Stages of Customer Awareness: Mapping the SaaS Customer Journey
In marketing, there are two related concepts: the "funnel" and the "customer journey".
Marketers and salespeople love funnels because they are simple and manageable, and because they present a pleasant picture where, under the force of gravity, conversion inevitably occurs.
The bad news is that if you work in SaaS, you'll have to work with "journeys" anyway. Successful SaaS cannot do without an excellent user experience, which is difficult to achieve without collecting user goals and actions into a timeline skeleton.
The good news is that understanding "journeys" is much simpler than it seems at first glance. To organize the complex web of interconnected events, you can divide touchpoints into stages of awareness. We'll come back to this later, but for now, let's clarify what a customer journey map and a sales funnel are.
The Difference Between a Sales Funnel and a Customer Journey
The funnel tells a company-oriented story. From your company's perspective, leads start at the top of the funnel and passively move down from awareness to purchase.
The customer journey is more focused on broad categorization than on individual touchpoints. Although actual buyer behavior may pass through these stages, it typically follows a much more winding path.
That's why funnels cannot give us much information about consumers. When we want to understand customer behavior, we need a user-oriented marketing and design tool. We need the customer journey.
What is a Customer Journey
A customer journey is the story of a person who has a problem and is looking for a solution. Even though it visualizes the same process of moving from strangers to buyers as the funnel, the journey looks at it from the customer's perspective.
This is a key point to realize: for customers, the journey includes the problem and the solution, but does not necessarily include you as the endpoint.
In fact, SaaS customers face an unprecedented number of platform and tool choices. How do you break through to grab their attention and make potential customers realize that your SaaS is what they need?
Why the Customer Journey is Important for SaaS
Customers need to find a solution to their problem, but they don't move step by step. They loop around each step, jumping from one to another, sometimes going back. And that's because choosing software is not a simple decision.
The SaaS market is the web version of an endless Turkish bazaar, full of colorful, noisy street vendors yelling at you. Choosing software is not exciting. It's overwhelming. It's confusing.
Maybe not for an industry insider, but for someone who has just scrolled through a dozen SaaS landing pages, they all look the same and all say the same thing.
Moreover, in each SaaS category, there are thousands of possible options, and the number is growing at an enormous rate. As an illustration: one in five solutions introduced in 2020 on the MarTech market did not exist a year earlier. A segment that consisted of 150 apps in 2014 grew to 8,000 apps in just nine years.
People need guidance. You are the expert. Do you see an opportunity window opening?
Buyers appreciate help when they have to navigate a very complex buying process. In fact, buyers who received content that helped them move forward in their buying journey were three times more likely to make a larger purchase with less regret.
For content to be useful, it must be relevant. The approach to a customer who is unhappy with their team's workflow, a customer looking for project management applications, and a customer who has signed up for a free trial will be very different.
That's exactly why we need the customer journey – it helps us align our solutions with the problems your customers face. By looking at the entire experience from the user's perspective, we can make it more valuable.
How to Create a Customer Journey Map
To start working with the customer journey, you need to break it down into stages, visualize them, and align our marketing messages with each stage.
1. Unawareness Stage
Through keyword research, we know that our audience often asks Google "what is a customer journey map". This is an informational intent; we align it with the unaware stage of the customer journey and write an article accordingly.
People with such a query are at the very beginning of their journey. So, even if we try to spread knowledge about our brand in the article, we are not promoting our services.
2. Problem Awareness Stage
When a person sets out to create a SaaS buyer journey map, they face a series of practical questions, or problems, that need to be clarified:
- What is the "SaaS customer journey" I'm about to describe? Why is customer journey mapping important? (You are here)
- I need the best example of a customer journey map to see how others do it.
- Are there customer journey mapping tools that can help me automate this process?
- Can I use the map in design to create a better product value proposition?
3. Solution Awareness Stage
Why are you digging into information about buyer "journeys"? Perhaps to use buyer journey maps to improve marketing or customer experience. Or maybe you want to redo something or even develop something from scratch.
A web application SaaS, or mobile app, or product web page – no matter what you need, we want to be on the list of best solutions. So we'll prepare a bunch of materials that list ways to develop pages and apps with excellent customer experience.
Remember that the customer journey includes the problem and the solution, but not necessarily you as the endpoint? The solution awareness stage is your chance to claim a spot among the solutions your clients are considering.
At the solution awareness stage, the client is much closer to purchase than at the start of the journey. So, by helping them see all available solutions, you can show off a bit, proving that your solution is the most suitable, and redirect the reader to a page that talks exclusively about you.
4. Product Familiarization Stage
The product familiarization stage is the shining hour of your sales content. Customers are already thinking about paying you money, so it's time to pull out your best persuasive arguments. This could be case studies and testimonials that back up your claims, or compelling offers that help prospects take the next step. .
For SaaS companies, freemium pricing is often used to remove barriers to the product's value. Users can try the product for free at a basic level to experience its benefits, and then the product sells itself by unlocking premium features that offer even more value.
But if you expect your product to do the heavy lifting of acquisition and conversion, you must provide users with a truly excellent experience. To ensure a consistent experience for all users, UX designers create specialized "customer journeys," known as user flows, that visualize the user's path within your product from entry point to final interaction.
5. The Most Aware Stage
The customer journey doesn't end when the user finds what they need, and this is especially important for SaaS companies. A newbie can easily add to the churn list if your competitor offers a better product at a better price.
Switching providers is just a few mouse clicks for the customer and nothing but financial loss for the provider. User acquisition costs are upfront, and monthly fees per user take time to become profitable, so providers need to make an effort to ensure customers stay.
Customer Journey: A User Experience Research Method
Knowing what a person does, needs, and feels at each stage of awareness helps build a CJM that becomes a real marketing tool, not just a pretty chart on an office whiteboard. The customer journey means that users are set in motion by a problem that makes them seek a solution. Understanding this journey can help SaaS companies join consumers in their quest and turn moments of frustration into moments of delight.
Using this customer-centric approach, you can help clients navigate the crowded SaaS market, earn their trust, and ensure the customer stays with you through human-centered design.