“There has been a sea change in how companies go-to-market,” observes Ren Chin, Chief Marketing Officer at GoFormz. “Just 8 or 9 years ago, many companies could be successful with an enterprise, outbound motion. But now, things aren’t quite so simple.”

GoFormz, specializes in transforming paper-based processes into digital forms to reduce errors, streamline work, and improve data-driven insights. They have clients in diverse industries, including  Agriculture, Energy, Construction, and Healthcare. 

GoFormz initially experienced rapid growth, particularly in the construction sector. However, growth eventually slowed, requiring the GoFormz team to take a critical look at their demand generation effort or what Ren referred to as their “modified outbound approach.” 

This led Ren and team to embark on a fresh demand generation strategy, one that prioritized “assistance rather than selling” and aimed at “attracting and engaging audiences based on what they value most.”

I recently had the chance to talk with Ren about the three key steps that he believes played a pivotal role in GoFormz’s resurgence.

1. Focus on Core Use Cases and Value Props

Ren emphasizes the significance of distilling their focus to a handful of core personas and use cases. He recognized that while they had nearly 50 personas across verticals, these buyers could be distilled into a dozen or so key profiles, for which his team could tailor their content and strategies for. 

The core use cases and personas remained constant. Ren describes this process, stating: “Identifying our top personas and use cases was key for us to scale growth.”  

Ren, with his marketing leadership team, reviewed their customer stories, paid ad data, and demand gen programs across their diverse user base to identify key persona-value props and messaging. The review led to the identification of three core value propositions: “Easily digitize forms, collect data to work smarter, and automate tasks to reduce administrative costs.”

GoFormz has clients in more than 20 different industry verticals. In building vertical web pages and content, Ren and his marketing team focused on versioning these core value props to maintain an overall cohesive messaging strategy while also personalizing to individual vertical needs.

In Construction, for example, the focus was on digitizing forms to reduce errors and streamline communication across the maze of contractors and subcontractors responsible for providing people, materials, and supplies to a construction site. In the notoriously form-intense Healthcare sector, the focus was on automating paper forms while preserving patient privacy and supporting distributed access to patient records.   

2. Create Contextually Relevant Content

With a core set of Value Props in place, Ren moved to the next phase of his strategy which was to “weaponize content marketing.” His goal was to make it easier for buyers to signal their needs and wants, as a part of his team’s “assist rather than sell” approach. 

Ren notes, “Without an intentional content strategy, the signals you get from your content just create a lot of noise.” Ren and team focused on creating content journeys that told a story about value for a specific buyer and vertical at three different levels:

• Top of the funnel (TOFU) assets that quickly present value and create engagement
• Middle of the funnel (MOFU) assets that help with self-solutioning and present unique competitive strengths
• Bottom of the funnel (BOFU) assets with social proof that encourage conversion

This content strategy translated into Industry pages featuring a blend of TOFU and MOFU assets, including video testimonials, blogs, eBooks, and customer stories specific to each industry’s needs and buyers. 

Ren stresses the importance of contextually relevant content in guiding individual buyers based on their readiness. Our goal, he says, is “to serve up the next content assets to encourage our free trial users to move toward a conversation with us, while also educating and enabling them so that the conversation is valuable on both sides.”

3. Mine Intent Data

GoFormz’s website experience aligns with the trend of B2B buyers expecting personalization similar to B2C websites. Ren says, “Our experience is that G2 and Capterra, or to a lesser extent LinkedIn, are really brand and awareness building sites, not demand generation sites.” 

Instead, Ren and team focused on delivering contextually relevant content and mining inbound traffic, which reaches up to 10,000 free trial sign-ups per month.

By analyzing inbound traffic, GoFormz identified that their first successful vertical in construction accounted for 10%-12% of trials, with field services and healthcare also gaining prominence. Ren emphasizes the importance of understanding which use cases by industry capture the most interest, enabling the team to refine language and create specific landing pages for higher conversion rates.

GoFormz’s strategic shift towards assistance-focused demand generation has revitalized their growth trajectory. Ren’s team has accomplished incredible results across their programs, including a year-over-year 80% increase in organic traffic, a significant increase in paid media efficiencies, and a nearly 70% increase in new subscriptions over the past year.