The Importance Of The Customer Journey For Tech And Software Businesses
Updated: Feb 6, 2021
Marketing and Sales departments have one common overall goal for tech businesses, which is to increase the revenue. However, they are still not the same thing and they have completely different objectives.
Let's say that you're doing Sales for an SaaS business. The main purpose of your role is to convert leads into paying customers, probably on a subscription model, right? You would probably have your own quotas to make for the month and will have systems in place to maximize your conversions.
It's easier, however, to convince your prospects to invest in the SaaS solution if they have some knowledge of your service, or if they specifically came to your website. This is where Marketing comes in.
The objective of Marketing is to drive awareness and engagement within the target audience. For example, marketing an SaaS business involves strategic campaigns through videos, blogs, podcasts and infographics.
The Marketing Machine is what attracts prospects to the service and educates the consumer.
This creates brand awareness and sets up potential sales conversions for the SaaS product. Simply put, Marketing is the process of getting people interested in your tech product or service.
Measure Your Tech Business Marketing With Metrics
We have previously taken a deep dive into the importance of Key Peformance Indicators (KPI's). They are the key metrics for measuring the success of your goals.
Before you start designing your Marketing Plan and setting your goals for your tech business, make sure that you've set up your systems for tracking your prospects. A Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software, for example, will be very valuable for collecting data about your potential clients and tracking their journey.
The Customer Journey In Your CRM
It's important to keep an eye on the progression of your prospects through their customer journey. This is the entire story of their interaction with your tech or software business.
How did they come across your brand?
How did they get in touch?
Are they ready to buy or have they already made a purchase from you?
You ultimate objective is to convert the customer to a sale at the end of their journey, then keep generating sales from them afterwards.
Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) are important for making sure that you're on track for meeting your objectives. They can also help you pinpoint areas where there are errors, or where you can improve.
They can also be used to follow your client's customer journey with metrics such as:
Content downloads
Demo requests
Contact forms submitted
Phone calls
Sales converted
Maybe you sell a subscription for a software in the events industry. If someone downloads your brochure about software products for events, then it's likely that they are in the early stages of their journey to finding that solution.
It's your job to nurture this prospect and guide them through the steps needed to reach your ultimate goal of a subscription sign up.
Track their progress in your CRM and take the steps necessary to guide them through the decision making and buying process.
Write It Down
People don't do this often enough. You need to actually sit down and physically write out your customer journey. The act of writing on paper forces you to think about this process in detail.
Let's go through an example of how sales and marketing combine to make a campaign for an SaaS solution:
Goal
Acquire SaaS subscriptions.
Customer Journey / KPI's & Targets
Marketing
Landing page visits / 200 per month
E-book downloads / 100 per month
SaaS demo requests from e-book link / 50 per month (50% success)
Sales
SaaS demos scheduled / 50 per month
SaaS demos completed / 25 per month
SaaS subscriptions sold / 15 per month
Results In January
Marketing
Landing page visits = 312
E-book downloads = 146
SaaS demo requests from e-book link = 65 (45% success)
Sales
SaaS demos scheduled = 20
SaaS demos completed = 9
SaaS subscriptions sold = 6
Analysis
As you can see from this data, we achieved the goal of acquiring SaaS subscriptions, but fell short on the targets. This doesn't mean that the campaign wasn't a success because the data is very valuable moving forward.
You can see immediately, from this snapshot, where there may be some things that are done well, compared to some areas which need improvement.
As you can see, the landing page visits surpassed the target. This indicates that you're doing better than anticipated for this stage of the customer journey. Why is this the case?
Do you have a super slick landing page? Is there a persuasive video on there which gets a lot of views? Maybe you can test this campaign against another landing page to see if there's much difference.
Although your numbers here are great, you should still see how you can improve this step and generate even more activity!
On the other hand, it looks like the demo requests from the e-book link were 5% less successful than the target. It's time to work out why this is?
Is it down to the layout and design of your e-book? Maybe the writing can be more persuasive? Is your link to the demo easy to find and use?
Again, setting up a second campaign to test another version of the e-book will be useful. Brainstorm ideas to design this stage of the customer journey to maximize its effectiveness.
This kind of scrutiny and analysis in each step of the customer journey will help you to really drill down into what does and doesn't work. It will allow you to really streamline your customer journey and work out any problems.
Use your analysis to set goals for the following month and see if you can grow your numbers to ambitious levels.
Once you find something that works well, make sure that you really lean into it and develop that aspect to increase your success!
Make A Great Impression!
This is a simplified example of a customer journey and the kind of KPI's that you can use to measure the success of your goals. There are, however, many more metrics to measure a campaign.
Impressions indicate the number of times that your paid ad was seen by your target audience. Clicks are the number of times your target prospect clicked on your paid ad.
If your impressions are super high and your clicks are low, this indicates that your ad isn't very enticing.
We could go on and on, the possibilities are vast for building and testing your campaigns.
You should start by choosing one type of campaign with basic KPI's and scale from there. The more that you practice, the better you'll get!
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We are ORLA and we specialize in making stunning videos for tech companies. We have worked with clients all over the world involved with blockchain, artificial intelligence, the internet of things, renewable energy, SaaS and much more.
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