- Because JotForm is a generic tool with a very varied user base of 1.8 million, it is important for us to target different market segments as well as appeal to them all. We do this by reaching different segments of small businesses, marketers, teachers, nonprofit professionals, and other groups, with content and advertising.
- We’ve strived to make our website feel personal to different groups by offering categories of forms that fit different needs. Teachers are interested in online quizzes, class feedback forms, and class project evaluations, while e-commerce companies are looking for payment forms and lead collection forms. We make it easy for different kinds of professionals to find what they need in the most efficient way.
- At JotForm, 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.
- Targeting Myths
One of the biggest targeting myths is that “you can’t be everything to everyone.” Here at JotForm, we believe that we can strive to offer the best online form experience for everyone — regardless of how they use the tool! Although we target different groups to drive brand awareness and engagement, we want JotForm to come to mind regardless of what an individual is looking to do with our product.
Whether they want to email event invitations, sell products online, use a contact form, or send out a customer feedback survey—we want them to come to JotForm every time. This is why we emphasize all the different ways that you can use the product, instead of focusing on only one use case.
- Targeting a Broad and Niche Audience, Simultaneously
Instead of offering 5–12 integrations like our competitors do, we actually over more than 300. We understand that it is inconvenient for a user to use one product for X, Y, and Z, and have to use a similar but different product for A and B. We try to provide a one-stop shop so that we have everything that they need with us, to save them even more time.
We did a comprehensive analysis of our users and found that a sizable proportion of them are in the education industry. So, we moved forward with some strategic PR and Scholastic recommended us as a tool for teachers. One of our many users in the education field wrote about how she uses the tool, which was an effective way to teach others useful things that you can do to make education a better experience for you and your students.
Although JotForm’s marketing team takes two different roles with our targeting strategy, both inclusive and niche, we find that the goals don’t have to be mutually exclusive. In fact, they compliment each other in getting the “everything to everyone” message across.
Leeyen Rogers is the VP of Marketing at JotForm, a popular online form-building tool based in San Francisco. Its simple drag-and-drop interface along with conveniently sortable submission data allows you to create forms and analyze their data without writing a single line of code. JotForm is the solution for online payments, contact forms, lead collection, surveys, registrations, applications, online booking, event registrations, and more.