For so long, we’ve focused on blog and video content as being the pillars of content marketing. The thing is, they’re not. Your website — the information architecture that makes up your entire navigation and user flows — is essential to your content marketing success. If the navigational systems on your website don’t make sense and are not optimized for search, you could risk losing out on potential traffic and conversions.
There’s a myth that corporate buyers hold all the power over vendors – that vendors struggle to sell. However, perhaps it’s the other way around: buyers struggle to buy. The single biggest challenge of selling today is not selling, it is actually our customers’ struggle to buy. Indeed, more than 75% of the customers described their purchase as very complex or difficult.
Depending on the type of product you’re selling, the number of people you’ll need to convince could be vastly different. Selling a loaf of bread might only need one person’s approval, whereas selling high-end services to a large corporation will require a number of decision-makers to agree. To simplify this abstract idea, specific buying roles have been characterized. These roles will be present in most buying situations.
SEOs can relate to this, but folks new to SEO need to understand what typically happens when you focus on SEO and content. A new account gave me lots of sleepless nights. For what felt like forever, we couldn’t get articles to rank. Then in June, we felt like the issue was the blog being on a subdomain. It got moved to /blog/. 3 months later… liftoff. Trust the process.
The problem is that most startups have limited resources. When adding your first UX headcount, you’re taking one away from engineering or sales. So it’s tempting to delegate this work to contractors or, what’s worse, to get in charge of the UX yourself. The reality is that most startups need UX design way earlier than they realize. We live in a world of commoditized user experience. If you’re developing consumer software, that’s your bar. If you’re developing business software and want to win for real, that’s also your bar.
How does a SaaS company reach enterprise buyers? Enterprise decision-makers have unique problems they need to solve, but they don’t always have time to experiment with a platform or sit through dozens of software demos to find the right solution. When it comes to creating an enterprise pipeline, Notion takes a unique approach. Notion has found the most success in attracting larger, enterprise-level customers through the recommendations of their internal team members that use Notion in their personal lives.
One of the most impactful ways you can improve your user onboarding experience is to remove as many unnecessary steps as possible. Doing so should reduce your product’s time-to-value and increase the number of people who experience your “Aha!” moment. The goal of onboarding isn’t to get more people to experience your product’s value asap. It’s also to help them adopt new product habits. Habit-formation requires some friction.