The jobs that need to be done (JTBD) approach provides a framework for defining, categorizing, capturing and organizing all your customers’ needs.
It teaches us to think about the needs of users and develop a product to meet those needs. The framework also allows us to interact with the user through the lens of the tasks they want to do, and stay focused on developing features that match their needs.
Here are three ways an early stage startup can use the JTBD framework for marketing:
- Get initial organic traffic for the website.
- Increase the conversion of information pages.
- Increase product virality.
How to deploy JTBD early on SAAS
The startup I’m building aims to develop an ecosystem of sales and accounting automation apps, each of which can solve a specific problem. These apps are integrated under the hood so that customers can use other apps for related tasks.
For example, if a customer uses our invoice creation app, we automatically extract the earnings and accounts receivable information in our personal finance app, if they opt in to it. And if the user needs to track mileage in the future, they can just download our Mileage Tracker app and all their information is already in there.
We take the same approach to our marketing.
Optimize your website with JTBD keywords for SEO
To get traffic on a budget, you first need to analyze what your potential users need to do, find out how they search for ways to accomplish these tasks, and use those keywords on your website.
For example, instead of fighting for the keyword “best invoice maker” on SEO for our invoice maker app, we could use more direct search terms like “printable blank invoice” or “medical records invoice template”.
Applying the JTBD search framework, we assumed that many people would like to find an invoice template for specific services, such as plumbing or medical records. These search terms are all very similar, but that’s how people search for solutions.
That’s why we’ve created simple landing pages with invoice templates for different industries and tasks. We now have hundreds of these templates and they generate 80% of our new inbound traffic.
After doing this for six months, we saw:
- 300,000 website visits via search per month.
- 25% conversion of inbound traffic to views of our templates.
- Landing pages created with the JTBD framework converted more than 15% visitors to registration.
Traffic from search engines to our templates is growing much faster than from our blogs because the template pages have excellent properties in terms of view time and interactions on the page.
