Now that you’ve used inbound marketing to attract your buyer personas, or target customers, to your SaaS website, how do you move convert them into customers?
Once you’ve identified your buyer personas, it’s much easier to market content to them, but the timing of this content is also crucial. Your buyer persona will go through a research process before selecting the software suited for their business needs, and this search process is referred to as the buyer’s journey. The buyer’s journey consists of three phases: awareness, consideration, and decision. You need to create content for each of these phases, so that when your buyer persona searches for help for their business, it won’t force them into a purchase situation when they aren’t ready to make one yet. This can be a major turnoff.
The Buyer's Journey
- In the awareness stage of the buyer’s journey, your potential customer knows that their business has a weakness, threat, or potential opportunity, but they need further research in order to understand the full scope of it.
- Your Move: You attract your potential customers to you website with content educating your customers on these questions. These can include blog posts, SEO, and social media. Your content should make them more informed about their issues, like why their business may not be reaching their productivity goals, so they can better understand how your software would help them down the line in the buyer’s journey. Do not mention your software or your company yet. They are not ready to make a purchase at this stage and will not be receptive to being pushed in that direction.
- In the consideration stage, your buyer persona now has defined what the problem/opportunity for their business is and they want to educate themselves on possible approaches to handling the situation.
- Your Move: You offer information in exchange for your leads’. You can do this by creating content teasing a topic of interest to them. On this page there will be a call-to-action promising more detailed information, such as an eBook, on the subject. After clicking the CTA, your visitor will be directed to fill out form on a landing page in exchange for this more detailed content. This process allows you to receive information that would help your build your buyer persona, such as their demographics and goals, but also their email so that you can send them related articles to move them along in the buyers’ journey and keep them coming back to your website. This is how you convert your visitors into leads.
- In the decision stage, your buyer persona now knows what type of software suits their needs, and now they much choose between vendors.
- Your Move: Your offer your leads cold hard facts and demonstrations about what your software does better than the competition. This can extend to beyond the software as well, such as if your company is known for being friendly and personable. Things like this can make the difference between similar teams. Also offer demos of your software to promising leads, which can include free trials and freemium samples. This would give your leads a taste of what it could do for their business in a 90-120 day period. In turn, you receive even more valuable information about how people use your software for their business as well as their feedback, allowing you to fine-tune your software even further. This is how your leads will see if your software will achieve the goals they’ve set for their business while tackling the challenges they typically face. This is how you close your leads into customers.
There are further examples of SaaS buyer personas and how they fit into the buyer's journey included in our free How to Create Personas for Software Companies:
The buyer's journey does not stop there. You could even create a workflow with this content, slowly linking your customer from content to content that brings them from the awareness stage to the decision stage where they’ll be ready to make a purchase. This can be done through CTAs linking to content answering any follow up questions your buyer personas would have after coming across your website, like our eBook offer above. Emails following up on content offers would also help. Following this process makes your buyer personas much more receptive to your company because you’re giving them content that they need, when they need it. This paints you as an authority on the issue/opportunity that led them to your website in the first place and gives them the belief that your software can offer the solution. Your potential customers will trust that your company is best suited to help their business.
