To boost early-stage growth, adopt a jobs-to-be-done approach to marketing – TechCrunch

The jobs-to-be-done (JTBD) approach provides a framework for defining, categorizing, capturing and organizing all your customers’ needs.

It teaches us to think about users’ needs and develop a product to meet those needs. The framework also lets us communicate with the user through the lens of the tasks they seek to do, and stay focused on developing features that align with what they need.

Here are three ways an early-stage startup can use the JTBD framework for marketing:

• Get initial organic traffic for the website.
• Increase conversion of information pages.
• Increase product virality.

How to employ JTBD at an early-stage SAAS

The startup I’m building aims to develop an ecosystem of apps for sales and accounting automation, each of which can solve a specific problem. These apps are integrated under the hood to enable customers to use other apps for related tasks.

For example, when a customer uses our invoice maker app, we’ll automatically extract the income and account receivables information into our personal finance app, should they opt-in. And if in the user needs to track mileage in the future, they can just download our Mileage Tracker app, and all their information will already be in there.

We employ the same approach to our marketing.

Optimize your website with JTBD keywords for SEO

To get traffic with a small budget, you should first analyze what your prospective users need to do, discover how they search for ways to do these tasks, and use those keywords on your website.

For example, instead of fighting for the “best invoice maker” keyword 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 framework for search queries, we hypothesized that many people want to find an invoice template for specific services, such as plumbing or medical records. These search terms are all very similar, but this is how people look for solutions.

So we created simple landing pages with templates of invoices for different industries and tasks. We have hundreds of these templates now, and they generate 80% of our new incoming traffic.

After doing this for six months, we saw:

• 300,000 website views via search per month.
• 25% conversion of inbound traffic into views of our templates.
• Landing pages made with the JTBD framework converted more than 15% visitors to registration.

The traffic from search engines to our templates is growing much faster than from our blogs, since the template pages have excellent characteristics in terms of view time and interactions on page.