Create A Great Go-To-Market Strategy With Community Led Growth

Generating sufficient market demand to go to market can be one of the biggest hurdles faced by any young business. With high customer acquisition costs, monopolized internet spaces, and inefficient government funding becoming bigger and bigger problems, finding significant demand with an effective go-to-market strategy can often seem impossible.

After all, almost five million businesses are started in the U.S. every year - and up to 90% of them fail.

But don't panic! High-tech, high-cost marketing efforts don't have to be the backbone of your initial business model. It's more than possible to find prospective customers and see massive growth through grassroots, community-led go-to-market strategies - strategies that may even give you a competitive advantage.

Leadium recently sat down with Lloyed Lobo, Boast co-founder and leading entrepreneur, to get expert insight into the world of community-led go-to-market strategies, as well as valuable advice on how to generate interest, target a niche, build a loyal customer base, and much more.

What is a Go-To-Market strategy?

A Go-To-Market strategy (GTM) is plan used by sales teams to ensure a successful product launch. 'Go to market' is quite literal: it means using market research and sales strategies to enter the market with a water-tight marketing plan that'll hook potential customers.

An effective GTM strategy encompasses many marketing channels and can be a costly venture. A traditional route - such as government funding - can be a long, drawn-out process prone to frustrating audits and lengthy reviews. In other words: it takes a long time to get the money.

Lloyed wanted to 'automate' the go-to-market process. He holds that with the right mixture of vision and determination, you can build an effective go to market strategy purely through thoughtful networking and community engagement.

What is community led growth?  

In the context of a go-to-market strategy, community led growth means harnessing the power of community to reach target customers and achieve business goals. The aim is to:

• Build customer relationships
• Improve customer retention
• Leverage high-interaction community events to establish brand reputation and attract more potential customers

This differs from other business model growth strategies in that you're essentially building a market of loyal customers from the ground up. In contrast, a market penetration strategy is a go-to-market strategy that aims to inject itself into an already existing market with heavy advertising and strategic planning.

Of course, a good go-to-market strategy can often be expensive - but community led growth doesn't have to be. Lloyed pointed out that he built a $10 million ARR with essentially no marketing team. Impressed yet?

Let's see how he did it.

The importance of a niche marketing strategy

One of the key factors of a successful community-led go-to-market strategy is targeting the correct niche. When starting out, it's easy to believe that in order to find a target audience and go to market you need to work within a big niche. Bigger niche, more customer acquisition, right?

Not necessarily. In Lloyed's experience, it's often better to 'niche down' than to 'niche up.' You don't need to 'make' an entirely new market, but you should try to understand who your product is really going to benefit. For example, Lloyed didn't just target every technology company in North America with his go-to-market strategy; he targeted small tech startups in a specific province in Canada.

When building a GTM strategy, it's often better for a new business to speak to emerging markets of fewer than one hundred people than to go to market more broadly and waste time (and money) addressing the wrong audience.

That way, companies are able to align more closely with their target audience over time, which will resonate with customers, thereby enhancing your unique value proposition, buyer's journey, and customer lifetime value.

Build your Ideal Customer Profile

Of course, constructing a niche go-to-market strategy relies on a comprehensive ICP (Ideal Customer Profile) - but, as Lloyd points out, rather than having your sales team over-analyze market data, one key question should be front and centre: do you love your target market?

As a founder, you'll be spending more and more time with your customers as your company grows. When forming a go-to-market strategy (or any marketing plan, for that matter), you'll rely on them for feedback and data, and in turn they'll rely on your product or service for value. Put simply: if you don't love the market, you're not going to be able to form a successful sales strategy, let alone recurring growth.

What's more, understanding your market on this intimate level will help you develop a great value matrix (how your product compares to an existing product) - a powerful tool when building your go-to-market strategy.

Create a 'buzz'

A key way to enhance your go-to-market strategy and generate community led growth is to create and distribute valuable content. Note the key word there: distribute.

Simply making content isn't enough - in order to construct a strong social media strategy it's necessary to call on your network of 'existing customers' to interact with your content as much as possible. You may even be able to incorporate user generated content into your marketing strategy.

Enthusiastic community-led support can benefit your marketing strategy and complement your in-person expansion efforts.

Additionally, by testing your content and performing in-depth analytics research, you'll be better able to identify important gaps in the market which you can exploit in your sales strategy and go-to-market plan.

Go to market with in-person events

As great as it can be for founders to network at high-attendance events, let's face it: they can often be dead ends when it comes to developing a useful go-to-market strategy. Lloyed remarks that they often rely on 'high-level CEO platitudes' and rarely offer any practical advice for startups.

So, what's the answer? Lloyed suggests building founder-to-founder relationships with your own grassroots events.

He did this by targeting the market gaps he'd identified (i.e. practical advice for startups on how to get their first ten customers and how to strike their first enterprise deal) and addressing them with a relevant events-focussed go-to-market plan.

Following the success of his 'Startup of the Week' column, Lloyed began hosting networking events for startups at a local coworking space. It soon grew so big that the space had to ask him to host elsewhere. As Lloyed puts it:

'If you want to be the cool kid on the block, be the kid who hosts the cool parties.'

What are the benefits of in-person events?

Hosting 'cool kid' parties, i.e. in-person networking events, as part of your go-to-market strategy has many benefits. You can:

1. Get a ready-made ICP.
   If they're coming to your events, they probably fit your target audience. That's organic customer acquisition sitting in your lap. When you go to market, you'll have a solid base of potential customers already emotionally invested in your company.
   ‍
2. ‍Enhance social proof and go to market with credibility.
   ‍The more people you can attract to your event, the more credible your company appears. Your target audience is more likely to show interest if you have dozens or even hundreds of people going out of their way to connect with you.‍
   ‍
3. Encourage cross-pollination and interaction.
   If you can build a reputation for hosting top quality events where other founders can share and receive valuable advice, you'll establish yourself as a leading voice within your target market. And the more those leads interact with and around you, the better your go-to-market strategy will be.

Don't underestimate events in go-to-market strategies

Nowadays, most new companies rely on social media and search engine optimization for building a sales funnel, but they often overlook the importance of building credibility through a community-led go-to-market strategy first.

In summary, addressing your target audience and improving your customer journey with a strong, niche-focussed marketing strategy built on useful content, quality in-person events, and deep customer interaction is a powerful way to go to market. It takes time and perseverance, but with the right product market fit and an engaged community, your go-to-market strategy is sure to succeed.

‍