ve described in this guide to refine your strategy and build on top of it. There’s nothing more to it. Just iterate until you’ve succeeded.

If things didn’t work out for you, and you did not get good results from your validation campaign don’t despair. Go back to the drawing board and rethink your concepts.

The only way you can fail is if you give up.

Good luck & thanks for reading!