Jobs-Led Marketing: How Intercom Became A Billion-Dollar Company

This article is an excerpt from Jobs To Be Done CORE.

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Intercom was launched in 2011 as a single product offering four distinct pricing plans — Free, Sponsored, Starter, and Premium. From the start, it has always been Intercom’s goal to help internet businesses connect with their customers and build thriving relationships.

Having run web startups in the past, the founding team wanted to address the problem of siloed tools for messaging, support, product updates, surveys, and even analytics. In their early research, they spoke with a wide range of physical and internet-based businesses to understand how they engage with customers.

While they were unable to find commonalities among the people and personas they interviewed, they did find a lot of similarities in the progress people were struggling to make. At the time, people were hiring Intercom to onboard new users, collect real-time feedback, and also provide support to existing customers.

But the problem for Intercom was how to position and communicate all the different ways in which the product was being used. Thus, they connected with Bob and the Rewired Group to challenge their assumptions about the jobs people were hiring Intercom to do.

Based on their research (interviewing a mix of 15 active, inactive, lost, and free-trial customers, and codifying the qualitative data), they discovered customers were hiring Intercom to do four high-level jobs, which they called:

1. Observe: Help me see my users
2. Learn: Help my users talk to me
3. Engage: Help me get people to do the right thing at the right time
4. Support: Help me provide timely responses

After that, they had to unbundle and redesign the product to align with these four high-level jobs. They found that customers would hire Intercom for one or maybe two jobs at a time, but they would go on to hire Intercom for the remaining 3–4 jobs throughout their lifetime with the product.

Therefore, they split Intercom into separate but integrated products, and the goal for the growth team was now to help customers get onboarded and successful in the specific job that brought them to Intercom on a particular day, before onboarding and activating them for other jobs later in their lifecycle.

They broke down Intercom and the JTBDs into specific product tours and activation flows for each job, and this gave the team a clear picture of the kind of progress people were hiring Intercom to make at any given time. So why did Intercom not adopt the typical onboarding strategies that are based on personas, job titles, or even verticals?

They discovered their customers came from different verticals, but one thing they had in common was the job they were hiring Intercom to do. As it turned out, JTBD worked so well at Intercom because it created synergy between their product development and product marketing efforts.

Jobs-led marketing has always been the foundation of Intercom’s marketing strategy.¹ According to Matt Hodges, Fmr Dir of Marketing at Intercom, the company became so successful because before taking any product to market, they first figured out the high-level job it was being hired to do. More than that, every decision at Intercom is based on first-principles thinking — they make sure they understand the fundamental truths about what they are to build or market, before coming up with ideas or solutions.

In this way, they figured out the different types of people and teams that were hiring Intercom for the different high-level jobs, making it easier and more contextual for them to tailor their marketing, positioning, and messaging accordingly.

Their marketing team focused on creating relevant content around the complexities of these high-level jobs so that people searching for a solution for these jobs would find Intercom instead of competing products. If you don’t start with the core jobs people are hiring your product to do before layering any other type of segmentation, you might just be relying heavily on luck.

Before Intercom adopted the JTBD approach, they had a single page that vaguely described the entire Intercom product. It wasn’t contextually targeted and didn’t give people a clear picture of what they could do with Intercom, based on their specific JTBD and use case. So Matt and the marketing team created messaging guides for each of the four Jobs to be Done.² The messaging guides for each JTBD and product use case answered the following questions:

• What is the job that people are hiring Intercom to do?
• Who are the people and/or teams looking for solutions to this specific job?
• Why are they looking to hire Intercom to do this specific job?
• What problems are we solving for them and why do we care?
• What features make Intercom a good solution for this job?
• What can they do with this particular package or use case?
• Which features do they get in this package and why?
• How much does it cost?
• Who are the people currently using Intercom to do this job and what progress are they making? (social proof)

In Matt’s article — create high-converting landing pages in 12 steps, he shared how they used these messaging guides to create landing page content for each of Intercom’s four jobs.³ Currently, about 4–6 million people visit Intercom every month, with more than 80% of visitors coming from direct searches. But if you want to trace the reason for this SEO success, it all comes down to how Matt the marketing team managed to align Jobs to be Done with content marketing.

In fact, within a few months of implementing the Jobs-led marketing approach, Intercom more than doubled (3x) top-of-funnel traffic, while maintaining the same conversion rate. That’s insane! Before creating any piece of content, the Intercom marketing team made sure they answered the following questions:

• What keywords are people using to search for products that can do this specific job?
• Who are the top search competitors in this keyword space?
• Who else is providing a solution for this specific job?
• Is Intercom a better product?
• What differentiates Intercom from all the other alternatives that do this particular job?

Companies that think of SEO or marketing-first tend to give little or no attention to the actual content itself, but this wasn’t and isn’t the case at Intercom. They were able to win because they prioritized content before marketing. Intercom’s strategy was simple — they shared their latest understanding of the world with other startups and product folks, who then rewarded Intercom with their attention and word-of-mouth.

In Matt’s opinion, when you focus on the complexities of a Job to be Done rather than your product story or problem statement, you’ll be able to create content that helps people make progress. Every piece of content you create should be about the progress the reader is trying to make as they read what you have written. By doing so, Intercom has been able to attract customers and partners who genuinely share their values while ignoring those who don’t.

Intercom’s content-first approach also drove exponential results for their demand generation strategy, as it attracted speaking invitations, which ultimately led them to organize their events worldwide. They made sure their events and PR/communications strategies addressed the following questions:

• Where will we meet the people looking to hire Intercom for this specific job?
• What events are they attending?
• What podcasts do they listen to?
• Which influencers are they listening to?
• What publications/newsletters are they reading?
• What podcasts/events do we want to sponsor or speak at this year?

Another interesting learning from Intercom is how you can leverage Jobs-led positioning to create the force of push for struggling situations, so potential customers can be motivated to make progress.

The goal was to optimize positioning and messaging for Intercom’s support JTBD. People were hiring Intercom to solve their support problems, but the team had no idea what this support problem entailed. So they used the JTBD timeline to figure out the critical moment that caused people to start looking for a solution.

According to Matt, they found that people looking to hire Intercom’s support product didn’t come to that realization until something catastrophic happened. Perhaps they rolled out a new feature that caused a slew of support tickets, or maybe a critical bug ruined the experience for their active user base and led to a flurry of inbound support requests.

Until that moment when they could no longer make progress with their current process, they were typically fine with using shared inboxes or email threads to get their support JTBD done.

By leveraging this knowledge, Intercom was able to position their support product in a way that recreated these moments in the minds of people looking to hire Intercom to get their support JTBD done. Your customers’ Jobs to be Done should be the foundational unit on which you build your marketing, not personas, not verticals, and not use cases. At the same time, JTBD is not a set-and-forget approach.

On top of the four high-level JTBDs, Intercom originally layered three use cases/products: Support and Retain, Capture and Convert, and Onboard and Engage. However, these use cases have now morphed into Conversational Support, Conversational Marketing, and Conversational Engagement. Even so, the goal is still the same.

Your customers’ jobs will remain stable through time, but their hiring and firing criteria will evolve, and you need to keep optimizing for that. Intercom chose to focus on the progress their customers were struggling to make and not product categories, and in the end, they’re competing in as many as four different product categories. However, the downside is that Intercom doesn’t really nail the JTBDs in each of these categories, unlike the products that target just one product category/use case.

This article is an excerpt from Jobs To Be Done CORE.

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Notes

1. Inside Intercom & Hodges, M. (2021, January 21). How to market the Job-to-be-Done. Inside Intercom. Retrieved November 14, 2021, from https://www.intercom.com/blog/videos/marketing-the-job-to-be-done/
2. JTBD Radio, Moesta, B., Spiek, C., & Fowlkes, E. (2015, March 31). MARKETING INTERCOM WITH JOBS-TO-BE-DONE | MATT HODGES ON JOBS-TO-BE-DONE RADIO. JTBD Radio. Retrieved November 13, 2021, from https://jobstobedone.org/radio/marketing-with-jobs-to-be-done/
3. Inside Intercom & Hodges, M. (n.d.). 12 steps to creating landing pages that convert. Inside Intercom. Retrieved November 13, 2021, from https://www.intercom.com/blog/12-steps-to-creating-landing-pages-that-convert/