Customer Spotlight: Typeform revs up their content engine with Beam

“In 2023, we decided we needed to find an agency for consistent content, and we were really looking for quality. Moving to an agency was the only way we were going to quickly and successfully create high quality on a consistent cadence.”

That’s what Lydia Kentowski shares with me, as we sit down to chat. (Spoiler: Lydia chose Beam, and this is the story of our collaboration.)

Before we get into the juicy details, a quick backstory:

Typeform is a distinctly creative form builder that helps businesses collect data they need with forms, surveys, and quizzes. Designed with striking visuals, a conversational flow, and powerful data gathering capabilities, Typeform empowers brands to give and get more with each form.

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Lydia joined Typeform in 2022 as its Brand and Content Marketing Manager. Hired to helm the company’s long-form content production, Lydia got started with a blog revamp. She set out to find the right agency to create a sense of direction and execute on a dependable schedule. 

Lydia found Beam, and this is where the juicy detail begins. Keep reading for a fun success story about our customer, Typeform.

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The Challenge: No content engine

While Typeform’s blog had some good articles, the company lacked the internal bandwidth to produce a steady stream of compelling content. 

“We had more of a ‘splatter-gy’ previously,” Lydia says. “There weren’t outlined themes and pillars for the most part.”

That meant that it was difficult to track what resonated with audiences and what didn’t. When a piece was successful, it’d be supported with a social launch and other distribution methods—but it always felt like a one-off push rather than a concerted effort. There was no legitimate process. 

“It's not that the content wasn't good,” Lydia states. “It just wasn't building towards our desire to be educational or to be experts in this space. It wasn't something that was incrementally building Typeform as a voice and as a thought leader.”

During this time period, Google tweaked their algorithm and it prompted Typeform to take a closer look at their site traffic. Lydia realized that the company’s existing content wasn’t connecting them with the right audience anymore. 

“We found a couple of legacy pieces that people searched for that were highly irrelevant to Typeform as a brand and as a product,” she divulges. “It encouraged us to work harder and be more focused on providing content that meets the needs of somebody who might be a Typeform customer one day.”

They didn’t want to just ditch this content—it was share-worthy and high-performing. Instead, they needed to build a network of other pieces to recommend to readers that might take them from an irrelevant piece to problem-aware and (eventually) solution-aware.

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The Solution: Consistent delivery of high-quality, customer-centric content

Typeform turned to Beam Content, and the rest, as they say, was history. Beam’s people-first approach fit perfectly with Typeform’s audience-focused goals.

Working with Lydia, Beam was able to:

• Map out content by quarter to provide Lydia and the in-house team a solid roadmap and give them the opportunity to slot in additional relevant content
• Create person-first content with SEO functionality
• Switch Typeform’s content focus from mostly customer stories to more customer education and inspiration
• Deliver high-quality content on time in an expected rhythm

And the bonus? This plan to achieve a broader bank of helpful, dynamic blog content would also support Typeform’s future distribution efforts. Typeform plans for social ads to point to fresh, practical blog content to give prospects a sense of what they could achieve with Typeform’s customizable tools.

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The Results: The right metrics on the rise 🤩

Between partnering with Beam and redesigning their blog, Typeform’s traffic really took off.

“Now we have a new baseline, and we've seen a lot of success in our strategy-driven pieces for sure,” Lydia says. “Overall, we're seeing that the content is really high quality for our readers. Meaning that time on page and bounce rates are significantly improved over a lot of our legacy content. We've continued to see it build month over month.”

Among other pieces, Beam produced an educational blog series called Survey School, showing readers how to create thoughtful, engaging surveys for their audiences. The results speak for themselves.

Survey School readers:

• Consumed more content: Time on page increased 13.8%
• Stalled out less often: Bounce rate dropped 12.7%
• Clicked the dreaded ‘X’ less frequently: Exit percent decreased 24.3%

“That’s huge for us. This is primarily just organic, SEO quality metrics,” Lydia says. “A successful piece of content, a good piece of content, should pull its weight without any other channels on.”

To promote all six Survey School pieces, the Typeform team recommends other articles in the sequence at the bottom of each Survey School piece. Titling and numbering the pieces helps readers make the connection that there’s more to explore.

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What’s next?

In Q1 2024, Typeform plans to focus on onboarding and activation content.

“Especially with our onboarding articles, we’ve sent people to highly tactical, specific, Help Center content, instead of the more inspiring, conceptual, strategic content that Beam has helped us put together,” says Lydia.

For example, if a user is interested in brand kits, it might make more sense to steer them toward the benefits of a highly designed, on-brand form versus a “how to install” piece.

“We’re trying to figure out, ‘What is the actual journey, and what might that customer actually be looking for? What content is going to speak enough to promote using our product or different features within the product?’”

More than anything, Typeform wants people to feel understood and reduce the friction and number of clicks it takes to get them where they want to go.

With Beam, they have a partner in planning and creating this people-first content to provide a better customer experience.

We’d be happy to create excellent content for you, too. Just give us a shout to get the conversation going.

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