In my technical writing course, we were tasked with analyzing the audience of some homepage. I picked Zapier for this, and you can find my analysis below.
You can find the Zapier homepage here: https://zapier.com/
What is Zapier?
As technology becomes increasingly more important in all aspects of life, there is a large gap growing between those people who are skilled at automation and those who aren’t. For instance, a data scientist who manually enters all of their data will find themselves outclassed by someone who automates that and can focus on actually analyzing their data.
This gap spans across multiple different types of jobs: recruiters, marketing representatives, programmers, etc. Zapier seeks to try and even the playing field by allowing people who don’t have a background in software development to easily set up automations for themselves. They do this by providing a simple UI for people to connect 5,000+ different web services together.
You can think of an “Automation” as a series of steps that happen without human intervention.
Who is the audience?
Zapier is targeting a wide range of people with their product. The most common roles these people fall into are:
- Engineers
- Marketers
- Customer Support Representatives
- HR & Recruiting Ops
- Project Managers
- Data Scientists
- IT workers
- Sales Ops
What does the audience need?
The common need across all of the above groups is a tool that allows them to easily connect one web service to another. For example, a streamer might want to set up an automation that says, “When I go live on Twitch, post a message in Discord, tweet about it on Twitter, and add to my Instagram story.” In this example, the streamer needs Zapier to provide a connection to Twitch, Discord, Twitter, and Instagram.
With that being said, a customer service representative doesn’t particularly care if Zapier provides connections to those places. Rather, they would want to see connections to Customer Relationship Management software such as Salesforce.
Of course, just having a connection to a particular service isn’t good enough. If the Salesforce connection doesn’t provide the tools for people to do their jobs, then it’s irrelevant whether or not Zapier is “connected” to them.
To summarize, in order to meet the demands of a vast audience, thousands of different services need to be connected in an intelligent manner.
What is the purpose of the homepage?
Some of the most common goals for homepages include:
- Explaining what the product is
- Helping people get started with it
- Building trust with the person viewing the page
- Providing links to key pages
Zapier seems to struggle a bit on this front as their audience is so broad. As mentioned above, a streamer would have vastly different needs than a customer service representative. Zapier tries to get around this by having some scrolling text that shows the different things you can automate, but they ultimately end up tailoring it to specific users (marketing and IT).
Given their user base, it makes sense why their homepage is like this, but I do find it a bit lacking in some regards. When I navigate to other homepages, I found that many were much clearer on what the product can do for you and why. For instance, Workato, a competitor to Zapier, has a much simpler looking page that clearly answers what they can do. If you scroll down slightly, you’ll find a clean form that you can pick specific roles to see automations tailored for them. Zapier, in contrast, has the roles page buried in a sub-menu that’s not obvious to me. Furthermore, scrolling down on their page feels both cluttered while also having a lot of empty space.
With that being said, I am by no means a marketing professional. It’s quite possible that the Zapier homepage is more effective than the others I went to despite it being more confusing and difficult to navigate for me.
What are the intentions and attitude of the audience?
It’s difficult to accurately answer who the people that go to the Zapier home page are without directly asking them or tracking where they go and what they do. Likewise, knowing their intentions is also very much a guessing game without interacting with people directly. With that being said, I think that the intentions and attitude of the audience can roughly be broken down into one of three categories:
- People that already use Zapier.
- People that have heard about Zapier, but haven’t used it directly.
- People that arrived via a search engine or referral.
Let’s talk a bit more about each of these categories.
People that already use Zapier
These people are probably looking to log in to their account to perform some action. This could be creating a new “Zap”, or it could be fixing a bug with an existing one, or it could be seeking help with something in their account.
Their intentions and attitude would vary wildly depending on whether or not things are going well. Someone setting up something and seeing it work could be happy and excited, whereas someone struggling to set up something could be annoyed and frustrated. Some people might be looking for support, whereas others would be looking to build new things.
People that have heard about Zapier, but haven’t used it directly
These people might have heard about Zapier and think that it can solve some problem they have. It’s also possible these people might not know what problems they have, and they’re looking for someone to suggest solutions to problems they aren’t thinking about.
These people would probably be in a more curious and hopeful state of mind. Of course, the flip side could also be true where they feel overwhelmed and like they need something to solve their problems fast. More research would need to be done to truly answer this.
People that have arrived via a search engine or referral
This is probably the smallest of the categories as I suspect people performing searches would be directed to more specific pages rather than the home page. For instance, if I Google, “Connect Salesforce to Google Sheets”, I would be directed to a SEO-optimized page rather than the home page.
These people would probably be very focused on a specific inquiry and would be looking to get an answer to their problem quickly.
What does the audience already know and not know?
Similar to the above section, this is pretty much impossible to answer without a direct user study. My hypothesis, though, would be that the knowledge of the audience would be broken up into many different categories. To get a bit more specific and to break things down in a different way from above:
Zapier Users:
- Power users: People who work with Zapier often and deeply understand the product. They might not know how to do everything, but they would know where to go to get their answers. They could solve many different types of problems and help teach others how to use Zapier.
- Standard users: People who work with Zapier and know how to use it to solve a few problems that are particular to them. They would probably struggle to set up something completely new or outside of their domain, and they may have a moderately difficult time looking for answers.
- New users: People who are brand-new to Zapier and aren’t very familiar with the product. They might have some idea on how to start based on some tutorial or web page they’ve visited, but they also might be fairly lost. The more tech-savvy users might be willing to try things and experiment, but other people might be looking for assistance and guidance. There are probably many different sub-categories to this group.
Non-Zapier Users:
- Tech-savvy people: People who have never worked with Zapier before, but are knowledgeable about tech in general and are willing to jump in and try things. They probably understand what automation is and why it can help them. They would also probably know what specific problem needs solving. While they probably don’t know how to work with Zapier, they could probably figure it out with a simple guide or by experimenting.
- Average person: People who have never worked with Zapier before and who use computers, but who aren’t accustomed to trying new pieces of technology. Some may understand what automation is, but others might be puzzled by that word. Some may have a specific problem they’re trying to solve, whereas others might just be looking for guidance on what is even worth automating. Some may be willing to experiment and try things whereas other may be warier.
- Novices: People who struggle to work with technology in general and who would need guidance beyond a typical help doc. These people more than likely don’t know what automation is, and they probably don’t have specific problems they are trying to solve beyond doing their core job. They would not be comfortable going to a website and experimenting; rather, they would prefer something more direct like in-person guidance or a phone call.
Conclusions
Zapier’s audience is vast and difficult to analyze without direct access to their users or via a wider market analysis. I can hypothesize the different groups, but the audience analysis is much more guess-work than at other websites due to the huge differences in the types of people who want to utilize Zapier and what their goals are.
While I found the home page to be somewhat lacking due to the fact that it’s targeting such a broad range of users without providing any clear benefits to most people, I also am cognizant of the fact I have no background in marketing and can’t truly know if it’s ineffective or not.