Getting your positioning right is critical to the effectiveness of your GTM strategy (Go To Market strategy). You need to define the right audience and reach them with the right messaging. For B2B businesses competing in highly competitive categories, it’s essential to be laser-focused on the highest value audience – those with the authority and influence to make purchasing decisions.

In this blog, we explore the importance of targeted positioning and messaging, with 5 best practice tips we always follow when supporting our clients with their GTM strategy with the Magnus Go to Market Positioning Solution.

Gain insight into your target market (and audience)

Our Magnus Discovery methodology enables us to understand the shifting pain points, preferences, and priorities of the customers you are trying to reach. Through in-depth market and audience analysis and thorough interviews with key internal stakeholders and external customers, we produce insight into the key drivers within your market. This ensures your GTM approach considers all recent trends, emerging technologies, and market shifts, to ensure your positioning is relevant and resonates.

Focus on the highest value audience with your GTM strategy

At Magnus Consulting we strongly advocate for narrowing your focus on only your highest value audiences. It’s true that you can’t please everyone in life, and the same applies to your targeting and messaging – you shouldn’t try to speak to everyone either.

Instead, it’s essential to be laser-focused on the highest value audience – those with the authority and influence to make purchasing decisions.

By reviewing all potential audiences and mapping them against these two factors, you can optimise the efforts of your GTM team (sales and marketing) by focusing on the audiences who have the greatest influence. By focusing on the right audience, your finite resources are utilised more efficiently, leading to improved return on investment (ROI) and higher conversion rates.

Be specific and personalise your message to resonate

In B2B, one size doesn’t fit all. And by defining who your critical audiences are, we can tailor the message for each key target audience. For example, if we want to speak to businesses who are considering managing a complex migration from a legacy ERP to an upgraded version – the message to CTOs may focus on ‘successful delivery on time and budget’, whereas the CEO may instead be focused on the ‘business staying competitive with a future-ready solution.’

Defining 1 primary audience, with 1-2 supporting audiences, ensures that your GTM efforts are relevant and precise. It also maximizes the chance of success by focusing on those potential buyers who are most likely to be genuinely interested in the product or service you’re offering.

Highlight emotional as well as functional benefits

When we work with clients to develop a value proposition for their GTM strategy, we always show the Audience benefit ladder shown below. As you’ll see we are aiming for our go to market positioning to speak to the emotional or transformational benefit, rather than just the functional product attributes or benefits at the bottom. Why? The majority of B2B brands are playing in this space – competing primarily on product messaging and therefore positioning themselves in a functional space from where it is hard to build and prove real business value.

Tapping into emotions also just makes rational sense. With the B2B Institute showing that emotional campaigns (ones that try to make prospects feel more positively about the brand) are more effective in the long term than rational campaigns (ones that try to communicate information).[1] It is worth noting that rational messaging is more effective at producing strong short-term sales activation. Yes, solid research supports the fact emotions play a significant role in B2B decision-making just as they do in B2C. And your category, brand or product definitely isn’t the unique outlier here, it will apply to you too.

Create an effective value proposition

A well-crafted and effective value proposition addresses the specific needs of our defined audience. It can be inspirational. It should be succinct. But it should definitely be memorable. Ultimately its purpose is to resonate with your agreed target audience, differentiate your brand (or product or service), and convince them of the value you can bring. These are obviously all critical for a GTM strategy to deliver. It’s hard to get right but when it is it’s incredibly effective at setting you apart from competitors and increasing the likelihood of your message cutting through to your audience.

It’s also crucial to ensure that the value proposition and any supporting messages* are validated with proof points – in the form of testimonials, case studies or quantifiable stats and figures demonstrating the benefits the value proposition is discussing. This is critical to reassure and provide confidence that you can deliver the value you’re promising.

* At Magnus we usually produce 1 core value proposition message, with up to 3 sub-messaging angles. The core message is the unifying primary message known by all, and the sub-messages apply to particular segments such as secondary audiences or specific sectors.

our gTM strategy Increases effectiveness and ROI

In conclusion, reaching the right audience with the right positioning is the foundation of a successful B2B GTM strategy. It ensures your GTM efforts are laser-focused, relevant, and resonate with the most influential potential customers. By investing time and resources into understanding the audience and crafting a compelling positioning, you can generate higher conversion rates, pipeline and growth.

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[1] The B2B Institute, The 5 Principles of Growth in B2B