Gearing up for a re-design of your SaaS marketing website? Before you commit valuable time and resources, you need to make sure you're creating something that works. Today, I'm looking at the importance of putting strategy before design.
1) Your Website Needs to Be Built for Your Buyers
Most SaaS companies approach design agencies with a clear idea of the website they want to build.
They talk to their design partners about what they want, and design for what they think is best practice - making decisions on the messaging, usability, layout and content based on their own needs.
But why are we designing a website?
The main answer's usually similar: to attract potential customers, convince them of the merits of our products and services, and funnel them towards a sale.
So, with such a clear purpose, why do so many SaaS companies design websites for their own benefit, and not the benefit of potential customers?
Instead of building a website to our own specifications, we need to address the needs of our potential customers. To do that, we need to understand the needs of our buyers, and how those needs drive the buying process.
To reach that stage, we need to develop buyer personas.
2) Your Buyers' Needs Create a Design Framework
We've talked about buyer personas ad nauseam, but in essence, they're a representation of your product's ideal buyer - containing insights into their motivations for buying your product, and the barriers to sale that stop them from becoming a customer.
From a website perspective, these needs create a clear framework for web design: listing problems our website needs to solve, and barriers that it needs to overcome.
Instead of creating a page structure based on the messages your company wants to broadcast, you can create pages that focus on the messages your visitors want to hear.
This way, your website can be designed to channel your visitors through the sales process.
You can identify the challenges they face at every stage of the buying process, and use your website to answer those questions, and direct them through to the next stage - educating them about their problems in the attract phase, introducing your solutions at consideration, and earning their trust during the decision stage.
3) Every Page Needs to Serve a Single Purpose
With this clear framework in place, it becomes easy to evaluate your current pages, and create concepts for future pages.
If you view your marketing website as a tool for getting the buyer from visitor to customer, it becomes clear that every single step in that process needs to serve a clear purpose.
Every page, image, link and button needs to be designed to answer their questions, earn their trust, and direct them to the next stage of the buying process. Every website element that doesn't serve that goal represents a wrong-turn - taking your visitor further away from the end-goal, and making it a little bit harder for them to become a customer.
If you can't clearly define why you have a page - in terms of its impact on a particular persona, during a particular phase of the buying process - it isn't helping the sales process, but hindering it.
4) Your Website Needs to Evolve with Your Personas
As your SaaS business grows, so will your understanding of your buyers.
You'll learn valuable lessons from your existing customers, and redefine the types of customers you want in the future. You'll gain clearer insights into the problems your product solves, and the problems it doesn't. You'll learn which parts of your website play an instrumental role in the buying process - and which are just dead weight.
Your website needs to evolve alongside your understanding of your buyers. As you learn more about your visitors, leads and customers, you need the flexibility to change your website accordingly - streamlining userflows, rewriting copy and redesigning pages.
This type of iterative SaaS website design is vastly different to the 'set-it-and-forget-it' approach prevalent in most traditional web design processes, where businesses invest a small fortune into a complete website overhaul, and leave it unchanged for several years.
Instead, it's better to take a little-and-often approach: making small changes, testing them out, and using that information to make smarter changes in the future.
5) Your SaaS Marketing Website Will Make or Break Your Growth
In the digital age, your website is the be-all and end-all of your sales and marketing efforts.
It's the first place visitors turn to learn about your business, and the last place they'll check before becoming a customer. It's a showcase of your ideas, beliefs and attitudes, and a place for people to compare you to your competitors.
In the battle to earn the trust and gratitude of potential customers, it can be your greatest ally - but it can also be your worst enemy.
The way you approach your SaaS website redesign will have huge implications for the success of your business. Your pages, copy, design, navigation and UI can help or hinder your sales or marketing efforts.
In most cases, traditional web design is slow, expensive and inefficient; fixated on the needs of the business, and not the buyer. As an innovative and disruptive SaaS business, you need something faster, smarter and more flexible.
You need something iterative, and lead by strategy.
