How to Integrate G2 into Your 2024 Go-to-Market Strategy from G2's VP of Revenue Marketing

Ah, the start of a new fiscal. That fresh new year feeling – and that fresh set of goals to hit.

This time of year, go-to-market (GTM) teams are hitting reset, shuffling their books, setting new targets, and generally getting amped for what lies ahead.

When it comes to your GTM strategy, G2 isn’t a question of if. It’s a question of how. Whether you’re looking to automate your review collection, gain deeper product insights, or integrate your intent data, G2 can pay dividends across the business. 

B2B marketing is hard. Aligning your GTM across marketing, sales, and product around shared goals is even harder. Especially when pipeline and revenue are expected outcomes.

And if your marketing team is anything like ours, that’s the ultimate goal. As a fellow marketer, current G2 marketing leader, and former G2 customer, I wanted to share some of the field-tested ways that my team – and customers like you – have approached G2 Marketing Solutions as a critical piece of the GTM strategy. 

Here, at the beginning of 2024, marketing leaders will be asked to understand which channels, programs, and tools are must-haves – and which aren’t – to know where to focus this year in order to grow quality pipeline and improve win rates. 

Before joining G2 I built a career overseeing growth strategies, and I’ve always viewed G2 as a must-have, not a nice-to-have. In fact, that’s part of why I was so excited to join the G2 team.

I want to highlight the why behind that point of view and give you a framework for how to align your team to build a successful GTM strategy – powered by G2 – and exceed those ambitious goals we’ve all signed up for.

First, an underlying truth behind this entire framework: your G2 Profile sets the foundation.

Your G2 Profile is another owned channel. Treat it that way. With over 90M visits to G2 every year, buyers, investors, and technology influencers are researching and comparing software like yours. This is unique traffic that G2 is investing significantly in driving to our marketplace, our reports, our annual highlights like Best Software, and more.

Take advantage of those eyeballs to position your brand.

There’s so much you can do with your profile, especially if you’re on an upgraded plan. Optimized profiles serve as the basis for success on G2 and can include a number of resources to help support the self-service research experience we know buyers crave. Add an explainer video in the banner, custom CTAs to drive engagement, awesome content, and one of my favorites – an interactive demo. Have your team get up to speed through the G2 University course Anatomy of Your G2 Profile.

Now, we want good measurement in place – so you should also be using G2’s Track My Prospects feature and custom UTM parameters to understand traffic from your G2 Profile to your website. If there’s any question about whether your G2 Profile gets views, whether it shows up in Google search, or whether your website gets referral traffic from your G2 page, this will put that to rest.

So, let’s dive into our three-part framework.

Amplify Customer Voice: The power of G2 reviews

Your customer’s voice matters. 5-star reviews are great, but guess what? So are the others! Reviews that include a mix of sentiments typically feel more credible to potential buyers, provide great product feedback, and give your team the opportunity to respond – right there on your page. 

They can show that your team is approachable, open, accountable, and engaged. That’s the team I want to buy from.

You can also turn those reviews into content and spin up landing pages that focus on themes from your reviews. You don’t need a design team for that; just use the Reference Pages feature and get going. Use these pages in your mid-funnel campaigns across channels like LinkedIn and email. Share the links with Sales and BDRs to use in outreach. Put the links in your company signatures. Powerful, powerful stuff.

Plus, did you know G2 reviews are syndicated to more than a dozen leading software marketplaces, including AWS and Azure? That’s right, G2 reviews have a massive audience outside of G2 – doubling your exposure to buyers. 

I get it. Review collection can feel like a chore. But it doesn’t have to be. Put some focus and intention behind it by having a member of your team own a quarterly review goal.

Your G2 team is here to help with ideas. Here are a few to get started:

• Use G2’s integrations, like Pendo and Delighted, to automate the process 
• Let Team G2 run campaigns for you (you can still control the audience and the message)
• Add a footer to your customer newsletter or other customer communications
• Add it as a call to action after webinars
• Consider having G2 run a review booth at your in-person event 
• Provide incentive and do some good by tying a review campaign to G2 Gives, choosing a non-profit support

We’ve also got a quick video on effective review strategy right here to help you get going!

Because G2 Grids, Badges, and Reports are driven by authentic customer feedback, reviews have a big impact on your placement. Improving your position on the G2 Grid will open a world of Badges and content to use in your campaigns and sales outreach.

Your product will be validated not from outdated, analyst-created quadrants, but from real-time trends and the voice of your customers. This is true for all segments, from high growth disruptors to enterprise household names. Prospects land on G2 because they’re searching for solutions. When they find G2, will they find you?  

Tell your story. Let your customers tell your story. Then, use insights from G2 to understand these in-market buyers and power your demand strategy.

Which brings us to the next part of our framework...

Power Your Pipeline: Identifying and converting in-market buyers

Intent data, when used right, is a very powerful thing. G2 Buyer Intent is proprietary data that can show you the actual accounts that are researching your product, your category, and comparing you to your competitors. 

Please think about that.

As a revenue marketer, it’s gold. Instead of running campaigns that target wide audiences that you think will care about your solution, you can target the exact accounts and people that are actively researching you, your category, and comparing you to your competitors on G2.

Listen, no one is on G2 for fun (not even me!). They’re on G2 to solve a problem. People come to G2 to research and compare software and services. They may already be researching you, or they may learn about you on their buying journey.

Would you want your marketing efforts to focus on converting those people?

Would you want to surface these insights for Sales? 

Would you want your BDRs to prioritize outreach to these accounts rather than doing the same old same old?

There should be no such thing as cold outreach anymore. We have enough data and tools to know who’s in-market and to connect with them in more meaningful ways.

No matter what’s in your tech stack, G2 can integrate Buyer Intent, so you can operationalize and scale account and lead scoring, targeted outreach, Slack notifications, and social and display campaigns. 

And those are just a few examples.

It’s widely understood that only 5% of your target audience is in-market at a given time. Shift your mindset from quantity to focusing on engaging and converting that 5%.

Taking it a step beyond targeting those in-market buyers, G2 customers like Salesloft have learned that engaging that 5% with customer proof, like G2 reviews, Badges, and licensed Reports, is an effective way to further optimize your conversions and shorten sales cycles. 

So… we’re leaning in on the voice of the customer, and our 2024 pipe is looking strong. Now, we can turn our attention to long-term market domination by better understanding the dynamics of our own customer base and our broader category.

Inform Your Strategy: Competitive insights like you’ve never seen before

The latest addition to the G2 family, Market Intelligence, reimagines how G2 data can inform your whole go-to-market strategy.

Compiled from the millions of data points and intent signals collected by G2 – many of which have never before been made accessible on public product profiles or even via my.G2, Market Intelligence arms your product, marketing, and competitive teams with customer feedback, market share trends, and in-depth data not only or your products, but also for your entire industry – including your competitors. 

Tapping into the data simmering beneath the surface of G2, you’ll find at-a-glance trends in areas like market share, trending competitive comparisons, and key satisfaction drivers, including time to value, feature functionality, and support.

You can slice and dice data or run competitive comparisons that help inform your roadmap, value props, and positioning. It’s like a focus group at your fingertips.

For those who love digging into data, with one click you can export raw customer feedback data from your reviews and all of your competitor’s reviews. Use this data as-is for competitive intelligence and to inform feature development, or to ingest into your business intelligence engine to fuel strategy discussions. You can even integrate it via systems like Snowflake, so you’ve got an always-on source of market data straight from G2 to you.

So, that’s the three-part framework: Amplify Customer Voice, Power Your Pipeline, and Inform Your Strategy.

While the framework is simple, I won’t pretend this isn’t hard work. A true G2 Marketing Solutions strategy will require intention and planning, but the payoff will be dramatic. From market positioning to improved pipeline generation and progression, all the way through to win rates, you will not see a deal that hasn’t been touched by G2.

Sound like a lot? Our Customer Success team is the best in the business to work with your team on fleshing out goals, owners, milestones, and measurements. And If you’re new around here - we’re ready to give you the grand tour.

It’s early in the year. Let’s go! Like you, my team is ready to dive in and make an impact across the business in 2024.