You should always be iterating your product and trying to ensure that it addresses your customers’ pain points. The problem is that it could take months or even years until you have iterated your way to a product that drives its own sales. How many expansion-stage technology companies do you know with that kind of time? Which leads us to your second choice: Selling your existing product to more customers. Unfortunately, this option isn’t foolproof either. That’s because most companies really don’t do a very good job of selling their products. Why? Because rather than figure out which sales and marketing tactics are most likely to attract and influence their best customers, most businesses simply implement a variety of individual tactics and hope for the best. It’s certainly not the way to take control of a market niche. To dominate your market, you need a well thought out go-to-market strategy with a holistic approach to winning customers. And, as we will see, for that go-to-market strategy to be effective, it will need a lot of high-quality content at its foundation. Why You Need Content to Fuel Your Go-to-Market Strategy A company’s go-to-market strategy defines how it makes contact with prospects and customers, shepherding them through the sales funnel to a purchase. The key to creating a successful strategy is focusing on a very specific set of prospective customers and taking the time to fully understand them and their buyer journey, as well as the points within that process where they tend to get stuck. Once you have that understanding, you can develop a framework to “In today’s online world, address each sticking point with the right content, turning them into content marketing is market- leverage points that actually help drive sales. To accomplish this, ing. Without great content to however, your content needs to: tell your story and support your business, it’s crazy-hard » Be tailored to the context of your buyer’s specific situation to stand out – to differentiate » Effectively address his or her concerns yourself from your competition. OpenView’s eBook » Contain the right conversion mechanisms to help move lays out a clear, accessible framework for building that person to the next step in the buyer journey the kind of in-house content team and sustainable plan every business needs to connect with pros- pects and nurture them through the sales process (and beyond).” Ann Handley, Chief Content Officer, Marketing Profs It Takes a Content Factory! | 4