Using Jobs To Be Done To Improve SaaS Website Conversions

What is Jobs to be Done

Jobs to be done is a framework defined by Anthony W. Ulwick and later popularised by Clayton Christensen in his book Innovator's Solution. According to JTBD, people use products for a certain job, the most most popular example is that people are not looking for a drill bit, but rather looking for a hole in the wall.

The actual job to be done maybe that the user wanted to hang an art piece on the wall. Jobs to be done are never single functional jobs, they involve other ancillary jobs too, which can be social, emotional or personal. For example, while the user wants to hang something on the wall, they want to make sure that they don’t spoil the wall, thus taking drilling machines out of the equation.

In the same way, when the visitor lands on your website, they are looking to get something done, and understanding their job to be done, will help you, help your users, thus improving your conversions.

Get Acquainted with the User’s Jobs

Step 1 Define your Goals

You might have various goals as a marketer, some of them would be:

• To Increase traffic
• To Increase engagement
• To Increase Signups/Conversions

Step 2: Put yourself in the user’s shoes

Now, think of each of the goals from the perspective of the end-user. The success of your goals will lie in mapping each of your goals to the user's goals.

Your Goal: Increase Traffic‍

To achieve this you need to need to make sure the CTRs on all your social posts, search results and ads are high. Why? Because high CTR in almost all cases showcases your copy is informative enough that the user is interested to learn more thus they click on the post.

Diving deeper, The Job of the headline, the social copy, the image, the meta description etc is to provide enough information to the user that they are inquisitive enough or certain enough to click through. The analogy I always give people is that your social, search & ad copies are like windows in a shop, their job is to make sure the shopper walks into the store. (And as an extension, sale boards are like clickbait 🙃), your copy’s job is to get a click-through to get more traffic.

Increase Engagement

Engagement can be a bunch of things, it can be time on site, number of pages per session, etc. From the User's perspective, in most cases, she is coming to your page in search of information. Thus the job your content needs to do is to provide that information and to stay true to the headline. If the user does not find the right information they will leave, thus negatively affecting all your metrics. Worse many users mentally will associate your brand with bad content which will hurt you in the long run

Increase Signups

This is the most critical Job a website does from the marketer's perspective. Flipping the perspective, the user will only signup if they are both satisfied that the product will do the job the are looking to get done, and for some of them, some sort of validation. For the job they are looking to get done, they need to find the information is a use case, feature or a case study page. For validation, they might look to social validation externally, logos and customer testimonials on your site. Do pick social validation carefully, if someone is looking to buy an expensive SaaS product, they don't want to know that 3 hours ago, some random person from a city they have no relation to, purchased your product. They are more interested in large, similar companies using your product, thus the need for logos and case studies.

The Users Job > Your Job

A critical point to remember is that your goal is never as important as the visitor’s job to be done. If a marketer’s KPI for the month is to 4X the email list, most people take the more expensive, and low ROI choice of spending money to grow the list, rather than providing added value to the subscriber. Because the marketer never tried to understand the user's job to be done, even if they manage to achieve a few signups, such users will quickly churn out of the list, thus making that spend worthless. The goal of the mailing list should always be to provide value to the reader. The Goal of content should always be to educate the user.

Using Jobs to be Done

Using JTBD to increase conversion requires figuring out all possible jobs of the visitor, the popular term being “Buyer Enablement”. While sales enablement is helping the sales team with information & tools, buyer enablement is providing the buyer, in our case the visitor, with more contextual information to help the buyer make the purchase. So how do you go about enabling the buyer? Here are a few steps:

Understand what the users are trying to achieve

Each user who comes to your site is at a different stage of their buyer journey. Details like the page they land at, the source they came from will give you some insights on their needs. In addition, any past behavior will only add to your understanding of the user’s needs. Use that understanding to guide users through your site to your conversion goals.

Here is an example: User is to solve a problem, does a Google search, lands on your content. From there the user may be looking for validation thus would be then looking for case studies, testimonials or comparison to her current tool. Looking at the past behavior of such visitors you can decide what to show to this set of users.

Once the user is on your site, here are a few things they will be looking for:

1. More Information: Signalling they are not ready to convert and might need more information, eg user case, features, etc
2. Validation: Signalling they are almost ready but need to see validation in terms of logos, case studies, etc
3. Needs Hand Holding: This usually happens when you have a complex product and the user would like to get a demo or talk to sales.

Organize your site to serve those needs

Now that you have some idea of what the visitor may be looking for, build your site according. Make sure you have all the necessary content. From Use-cases, features, videos, Testimonials, guides, etc. Every Page at the end needs to map to do a job that users might need to be done.

Use Webmaster to look at queries users are making for each page. It will give you an idea of what the user is looking for. While Search CTR and ranking will help in figuring how good your meta description is, conversions from those pages will help you figure out how good your buyer enablement is.

Help your users

This is the actionable part of buyer enablement which will actually help you push your conversions. Once you have figured out your site’s top journeys, you need to start assisting buyers. This can be achieved by using Call-to-action products like NextStepHQ or by using chatbots on your site, if you captured the user’s email ID, you can reach them later via email, or just simply embedding custom-built Call to actions manually in your pages. Make sure you choose a tool that provides the flexibility to build all the journeys you need. Buyer enablement can also extend to social and support as you answer questions that your users have.

Using this understanding, you will be in a better position to help your users help themselves and become your users.

Let us know how you have been using Jobs To Be Done in your marketing and growth efforts by pinging us onTwitter

Image Credit: Photo by Hal Gatewood on Unsplash