How to optimize your time to market

From a business perspective speed is often just as important as quality, especially when it comes to establishing market dominance. And that is why optimizing your time to market, meaning the time it takes to get a product from idea and into the hands of the user, is so important.

One example is the Betamax VS VHS battle of the 1970’s and 1980’s. JVC’s VHS managed to beat out Sony’s far superior Betamax format and this was in large part due to speed. A high number of manufacturers were producing VHS machines on license from JVC whereas Betamax machines were produced solely by Sony. This meant that VHS managed to get into the hands of more consumers faster.

In a similar vein during the “Standard Format Wars” of the early 2000’s, where two camps pitted their formats of Blu-Ray and HD DVD against each other, resulted in the Blu-Ray camp beating out HD DVD largely due to getting a cheap compatible player (Sony’s Playstation 3) onto the market faster than the HD DVD camp.

But while historic examples of the importance of speed to market are interesting, let’s move from the historical perspective and to a more applicable one, as we explore what time to market is, how it affects your business and how you can improve the speed of your organization.

What is time to market?

Time to market, also often referred to as speed to market or TTM, are synonymous definitions of the time it takes for a product or campaign to make its way from initial idea to launch. 

When we talk about time to market for a product it includes development and production, marketing campaigns and other operational processes, and on the retailer side it also includes procurement and distribution. As such, the time to market-process is the sum of the combined efforts of getting a product onto the shelves or into the hands of the buyer.

Additionally, the time to market definition also covers marketing campaigns and promotions as isolated events. In this case it is the time it takes a campaign to go from planning, through development and production to launch.

How does time to market affect your business?

Where it used to be a term mainly used in retail, time to market has become an increasingly important focus across industries. And with good reason. Being fast to market can give you an essential competitive advantage.

From an overall business perspective, if your time to market is too long, you run the risk of competitors pulling ahead and presenting customers with an equivalent solution or product.

From a purely marketing perspective the past years have shown that speedy marketing campaigns pose a huge benefit to brands. So much so, that the term fastvertising has been coined to describe marketing teams reacting quickly to external factors as part of their marketing efforts.

An example of how speed can make or break a campaign (and a business) is Peloton’s reaction to a scene in the show Just Like That from 2021, where (spoilers) Mr. Big had a heart attack following a 45 minute Peloton class. This sent the Peloton stock tumbling down by 11.3% in the span of a single day. But within 48 hours the company had responded with an advertisement where the character is revealed to be alive and shacked up with his Peloton instructor.

While this example doesn’t necessarily present a situation that would come up in a lot of businesses, it does a lot to show how your ability to react to market opportunities and challenges in combination with a fast time to market can be a huge benefit to your business.

Launching a campaign or product faster will, per definition, give your product more time on the market, which means it will have more time to generate revenue before the market matures and declines.

5 tips to improve your time to market

Whether we’re talking marketing campaigns or product launches, getting a faster time to market is important to any organization. The question is, how do you get there? How do you increase speed to market?

To help you answer that question, we’ve taken a look at 5 different areas where optimizing your processes could help speed up your time to market.

1. Optimize your workflow management

The first thing you should look into when it comes to reducing time to market is your processes and workflows. Analyzing your workflows will let you identify which steps can be eliminated, where you have potential bottlenecks that prolong the process, and which production resources are systematically over- or under-booked. All of this will slow down your time to market, and in some cases quite significantly.

After you’ve identified the problem areas in your processes it is a lot easier to fix them, and in turn increase your speed to market.

2. Speed up your approval process

The approval process is usually a big part of both product launches and campaign launches. And, as any marketer can attest, a lot of time is spent keeping track of versions and corrections during the production phase.

This process is of course necessary as both editing and approval is a necessity when you want a good final result, but the process itself is still enormously time consuming.

So while the process itself cannot be skipped, it can be improved by switching to an online proofing tool. This eliminates the need to keep track of the changes across multiple document iterations when you inevitably pass several iterations of descriptions and designs back and forth between team members and internal as well as external stakeholders.

3. Get rid of manual processes

When you analyze your workflows there’s a good chance you’ll come across a large number of manual processes that slow you down. This could be anything from deadline reminders to asset hand offs. And there’s a big potential for improvement in automating these processes.

Essentially, automating certain parts of your workflow, will increase your speed while also decreasing the risk of human errors such as missed deadlines, wrong versions being passed back and forth etc.But when it comes to automation, handling deadline notifications and task handoffs is just the tip of the iceberg. Automation has a huge potential to speed up your workflows through things like creative automation and AI.

4. Integrate your data flows

Both marketing campaigns and product development usually requires large amounts of data, and the teams involved are often scattered, not just across departments but across sites, time zones and even places of employment—especially if freelancers, suppliers, agencies, or other external stakeholders are involved in the process.

And to help decrease time to market, you need to make sure that the data is accessible to everyone involved in the project regardless of when and where they work.

And because of this need for data there’s a measurable benefit to making sure that any tools used by the different collaborators integrate to as high a degree as possible. Otherwise your speed to market could be slowed down by a single stakeholder not being able to access the data they need, simply because it hasn’t made its way from one tool to another.

5. Be adaptable

A final piece of the speed to market process is to make sure your process is adaptable. It’s one thing to be able to get your campaign or product to market fast, but being able to adapt to external factors is just as important.

It could be due to changes in the market, changes in regulatory requirements or even PR situations, not unlike what Peleton experienced with And Just Like That, but you may well find yourself in a place where your current plan needs to be changed, and it needs to be changed quickly.

Whether we’re talking about launching a product or a campaign reacting to external elements, changing is a big challenge. Being adaptable, however, is not simply a mindset that your organization needs to nurture in employees, it’s also a requirement to your any systems and tools you use.

Where to invest to reduce time to market

As you can see, decreasing time to market is well worth both time and money. The question is, where should you put your time and money to get the biggest return on the investment you make?

When it comes to achieving a reduced time to market there are multiple areas where you could invest. Whether it is better to optimize workflows and processes, or to invest in new systems to automate manual workflows will depend in large part on where your organization currently is.

With that said, connecting aspects of your marketing work in a single ecosystem is never a bad idea. While the benefit may be larger to companies in certain situations, becoming more effective will always be a benefit.