Hi, I’m Rachel with HubSpot Academy. Your website is your business’s most important digital asset. But why exactly are websites so important and what is their purpose? Your website is the first-place people go to learn about your products or services and find information about your business. Although your other online presences like your social media profiles are important too, your website is your home base online. It’s also your digital sales rep, working 24 hours a day, seven days a week to promote your offerings. For these reasons, your website is critical not only to your marketing, but to your business as a whole.

When you think about your website, whether you have one yet or not, the first question to ask is what is the job of your website? You can use the jobs to be done framework, otherwise known as the job’s theory, to help you figure this out. The jobs theory was developed by Clay Christensen at Harvard Business School, and it’s a helpful way to look at customer needs by focusing on their motivations. The jobs theory is the idea that people have jobs in their life that need to be done, and they hire the best product or service to do it. Think about the saying, people don’t buy a quarter inch drill, they buy a quarter inch hole. This is a perfect example of the job’s theory in action. When someone purchases drill, they’re hiring that drill to do the job of creating a hole in their wall. Christians in Theory was written with products and services in mind, but it can be applied to websites.

Ask yourself, what is the job people are hiring your website to do? Your site will have several different jobs. Some people may be coming there to find out about your pricing, while others might want to speak with your sales team. Regardless of why people are coming to your site, it needs to help them accomplish their goals easily and efficiently. If not, you risk losing them for good. 88 percent of online consumers are less likely to return to a website after a bad experience. So, it’s important to determine the job your website is being hired to do and to execute on that job. Remember that the job to be done of your website is the one that your audience determines.

Focusing on your visitor’s experience and seeing your site through their eyes will ensure that your website accomplishes the job it’s been tasked to do.