The Biggest Marketing Challenge We Face
In 2006, JotForm was founded as an engineering-driven company. As the first WYSIWYG form builder, JotForm lucked out in a major way with SEO. It was the right time and the right product, and JotForm faced little resistance in building over a million users. Over time, competitors popped up, and the online forms space became crowded. As a bootstrapped tech company, JotForm needed to get serious about strategy to face off with competitors with solid venture capital funding and fully stocked marketing teams.
Since I started at JotForm in 2014, I have seen it grow and develop into a dynamic company of many moving parts that it is today. When we started and ramped up our marketing efforts, we had a massive amount of untouched data at our fingertips (and we still do! Gaining useful insights from data is a never-ending challenge). There were a lot of assumptions that needed to be investigated, and proven or disproven.
What was assumed
It was assumed that a large chunk of our user base was made up of developers and designers. Over a decade ago, Aytekin Tank created JotForm as a side project while working as a software consultant to help him speed up the process of building online forms. Because JotForm can save software engineers and designers time, it was surmised that many of our users were part of this demographic. However, when the data was reviewed, segmented, and analyzed, new information was realized.
What we found
Designers and developers were not the majority of our users, not even close. That segment was around 13%. We found that our users were mostly nontechnical, who used our tool for very varied reasons, but a top concern was ease of use. If they wanted to take the expensive and time-consuming route of having developers build their forms from scratch, they wouldn’t be using JotForm.
This insight allowed us to realize that our entire brand needed a complete overhaul. Our website’s content, including user guides and customer support answers, were too technical. The homepage was daunting and scared people away. There was too much emphasis placed on advanced features, widgets, and integrations and not enough of the basics. We built our marketing strategy to focus on advancing our mission (making it easy for anyone to create online forms), and our brand (fun and easy).
Our challenge
Our uphill battle is that we are the Jack-of-all-trades product for many kinds of users instead of being the solution for a niche demographic. Our product has expansive functionality, and we are keeping our focus broad and generic instead of working on penetrating a single vertical. Our small, agile marketing team is working on user acquisition within many industries, simultaneously.
We share this challenge with other universal or generic business tools. We have many different audiences to target, with diverse needs. Industries include small businesses, schools, creative agencies, startups, and nonprofits. Their responsibilities and occupations span a wide spectrum, including small business owners, administrators, teachers, marketers, operations and human resource professionals, event planners, and a popular 80s rock band!
At some companies, one person manages the company’s JotForm account (and perhaps sets up co-workers with sub-accounts), while larger companies like Uber and Adobe many employees independently set up their own accounts to help them in their day-to-day roles. Getting our messaging and positioning strategy down took a lot of research.
So, what are we doing to meet our challenge?
Continuous deployment
It’s very important to JotForm’s success that our core product is intuitive and very easy to use. Our users can’t fit in one box, and for every user who works at a corporation we have a user who works at a bakery or a home business who may just be starting to figure out business tools. JotForm’s software engineers are always regularly running usability tests and refining components of our dashboard to make building forms easier. Our development style is working in piecemeal: as soon as we have a piece of the puzzle that is better than the last, we make it live.
This constant iteration allows us to give improvements to our users on a steady basis, instead of holding off on all ready-to-go components and releasing them all at once, which can confuse existing users if there is any friction, and users miss out on the opportunity to have something better sooner. Before we release the newest Form Builder (which will be the biggest makeover in JotForm’s history), our testing will conclude that it is in fact better and easier to use than our current version.
The cons to this approach is that the look and feel may not be completely streamlined. When we released our custom Thank You page wizard, it had a sleek new design, and the rest of the product had to catch up later. If you catch us at the right time, it can feel obvious that we’re making changes. Because our audience of mostly nontechnical users holds ease of use among the highest priorities, we’ve prioritize making the tool easy over temporary design inconsistencies.
Magnifying why our users chose us through messaging and positioning
On the marketing side, we’ve gained insights from user research and applied that to our positioning. The reasons why users choose us, we amplify. The reasons why users churn or downgrade, we see if there is a way to encourage engagement with our product. Our users see us as “fun” and “easy,” so we’ve gone further in that direction by making our messaging embody that.
It’s lighthearted, and centered around our cartoon cat mascot’s personality which is helpful with a tinge of mischievousness. We went from a serious, straightforward messaging style focused on information, to a conversational, lighthearted tone that guides and encourages users through getting to know the tool and its capabilities instead of overloading them with details. We introduce JotForm’s functionality to new users in a general, all-encompassing way, but driving engagement starts with our current users.
In all of our messaging to our users (in-product, email, blog, other website content, social), we try to introduce new ways that they can use JotForm. For example, users that may be using our product for registration forms and booking forms may be intrigued to learn that they can accept payments through JotForm as well.
In our monthly newsletter that goes out to all of our users, we detail the latest new integrations and features, and offer content that includes tips and how-to’s. The goal is increased engagement of our existing users, especially upping the number and types of forms used.
Our users can self-identify themselves, which gives us information about their industry and needs. This allows us to target them with industry specific tips and help, and lets them receive more relevant curated content.
Segmenting our target market to reach verticals individually
Although our core marketing efforts revolve around making JotForm accessible for everyone, we are also targeting vertical individually to convey our value proposition to each industry’s unique needs.
We have created landing pages for different industries including education and nonprofit, that detail the ways that JotForm can solve industry-specific problems. Nonprofits care about our low-cost payment collection capabilities, so we give them messaging to support them in their donation collection efforts. Tech companies and startups care about fast ways to manage their business operations, and they can’t wait for their developers. To them, we tout our best in class integration offerings so that our software can be automatically set up to save data in Excel or another tool that they’re already using. It’s important to marketers for their customer-facing forms to carry the brand and look like they were created in-house, so to them we speak to our free white-label, custom URL, and branding options.
In short, we find out what each segment is looking for, and we deliver messaging to help them find what they need in JotForm.
