In this webinar, we have with us Ashwin Krishna, a highly experienced marketer. He leads the marketing team at Tact.ai and is the former head of global marketing at Capillary technologies. He discusses the core elements that will make a SaaS website attract customers and even get higher conversion rates.

Key topics covered in the webinar

• How to strategize website as a growth engine
• Leveraging website at different stages of a company growth
• Anatomy of best performing -
  Home page
  Product page
  Sign up/ Contact us page
• The big question- to outsource or build it in house?

Ashwin Krishna: As a marketing leader, one should have a very clear understanding of the objectives behind the design and content of the website. Even as the basic structure of a website will be adhered to, there will always be opinions regarding the design and content, that’s why a clear understanding of the principles in marketing as well as the objectives one wants to achieve is crucial.

It is important to stop looking at a website as just a collateral and to start perceiving it as a growth engine which can enable the branding-to-advocacy journey. This includes multiple aspects such as - Prospects, MQL/SQL, Opportunity, Customer, 1st Value, ARR, LTV. Within these aspects are covered factors such as- Industry stories, Customer stories, Product stories, Competitors stories, ROI Calculator, On-boarding help, Product support, Product launches, Community.

The above is important for a SaaS funnel which can be studied in Boat Eye model. The model is all about how you can help the customer at different stages of the journey. A website is the enabler of value across this boat eye model.

For example, a visitor who lands on the industry stories page will be led to customer stories/testimonials. Here he is at the MQL/SQL stage. Later he advances into the other stages of the funnel and the website becomes the enabler here.

The Mind Set and The Strategy

A website is not something that only a marketer and developer will work on. It is the face of the company. It has to include the decision makers. Websites are often the most underrated content. However, an enriched strategy is required to tackle the problems associated with building a website. Other teams are also involved like the product management which involves telling about the product in the best way possible. The process entails as follows-

Figure out the audience:

Make the audience or buyers the centre of all the action. Understand the buyer of the product- job applicants, investors, customers.

Figure out the goal:

The main goal of the website is to help users to make decisions easily and quickly. It’s about telling your audience the right things honestly.

Now comes the execution part. Consider the following aspects-

1. Content - factors to consider

• Content mostly revolves around the pain points and their solutions. Nowadays, nobody says, “We use the best technology in the market today.” That is not something that works with the audience presently. You have to understand the pain points of the audience and also share how you can solve them.
• JTBD approach- It is about prioritizing the jobs-to-be-done by the customer (for which your product has been created). In this approach, the content will extensively cover the various aspects of the jobs/ tasks that each of your customer segments will have to do. And this is the type of content that attracts buyers to your website. Design all your communication with the help of JTBD framework
• What are the different types of stories to cover? Product stories, 2. Industry stories (thought leadership stories) 3. Customer stories- testimonials, 4. People stories- people who are already using the product, celebrate them.

2. User Experience
WebFlow is potentially a good CMS and is also getting high popularity. Ensure the entire experience loads within 3 secs. Think from the user’s point of view.
Provide a great experience to the user as he visits your blog or any other content piece. Try to present good ungated content so that he will be willing to sign up for the gated content. Give readers amazing content that they would love to read, share and bookmark. Readers will associate your brand with the topic.

3. Points to note about SEO
The internet is for humans and so Black Hat SEO practices have died down. We write good content that people will not only find informative but will also share and bookmark. As a result, Google will love it.

For Blogs, it is better to have a subdomain- /blog
All the SEO juice that comes from blogs should be attributed to the website domain.

4. User Engagement- factors to consider

• Design simple and easy journeys
• Optimize micro (form drop outs in email field) and macro meters (Demo page conversions percentages)
• When should we have a great blog? “Start telling stories even before the first line of code is written”. In other words, the sooner you start telling stories, the better. As a CEO, you understand the industry better than your customers, as you are learning about the industry day in and day out.
• Hyper-personalization drives high user engagement and brand recognition. Use tools like CustomFit and Clearbit.

What does the website look like at different stages of the company's growth?

Pre-launch stage:

Tell your story- how the company came into being. Even before you haven't launched the product, start talking about the industry. This is a good way to build the top of the funnel.

Post Launch/Hyper Growth Stage:

• For each product- there is Use Case, Industry, By Function section.
• For Customer Stories- there are logos, testimonials in text/videos.
• Resources- blog, events, guides, webinar,
• About Us- Our Story, Team (Leadership team), in the news, awards, careers, why company X,
• Other important pages- partners, pricing, customer support.
• Contact us, Get Demo, Start Trial.

Post IPO:

One can experiment with Multilingual country-based content. You can consider having multilingual content in various languages which can serve as a micro-site. There are certain parts of the world which prefer to read content in their language as they are quite sensitive when it comes to making buying decisions.

How to build a high performing-

Home Page

Illustrating with the help of Gong’s website, the most important thing to take into consideration is the audience. They have the following questions when they land on the website-
What is the one job you will solve as a product? Show me the proof. Why should I trust you? Tell me more, how can you help me? Show me the outcomes. Show more proof (This illustrates that the company has authority in the industry)

Product page

What is the one job that the product solves? (Headings are mostly about HOW)
What are the subproducts and sub-jobs?
What are the different features that you have (unbundle the product)?
What are the trends in the industry? (Also talk about resources that are important)

Contact us page

It is recommended to have auto-filling of the visitor’s details enabled. Provide multiple options for the user to reach out to you like email id, social media handles or through chat bots.
Showcase customer stories on this page as well.
Job seekers are also important.
Mention company’s offices

How a typical website stack looks like (with examples)-

• Platform- Wordpress, HTML, CSS, Webflow
• Chatbot- Drift, Yellow.ai
• Marketing automation- tracking forms: Hubspot, Marketo, Freshmarketers
• SEO- SEMRush/Ahrefs
• Analytics- Google analytics/Factors.ai
• Website Personalization- CustomFit, Clearbit
• Hosting- AWS, Azure, Godaddy

Whether to build a website in-house or outsource it?

Pre-MF/Pre-Revenue Stage

Get it done through the product design or development team
Get a visual + web developer (second hire in marketing)

Growth Stage and Beyond

Website team
Collaborate with design agency for rebranding (out of the box ideas)

In a nutshell, it is suggested not to outsource your web development as it core to your company's growth.