13 ways to use forms to up-level your marketing

A form may be one of the most unassuming, yet underrated marketing tools. Forms are often treated as a one-and-done solution to a problem: a required feedback form, or a way to gather personal information for a purchase, for instance.

Yet this merely scratches the surface of the true power of forms.

Forms can be used for far more than gated content or shipping information; they can be dynamic, beautiful, engaging, and a key tool in increasing ROI and up-level marketing efforts.

From audience research and lead generation to customer engagement, forms can bring you the data you need to drive more revenue throughout the marketing funnel. We’ve sifted through hundreds of customer typeforms, and are sharing thirteen of our favorite use cases. We’ve broken them down into three main categories.

1. Audience research

2. Lead generation

3. Customer success

Audience research

Understanding your target audience is the key to better engagement, stronger messaging and a more delightful product. Forms and surveys—powered by a people-friendly experience—help unlock the data you need to connect with them.

1. Researching personas

The more you know about your ideal customer profile, the better you can market, sell and support them. At the core of understanding your ICPs is gathering the right data—their demographics, their needs and what they want from your brand. 

Looking to make your ICP research process straightforward for you and your audience? Surveys are the way to go.

Canine merchandise and social media sensation WeRateDogs uses a typeform to learn about their audience from all angles. Do they own a dog—or aspire to? Why do they follow WeRateDogs? How do they interact with the brand on social media?

Answers like these let WeRateDogs create better content and products. The survey is simple and easy-to-use, and it ends with heartwarming messaging consistent with the WeRateDogs brand.

2. Understanding audience needs

For service-based businesses, creating the right client packages is essential. Forms can help you gather key information about clients’ needs, so your offerings, pricing and niche hit the mark.

Take, for example, Coach Belinda “Bella” Long. She helps solopreneurs grow their businesses by cutting out the manual tasks that keep them from what they love.

While developing her signature coaching offering, she used forms for market research efforts to ensure she was building the right program. Pro tip: she incentivized people to fill out the form by offering five random respondents a complimentary 30-minute coaching session.

In the form, she asked solopreneurs about their biggest pain points. Once she understood the needs and motivators of her target audience, she built the coaching program around how she could best support them.

Understanding your audience’s needs can help you do the same thing. 

3. Powering better copywriting

When you’re gathering firsthand data from potential customers, you don’t have to guess their experiences and pain points. You have their own words. This is an invaluable resource when creating marketing materials and copywriting for your website.

In addition to building her coaching program around solopreneurs’ needs, this is how Bella took the power of her market research a step further. Her typeforms send survey results directly to Airtable, where she has a word bank set up compiling the responses she receives. 

She uses these answers to create more compelling copy on her website. How does she know it’s more compelling? Because the pain points and phrases come straight from her target audience.

“I take the pain points and target market responses from the Typeform surveys, and adapt them for my website copy to target the dream clients that I want to attract,” Bella says. “The pain points I list here [on my website] are literally what respondents have told me.”

This allows Bella to resonate with her ICP, because she’s able to speak their language. When potential dream clients read her web copy, they see themselves in the pain points described there because the words come from solopreneurs just like them.

4. Gauging product awareness

Another way forms can be used for audience research is to understand how well they know your product. This understanding of audience awareness is the differentiator between marketing tactics that drive revenue and those that simply lose money.

Publishing company Agexa, for instance, uses typeforms to understand audience awareness that then influences their marketing decisions. They help their clients, coaches and teachers in a variety of industries, use this feature as well.

The surveys ask currently engaged coaching clients about other influencers they follow or other programs they’ve purchased in the same niche. They ask questions like:

• What competitors or what other influencers in this niche are you following?

• What other programs have you bought before?

• Are you actively looking for information on a related topic? 

These questions help them learn if clients were actively searching for the coach’s services or not, and if so, where they were looking—data that leads to better decisions about the right marketing tactics for their audience. For instance, if someone is actively searching they can target them with Google ads. If not, however, Facebook or YouTube ads are better for increasing awareness.

The bottom line? The best people to educate you on customer awareness—and where your marketing budget should be spent—are your customers.

Lead generation and nurturing

Gating your ebooks to gather email addresses is just one of many ways you can use forms to generate leads. Typeforms can be used in far more unique and all-around fun ways than as a mere email collection receptacle.

5. Hosting product quizzes

When someone visits your website, your task is to convince them they need your product. That means personalizing their experience and doing all you can to assure them they’re in the right place. 

Product quizzes or product selectors, hosted in a typeform, are an interactive way to do just that. 

For makeup brand Mented, a quick, 60-second quiz lets shoppers find the right foundation for their skin type and tone. Mented requests an email address to send quiz results, and shoppers get an individualized recommendation to kickstart their shopping journey.

6. Qualifying leads

Beyond capturing leads’ attention and information, companies also task marketing teams with queuing up sales to close the deal. This includes qualifying leads to ensure they’re a good fit before they’re in a demo or selling conversation.

Forms help here, too. Agexa has nearly doubled close rates for its coaches by using surveys to qualify leads before they get in front of sales. 

For instance, one survey for a financial coach asked a question about credit score. This single answer showed whether someone was the right fit for the coach’s signature offering or should go down a different sales path. 

Agexa uses questions like this, and logic jumps based on the answers, to “score” leads using variables that show the strength and readiness of the lead to buy. 

Thanks to these workflows, close rates have improved because their sales team is getting more qualified leads.

7. Showing your brand voice

Forms are also an opportunity to show off your brand. When you want to make a splash with prospective customers and show them your unique personality, the blank canvas of a new form is yours to command. 

Marketing and sales whiz Vickie O’Neill took this challenge seriously. She created an innovative quiz that was not your average lead generation form to reveal her innovative marketing approach. 

Respondents filled out the fun, engaging and informational quiz based on movie titles and offered up their email address to receive a custom Mad Libs-style short story. Vickie asks relevant questions and provides personalized insights about respondents’ businesses in a playful and useful way—showing off her personal brand voice in a memorable way that stands out from competition.

8. Powering giveaways

A “chance to win” is a tried and true way to entice leads and gather their information. Use a giveaway form to gather anything from the basic details to customer needs and interests in other products.

Plus, giveaways can serve as a great opportunity to create brand awareness through user-generated content, like the grill company Traeger did. In one giveaway, they offered a grand prize of one of their woodfire grills. 

The contest asked fans to post a photo for “Traeger Day” and submit their entry and contact information in a simple, five-question form. 

Entering to win (and generating leads) couldn’t be easier.

9. Curating your content marketing

Your best content marketing inspiration will come from your customers—what they think and talk about, what frustrates them and what keeps them up at night. Polling your audience on trending topics can drive deeper conversations that strengthen your content in new ways. 

Opinion polls enrich your content by sharing the latest industry takes on pressing topics. For instance, email newsletter Morning Brew uses Typeform to survey readers on topics like election predictions and stock market trends. 

This original data fuels exciting content from social media posts to your next educational white paper. Engage and nurture your leads with interesting and valuable content that shows them you know your stuff.

Customer relationships

Once a prospect becomes a customer, it’s not the end of their marketing journey—it’s the “beginning of a beautiful friendship,” Casablanca-style. When you need to gather customer information from onboarding to ongoing feedback, forms have you covered.

10. Onboarding new customers

When buyers are ready to jump in with your product or service, they need a place to start. A friendly form can capture the basic details you need to store in your CRM so you can stay in touch. 

Plus, this initial touchpoint is the perfect chance to learn about them and kick off the communication process. 

For example, Otter is a platform that matches parents with the right childcare for them. They use a typeform to capture information about the ages and needs of customers’ kids, their general location and their communication preferences.

These questions also serve as a qualifying step. Otter doesn’t provide childcare in every state, so if a customer isn’t in an ideal location, the Otter team can contact them later about local offerings as they keep growing.

11. Letting future customers join your waitlist

Rapidly-growing startups or products in the MVP stage might not be ready to open the floodgates to every interested customer. A friendly form is the perfect way to offer a waitlist option to those clamoring to try your product.

Take Amie. The company invites people to use its productivity app in weekly batches so they can incorporate user feedback at every step. 

Amie uses a waitlist typeform to gather essential information, like name and email address—and introduce people to their company’s story and brand personality. The form also asks how users currently use their calendars, offering the team valuable customer profile information. 

This form isn’t your average waitlist. It’s a treasure trove of audience data Amie can use in their product development and marketing. 

12. Gathering customer feedback

The most customer-focused brands make collecting user feedback a priority. 

By regularly asking customers about their experience—whether they sing your praises or air out grievances—you show them you’re putting their needs first and are actually listening. A simple, easy-to-use survey is a great way to start this conversation with your customers.

InVintory is an app that wine collectors can use to track their cellars, find their wine bottles, view market values, and build a tasting journal. They use typeforms to gather feedback by asking questions like:

They use the data gathered from this typeform to check in with customers and continuously update their app so that they’re offering a premium experience

Gathering customer feedback doesn’t just help marketing efforts by keeping you attuned to what needs to change about your product. Staying in close contact with customers will surface prime opportunities to let your product shine—from customer quotes to larger case studies on specific uses for your product.

In conjunction with talking to current customers, a churn survey to ask why a customer is departing provides valuable data on how you stack up to competitors or the pain points customers still have. (At Typeform, this is one of many ways we walk the talk and use our product!)

13. Developing input-driven product ideas

One of the best ways to understand how customers feel about future features? Ask them. 

The team behind Calm does this expertly by sending surveys to its champion users to workshop new app ideas and gather their input. If Calm users aren’t excited by a feature or don’t see its value, the team knows the idea isn’t the best place for engineers’ valuable time and resources.

But for the ideas that are a hit, customer feedback shines a bright light on the value proposition of upcoming changes. The positive input from surveys can reveal significant selling points and opportunities for new features and app updates, keeping the company innovative, relevant, and exceeding customer expectations.

Unlock the power of forms

In short—don’t sleep on forms. They are a low-cost, no-code way to up-level your marketing efforts in more ways than one, be it deeper personalization, higher engagement, or gathering invaluable feedback. 

Whether you are a B2B or B2C brand, forms provide a concise way to understand your dream client and target them through personalized copywriting, strategic questions, and data-driven marketing tactics. That deeper customer knowledge drives greater trust and higher retention rates—and ultimately, helps you build a stronger, more profitable business. 

So the next time you’re rifling through your marketing toolbook and shuffle past the “simple” form tactic—take a second look. They’re more powerful, and versatile, than you think.