The Analogy that Inspires our Marketing Team
Marketing is all about taking the resources that you have, running with it, and seeing how far you can go. Many companies, no matter how small, have big dreams. As they should! Goals promote success, and limited thinking runs counter to innovation. Facebook didn’t have grand plans to to connect just one classroom together. AirBnb didn’t dream about continuing to connect people with available air mattresses. Google didn’t teem with burning ambitions to photograph just one town and put the images online. Lofty goals and aspirational aims can set the stage for remarkable accomplishments.
At JotForm, an online form building tool, we aspire to be the Excel of online forms. Although Excel was initially developed for accounting or bookkeeping tasks, it is now are used extensively in any context where tabular lists are built, sorted, and shared. Excel has an intuitive interface and helpful tools (for calculation and graphing) which, along with strategic marketing, have made Excel a wildly popular tool that has become an essential skill for professionals of various backgrounds and roles.
Well situated into the mainstream, Excel is now used at basically any office job. In the same vein, JotForm expanded upon its initial purpose. JotForm was originally developed for developers in order to save time building forms, but quickly was made accessible for everyone.
JotForm’s marketing team thought about other applicable analogies that it could build a strategy around. The most universal office tool is arguably Microsoft Word. Easy, remarkable intuitive, with everything written out in plain text- there really isn’t a need to teach Word. Most people just start using it right away and familiarize themselves with the product. Although easy for a form building tool, JotForm’s full capabilities are still best realized with a little know-how, that one can easily pick up from JotForm’s many available resources. So, we decided that we were better aligned to compare ourselves with Excel. Easy to use for basic tasks, with advanced capabilities if you want to delve further.
We learned that some companies were teaching JotForm to their employees in a more formalized setting. Employees sat across a conference room table, and someone was taking the lead describing how to use JotForm as it’s interface was superimposed on a screen. This was exciting to hear about! From a marketing perspective, there is no better way to spread the word about your product than word of mouth.
Having JotForm be a suggested or required skill for a role (which can be as varied as marketing, market research, operations, or a number of business roles), or included as part of training, is an aim that we’d like to see more frequently.
Online form building is a crowded marketplace, with several other uniquely innovative companies. Against conventional wisdom, having such strong competition is beneficial for us. We’re better together- fellow online form builders help expand our collective target market, as more people are aware that the tool exists and is helpful. We are not striving to disrupt or change the industry.
The industry is thriving due to the practical and universal nature of the problem that JotForm solves, and there is no need to “disrupt” the industry of helpful form tools. Rather, we’re playing to our core strength which is building forms and the capabilities that come with the territory, much like our inspiration Excel, who has never wavered from its backbone.
How to gain inspiration from other companies’ successes
- Continuously learn about what other companies, even those not in the same industry as yours, are doing.
- Be knowledgable about the latest trends and ideas from your company’s industry. If you’re in tech, read tech news and tech blogs.
- Stay on top of role-specific trends, tools, and ideas. GrowthHackers, Crazy Egg, and Kissmetrics are great resources.
- As you learn about other company’s ideas, consider if there is some positive takeaway that you can apply for your company.
- Be aware of what your competitors are doing, why they’re doing it, and how it’s working.
- Know what your competitor’s users are saying about their product. Browse social media. What are their issues and problems? What are they happy about?
- Knowing the industry and competitive climate is not about copying others, you will never be one step ahead that way. It’s about continuously learning from other companies and selectively applying and expanding upon ideas.
