Marketing to End-Users – January 11 2017 Meeting Notes

The Marketing to End-Users team met for the first time since WordCampWordCamp WordCamps are casual, locally-organized conferences covering everything related to WordPress. They're one of the places where the WordPress community comes together to teach one another what they’ve learned throughout the year and share the joy. Learn more. US and the completion of the Homepage redesign. We discussed new ideas of ways to better explain the advantages of the WordPress platform for content creators, small-business owners, and other non-developer individuals.

If you’re interested in contributing, please have a read through our chat and the items listed below and leave a comment with which you’d like to help build! You can read the whole meeting in Slack here or the recap below.

Recap of Goals/Scope: Marketing WordPress to End-Users: this subgroup focuses on marketing to end-users, those single-site owners or small business users of WordPress, and content creators and bloggers. Information is more focused on the usability of the software, Features and integrations which will help them self-manage their websites, and information comparing WordPress to other website solution. (Read about the other marketing subgroups in The Four Horsemen of WordPress.org Marketing)

Projects Suggested for the Future

The following topics were shared in the chat. This is not an approved list of projects, just suggestions or places to start! Other suggestions are welcome (please bring them to the next monthly chat).

If a particular suggestion strikes your interest and you have time to work on it, please raise your hand in the comments with a mention about which one so those interested can start coordinating in SlackSlack Slack is a Collaborative Group Chat Platform https://slack.com/. The WordPress community has its own Slack Channel at https://make.wordpress.org/chat/..

  1. One recurring suggestion was to better utilize https://wordpress.org/news/ on WordPress.org. The question was raised whether people could actually subscribe or receive posts by email.
  2. Publish inspirational stories
  3. Talk about the REST-APIAPI An API or Application Programming Interface is a software intermediary that allows programs to interact with each other and share data in limited, clearly defined ways. – case studies/interviews which focus on the results
  4. Post articles or even videos showing a user creating content in WordPress and then attempting to create the same content in another platform.
  5. Post a series of articles that showcase WordPress as the platform behind mobile apps would be great.
  6. Post articles or web content that highlight the Power, Potential, and People of WordPress. Ex: “WordPress solved this problem for me and now I’m a success”- type articles. Showcasing everyday people and how they came to choose WordPress, what they did with it, and how it low-key changed their life.
  7. We discussed how Open-Source is not well understood to a beginner and the benefits aren’t communicated. We could work on “delivering the importance of WP being open”. Some questions: How do we communicate to end-users? Which aspects will they care about the most? (Open data, switching costs, migrations, moving platforms). Potential action item: look at other OS groups and how they do it.
    • A case study or interview with someone who was locked into (unnamed) platform would be great / user who was burned with a closed platform and then they migrated to WordPress.
    • A story on how the open community has changed people’s lives
  8.  Continued redesign of /features page on WordPress.orgWordPress.org The community site where WordPress code is created and shared by the users. This is where you can download the source code for WordPress core, plugins and themes as well as the central location for community conversations and organization. https://wordpress.org/
  9. “Why WordPress” for content creators / site owners. Similar to the one we created for enterprise or agency-level, we could create something geared towards bloggers and content creators. This could be a flyer but also a landing page. 
  10. Create a compact nutshell of most recent/helpful information to help you succeed on WordPress. 
  11. The home page could ask a question to determine which segment is visiting, so we can better target developers, enterprise-level, and end-users. 

#end-users, #meeting-notes