Go-to-Market strategy for your ChatGPT release
If you want to stand out in the already crowded SaaS market? Don't wait till you product team ships the ChatGPT integration to start your GTM motion.
ChatGPT has been buzzing in the tech world for over 5-6 months now and more so in the past few months. While every company is working on building a ChatGPT use cases, as a marketer you don’t have to wait for beta version, heck even the PRD to start your GTM motion. Why? Here’s a quick snapshot of Google Trends.
It’s a great time to ride this buzz. And probably even double down on this. Look at google ads bid price (Roughly .04USD to 0.73USD).
Many might say the hay day of google search is over. True. Most of my search happens on ChatGPT now a days. But you and I know, it’s still a long way to go for adoption, and habits don’t change that quickly. And organic traffic is still the bread and butter for most businesses.
So how can you ensure you/your brand is heard in this noisy chatter around ChatGPT?
I’d like to approach this like a music concert. Before the main band takes the stage, there are a few smaller bands who gather the crowd and warm them up. Once warmed up, the host builds up the tension and hold the audience’s attention for a minute or two. And then, when the main band takes the stage, the audience just goes wild.
Marketing is pretty similar too. Warm up your niche, get ‘em on your side and go with a big bang announcement.
Warm up your niche
At this point, PM and EMs are still in their drawing board of what plug-ins they need to build. You, as a marketer, don’t know what their “play” is other than the most obvious use cases. That means, you have no pressure coming from the product teams, but also means you have a very large ground to cover.
Your goal now as a marketer should be to pick your niche and build your audience.
Picking your niche
You have to pick your niche, else you will be one among the crowd adding to the noise.
If you work in CRM market - Your TG could be sales teams, revops teams, etc.
If you work in IT Operations - Your TG could be system administrators, network engineers, etc.
If you work in a HR/People Ops - Your TG could be HR managers, Recruitment managers, etc.
Pick the one that’s most close to the leads you already get and start there. Then branch out to the secondary groups.
Build your audience
How do we do that? Create content around “Prompts” for your niche audience.
Kinda duh right? But how many companies are doing it? Not many right? But think about these:
Tweet thread on 10 prompts that will help you become salesman of this month (CRM)
Lead gen content on 20 prompts that help you get more responses from your cold emails (CRM)
Tweet thread on ChatGPT responds in a funny way to customer rejections (CRM)
Really pick your niche and create huge content library around it. It will help you bring leads that you couldn’t reach by marketing just your product. ‘Cause this is a great opportunity to not only build the audience but actually connect with your audience. ‘Cause you are no more selling your product. But just helping them solve their problem with a general tool (which in a 2/3 months will be in your product) and be more productive.
Get ‘em on your side
At this point, your product prototype is sorta shaping up. Product teams have a PoC for internal showcase. There is some excitement around and your marketing brain is starting to light up.
So far you were primarily focusing on growing the top of the funnel. Now’s the time to focus on the mid of the funnel. That is, get them interested in ChatGPT integration for your product.
Crowdsourcing ideas from your community
Nothing gives the customers more joy than seeing their suggestion being built in the product. Gather ideas from your community and when the time comes for the launch, announce them with credits.(secretly you know product teams are building similar use cases too and in line with customer’s expectations)
If this seems far-fetched, ask them how they are using ChatGPT or ask them to vote for the use cases your are considering.
Building in public
Yes, this is very commonly used by startups trying to reach product-market fit. Even mature products can employ this (esp for ChatGPT) because it helps in the excitement level high.
As a run up to your big announcement, you can start showing them sneak-peeks into what your are building. May be even create a interest form for the announcement or sign up for beta, etc.
Yes, a few mature companies might not be comfortable with doing this. But, trust me everyone in your market is likely building similar set of use cases? If you can get a few more eye balls by speaking earlier, why not? You can always keep the differentiated use cases for the launch.
Think of this exercises as leaving a few breadcrumbs for people to follow. You don’t have to show the whole thing. But keep them on their toes.
Go for a big bang announcement
At this point, product is all set for the big release.
Marketing goes through the usual GTM checklist - PR, landing pages, SEO, mailers, social media posts, help docs, community announcements, product notifications, webinars, videos, update sales collaterals, partner collaterals, etc.
Thanks to the your effort during the run up to the announcement, you get good buzz for a week or two. But then after that, you will have to keep the show going as long as the market is buying the idea, we should keep selling it to.
Keep them engaged till the mike drops
What more can we do? Remember we already created a few collaterals to warm up the crowd? Time to reuse/repackage them as
10 ways you can use product X to increase your sales productivity
20 prompts you can use in product X to increase response rate of your cold emails
It’s not just enough to release the integration, but help them with adoption too. Keep building use case or prompt libraries for every type of user. Include it in the website, in help docs, or better if you can embed it in the ChatGPT window.
Run campaigns for top “prompts” within your community. Use that for your next ebook/twitter thread. Such User Generated Content is very rare for enterprise SaaS products and a great way to keep the audience on their feet and listening to your tunes.
You get the idea, nothing new or fancy here. But very rarely does SaaS product marketing teams get to ride any buzz at this scale or get so many avenues to market their product without marketing their product.
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