Regardless of whether your item or service is the best that this planet has ever seen, without a good go-to-market (GTM) strategy as well as a plan of execution, you won’t see much success. In school and numerous books, everyone is taught the significance of the 4 Ps within strong marketing plans including product, price, place, and promotion. Despite the significant importance of each one, the one with the most questions is the price. After all, with the right pricing model, you can turn your dream into reality. On the other hand, if your pricing strategy isn’t the best, there’s a high chance that you won’t succeed. Now, making a solid pricing strategy is no easy feat, but it can be made simpler if you follow these five important steps.
- The first thing that you are going to want to do is figure out your business objectives. Indeed, the amount of money that you make is based on both your marketing and sales GTM plan. If you aren’t sure what your objective is, take a look at this list for some inspiration:
- Boost profitability
- Market penetration
- Raise your revenue for every customer
- Create a new item
- Raise your prospect presence
- Next, you are going to want to organize a detailed market pricing analysis. Here, the goal is to make sure that the pricing method chosen takes into consideration the surrounding marketing that your item or service will be competing in. For instance, if you are a low-cost provider, then your audience will be larger than that of high-cost ones. In addition, if both your market and item are broader as you have a lot of competitors that offer quite similar things, you will most likely be competing on price. Therefore, you will want to do whatever you can to ensure low operational costs as that is how you will be making maximum profit margins. However, if your item is high in value, very differentiated, or it is more favorable to premium pricing, then you will be going after a different kind of targeted marketing. Indeed, in this case, it is of utmost importance that both your marketing and customer service are of high quality.
- Then, you are going to need to evaluate your target audience. Through this, you will be able to figure out what, how, and why your shoppers will want to use your item or service depending on their personal needs. Ask yourself what the perceived as well as actual value that your item or service will give your shoppers. You want to make sure that it somehow helps ease various tasks for them. The shoppers also want to be gaining something from it. Therefore, both your pricing strategy and your promotional campaigns should go hand in hand with why buyers would purchase your item.
- Afterward, you will need to outline your competitive site. Regardless of if you are a low-cost or a differentiated provider, both your pricing model and the price points of your rivals will play a big role towards the selection of your pricing strategy. Therefore, when it comes to both your direct and indirect rivals, there are a few things that you can do. For one, you can pinpoint a minimum of three direct rivals and really analyze their pricing. Figure out if they have component pricing or whether they offer heavy discounts. You also want to find out if they bundle their offerings or if they engage with value-based pricing, causing their customers to pay a part of the total supposed ROI. In addition, you will want to take into consideration the alternatives that a shopper could utilize in order to resolve an issue that your item or service typically solves. Therefore, figure out how much those indirect rivals cost your shoppers. Don’t forget that the word “no” is just as big of an indirect rival as any other.
- In the final step, you are going to want to make a pricing strategy as well as an execution plan. Now that you have all of the information that you would need to create an action plan, you can select a pricing strategy in confidence. A few popular types of pricing strategies include penetration pricing, premium pricing, promotional pricing, versioning, and competitive pricing.
Now that you have gone through the motions in each step, now you need to work through those steps in the opposite direction. This way, you can make sure that the GTM actions that you have chosen will help you compete within your target market segments in a successful manner while also boosting both revenue and market share at the same time.