What is Notion's marketing strategy, according to its team?
First Round Review picked three channels that helped power Notion's rise: community, influencer marketing, and growth and analytics. That is the frame of its deep dive, How Notion Does Marketing, published on 30 April 2024 and updated on 11 February 2025. First Round, which says it backed Notion at seed in 2013, interviewed three leaders who helped build those channels:
- Ben Lang, former Head of Community and one of Notion's early marketing hires. Lang found Notion on Product Hunt in 2018 and built a template site, Notion Pages, as a fan before joining.
- Lexie Barnhorn, Head of Social and Influencer Marketing, who joined in December 2021 from the skincare brand Curology, where Barnhorn was Director of Influencer Marketing.
- Rachel Hepworth, CMO, who first joined Notion as Head of Growth and Enterprise Marketing.
The titles are as First Round gave them in 2024. One structural choice explains much of what follows. Community, influencers and the other channels that reach top-of-funnel users sit in a brand org. Product marketing, growth marketing, demand gen, content and international sit in a separate, revenue-focused marketing org. Hepworth told First Round that the brand side needs a lighter touch, while the marketing programmes are where Notion takes more control.
For a small B2B team, three of Notion's mechanisms work at any size: a structured way to reward your keenest users, a directory that turns their side work into onboarding help for your customers, and a tagged link for every person who talks about you. The rest of this post takes each in turn, then one newsletter that converted better than any of the 150 influencer partnerships Barnhorn built in that audience.
How did Notion's ambassador programme start?
It started with one public call on Twitter. Lang told First Round that the first step was to tweet a call for people to get involved as ambassadors, by hosting Notion events, starting a YouTube channel or producing templates. Lang's recollection of the response: "We probably had a thousand people apply within the first few weeks." The article gives no date for that tweet.
By April 2024, First Round put the programme at more than 300 ambassadors worldwide who run or moderate Notion groups, discussions and events. Ambassadors own their groups, such as Notion Korea on Facebook, Notion for Artists on Telegram and Notion for Solopreneurs on Twitter, and Notion supports them from the sidelines.
The perks First Round lists are about access and recognition:
- Early access to new features
- Special AMAs with Notion team members
- A Notion workspace to work from
- An exclusive Slack group for ambassadors
- Prioritised support
- Exclusive swag
Lang also described passing ambassadors' feedback to the product team, sharing testimonials from the Notion team to recognise good work, and giving grants to people who host local events. Lang named the tools: Tremendous for sending grants that pay for food or rented space, SwagUp for shipping swag and Luma for tracking events. Lang said there was by then a community-led Notion event almost every day somewhere in the world.
Lang's warning to founders is about patience. Notion treated community as a long-term investment and did not expect clear metrics at the start. It added metrics over time, but Lang said it was important not to rush into measuring the wrong things.
How did a consultant directory grow out of the community?
Notion listed the people who were already doing the work. As companies adopted Notion, some superusers started side businesses as Notion consultants, helping large companies onboard whole teams. Instead of building a consulting arm of its own, the community team assembled a directory of those consultants. First Round presents it as the origin of Notion's Consulting Partner Program.
Three details from Lang's account matter for anyone copying it:
- Timing. Lang placed it roughly a year after the ambassador programme launched.
- Quality control. The marketing team set up a certification process for consultants, and Notion hired one of the consultants to help build the certification flow and exam.
- Growth. The directory started with two or three people and grew to more than 60, according to the April 2024 article.
The directory is still live. Notion's Find a Certified Notion Consultant page, checked on 20 October 2026, lets buyers filter consultants by service (such as workflow discovery, migration and change management), by project budget (from $250 to $1,000 up to $20,000 and above) and by language. We did not find a current total on the page, so we can't say how large it is today.
The B2B lesson is narrow and practical. If freelancers or agencies already set up your product for their clients, a public list of them gives your customers implementation help you could not staff yourself. Add a short check before you list anyone, as Notion did with certification.
Why did Notion tag a link for every creator?
Per-creator links let the team prove which partnerships worked. Barnhorn's biggest piece of advice in the article is to use link generators that add UTM tags to links specific to each influencer. With those links, First Round says, a team can track sign-ups and conversion rates, demographic data, and where in the funnel people drop off. Barnhorn keeps a dashboard of every influencer broken down by UTM link and recommends short.io or bit.ly to create and track the links.
The links are the last step of a five-step process Barnhorn described, which treats influencer marketing like a sales pipeline:
| Step | What Barnhorn described | Small-team version (our suggestion) |
|---|---|---|
| 1. Identify your persona | Write down the audience you want. Favour relevance over follower count, ask every creator for audience demographics, and judge engagement on views, likes and comments. | List 20 creators, newsletters or community leads your buyers follow. |
| 2. Lay out a CRM | Barnhorn uses Copper; a Notion CRM with Zapier also works. Write the first email and A/B test the subject line. | One pipeline: contacted, replied, trying the product, agreed, live. |
| 3. Negotiate | Give creators a trial period with the product, then draw up a contract. Negotiation takes the longest. | A one-page agreement covering what, when and the link to use. |
| 4. Automate | Move creators between stages automatically and connect a UTM link generator. | A saved UTM template you copy per partner. |
| 5. Tie it back to the business | Per-influencer UTM links and a dashboard. | A weekly check of sign-ups by link. |
Notion's affiliate programme follows the same logic. Hepworth said the community and influencer teams help coordinate who gets affiliate links, while the marketing team manages compensation and tracking.
Before Barnhorn joined, the community team had run creator partnerships by hand. Lang said the team manually reached out to every creator it wanted to work with and used contractors who knew specific markets, such as European YouTubers or Spanish-speaking creators on TikTok, before deciding the work needed a full-time owner.
How did one newsletter beat each of 150 influencer partnerships?
It converted better than any single one of them. While researching influencers to promote the launch of Notion AI, Barnhorn followed a playbook of finding startup leaders with successful newsletters that other founders read. The analytics showed a career advice newsletter, which Barnhorn called Career Supplements, performing exceptionally well. It became the team's best-performing influencer campaign for AI.
Barnhorn's ask was small: include an explainer section in a post on how to use Notion AI, with GIFs. The result, in Barnhorn's words: "that one newsletter converted better than any of the 150 influencer partnerships I worked to build in that particular audience."
A second B2B result came from LinkedIn. Barnhorn told First Round of reaching out to about 100 thought leaders on LinkedIn, asking whether they used Notion and, if they did, asking them to talk about how they used it and why it would suit other startups. Barnhorn called it a gamble that ended up bringing in a high number of conversions. Again, the article gives no figure.
Two of Barnhorn's selection rules fit both results. A creator in your field with a small, engaged audience is always better than someone with a large following in a general field. And in B2B, start by looking at where people buy software. A niche newsletter that founders read meets both tests.
What did Notion's growth team measure?
Free users who become paying customers, plus the early behaviours that predict it. Hepworth told First Round that activation, for the growth team, means the third of three common definitions: free users who convert to paying. Hepworth warned that optimising for sign-ups can spike sign-ups while the share who pay falls because quality drops.
Because upgrades can take a day, a week or a month, the team looks for the earliest signal that correlates with paying. The leading indicators Hepworth shared:
- A new user invites a second person to collaborate on a doc
- Editing a doc
- Creating a second doc within a day of signing up
- Signing up with a professional email instead of a personal one
Hepworth wants a signal people hit within a week, or even a day, so the team gets fast feedback. The same thinking applies to the creator links above: count the sign-ups each link brings, then check which of those people do the thing that predicts a sale.
For a B2B team without Notion's volume, pick one action that your paying customers almost always take in their first week, such as inviting a colleague or connecting an integration, and report it per source alongside sign-ups.
What can a 1 to 5 person B2B team copy this week?
Run one small version of each mechanism and judge it after 30 days. These steps are our adaptation for a team without a marketing department; Notion's numbers come from a much larger company.
Gather your superusers
List the 10 to 20 customers who post about you, answer questions or build on your product. Invite them to a small group with early access to features and an AMA with the founder, versions of the first two perks on Notion's list.
Ask customers what they read
Ask your last ten customers which newsletters, podcasts and LinkedIn creators they follow. Pick three niche ones and ask each for one explainer section with GIFs or screenshots, as Barnhorn asked of one newsletter.
Make one tagged link per partner
Create a short link with UTM tags for every creator, newsletter and ambassador, with the partner's name as the source. Check sign-ups and first-week activation by source every Friday.
Run partners like a pipeline
Put every partner in a CRM with stages from contacted to live. Write the first email once and test two subject lines.
List who already sells services around you
If consultants or agencies set up your product for clients, publish a page listing them with what each does, after a short check of their work.
If the founder's own LinkedIn is one of your channels, our LinkedIn post templates give you formats to start from, and Siela's Social Media agents can post in your voice at the pace you set. For the wider plan, see marketing without a marketing team.
Frequently asked questions
What is the Notion Ambassador Program?
It is Notion's community of superusers who run or moderate Notion groups, discussions and events around the world. First Round Review put it at more than 300 people in April 2024. Ben Lang, Notion's former Head of Community, said about a thousand people applied within weeks of the first tweet. Ambassadors get perks such as early access to features, AMAs with the team, a Slack group, priority support and swag.
Does Notion pay its ambassadors?
First Round Review's April 2024 article does not describe fees for ambassadors. It lists perks instead: early access to new features, AMAs with the Notion team, a workspace, a private Slack group, prioritised support and swag. Notion does give grants to people who host local events, covering costs such as food or renting space, and sends them through Tremendous, the tool Lang named for sending grants.
Which newsletter did Notion use for the Notion AI launch?
Lexie Barnhorn, Notion's Head of Social and Influencer Marketing, named it as a career advice newsletter called Career Supplements, and First Round's article links it to a page on Resume Worded's website. Barnhorn asked it to include an explainer section on using Notion AI, with GIFs, and said it converted better than any of the 150 influencer partnerships built for that audience.
How does Notion track influencer campaigns?
Barnhorn's advice in First Round Review is to give each influencer a link with its own UTM tags, made with a link generator such as short.io or bit.ly. Those links let the team track sign-ups, conversion rates, demographics and where people drop off, and Barnhorn keeps a dashboard broken down by UTM link. Creators are managed in a CRM, Copper in Barnhorn's case.
How many consultants are in Notion's Consulting Partner Program?
First Round Review reported in April 2024 that the directory grew from two or three consultants to more than 60, with a certification process to keep standards up. Notion's public consultant directory, checked on 20 October 2026, lets buyers filter certified consultants by service, project budget and language, but we did not find a current total on the page.
Sources
- First Round Review: How Notion Does Marketing: A Deep-Dive Into its Community, Influencers & Growth Playbooks (published 30 Apr 2024, updated 11 Feb 2025 (page metadata))
- Notion: Introducing Notion AI (Ivan Zhao) (published 16 Nov 2022)
- Notion: Find a Certified Notion Consultant (checked 20 Oct 2026)
- Siela: AI marketing agents (checked 20 Oct 2026)