There are a lot of marketers working in the WordPress community. We even have a dedicated WordPress marketing team. But most of the marketing budgets within the WordPress world are spent on our own brands. Hosting companies, plugin companies, and big agencies all work with WordPress, love WordPress, and market their own brands. For WordPress to succeed, we must do what’s best for our individual companies and what’s best for WordPress!
Of course, it makes sense to market your own brand. You want to stand out from your competitors. You want to tell WordPress customers why they should use your hosting, agency, or plugin. That being said, next to standing out from your competitors within the WordPress ecosystem, we want to make sure to stand out to our competitors outside of WordPress as well. You don’t want your customer to build their next site in Wix, right? This means that – next to marketing our own products and companies- we market the brand WordPress together. But how do we do such a thing?
I don’t know exactly what that could look like, but I do know that we need to collaborate more amongst all the WordPress brands. We do that now and then. Every big WordCamp is a celebration of our community and our togetherness. I really loved the WordPress 20-year-old campaign that ran last year. But I think we could do more. We should combine our individual strengths for marketing and our love for WordPress.
These “WordPress” campaigns will not directly affect our sales. But if we don’t set up a joint WordPress marketing front, it is well imaginable that Wix, Squarespace, or some other CMS will eventually take a large chunk of our market share. And that’s bad for us all. We need to look ahead! We can do this together!
Thanks for bringing this up. It’s been on my mind a lot since early last year.
As one of the Make WordPress Marketing Co-Reps, I would love to work with others and companies in the ecosystem to work on marketing the WordPress project. I think, for sure, there’s a lot that we can do together.
There are two discussions open in GitHub from last year touching upon opportunities presented in this article that any one is welcome to participate in to start getting this going:
1. Gutenberg and Blogging Campaign — the precursor to last year’s #WP20 From Blogs to Blocks campaign: https://github.com/WordPress/Marketing-Team/discussions/199
2. Eclipse WordPress competitors: https://github.com/WordPress/Marketing-Team/discussions/202
There are also other marketing projects that are ongoing that can tie into all of this that the Make WordPress Marketing Team needs help with: The Showcase as well as the People of WordPress and The Month in WordPress articles.
There are certainly so many fabulous marketers in the WordPress ecosystem and I look forward to (hopefully!) seeing you all around in the GitHub and Making WordPress Slack discussions.
In order to have a real marketplace, WordPress needs to get its act together about free plugin/theme analytics. We lost the “privilege” of seeing our growth rates a long time ago but even if we get that back in the future, we still need things like WP/PHP/MySQL versions of our users, usage stats by locale/country, some basic & anonymized telemetry functions (which could be opt-out) and such. WP actually gets these stats (wp.org/stats/) but unless we have that data for our themes and plugins, we’re building WordPress with blindfolds.
Only after this, we can think about building a real marketplace for freemium/premium plugins.
This is an important discussion to have, stemming from the need to market the WordPress brand.
As I understand, the Make WordPress Marketing only focuses on specific campaigns. But there’s key messaging that need to be pushed out, over and over again:
– WordPress is secure
– WordPress is a great option for Enterprise
– WordPress is better than Wix for SMEs
– WordPress invests in the future of online publishing
– WordPress is about a building a better world
(The last point relates to open source and the idea that a better world is where wealth, influenced, opportunities, etc… is distributed and not concentrated)
These are themes that will help shift perception and support campaigns, whether run by Make WordPress Marketing or WP businesses.
So yeah, it’s something I have been thinking about a lot too 🙂
I see folks talking about Wix and Squarespace. We’re past that. It’s fragmentation. It’s enterprises moving to purpose-built SaaS platforms; developers moving to new frameworks; designers moving to Webflow and Framer; writers moving to Substack and Beehiiv and Ghost; etc…
WordPress was the one-size-fits-all platform for a *long* time. Now it’s a bit of a cluster. Why pay for a managed WordPress host, and a theme, and plugins, if there’s greater ROI from a SaaS platform that does everything you need, with a fraction of the frustration? No worries about patching, code conflicts, server management, et al.
Want to stay relevant and competitive? Market WordPress like a SaaS product.
A good starting point would be WordPress.org targeting different use cases beyond publishing. The Enterprise page has four little bullet points for media, marketing, ecommerce, and higher ed. Case studies are buried further down and they’re just links to PDFs.
Blow those up. Have a dedicated page for each. Add more use cases. Call out the core WordPress features that shine for each use case. Get the testimonials and quotes out of those PDFs, etc.
This seems wise.
We sometimes encounter headwinds from mid-to-large sized organizations which are skeptical of WordPress and its plugin ecosystem due to terrible implementation and upkeep by previous developers. The extensibility of WordPress via plugins is a superpower and unfair advantage which gets executed poorly. Start-ups are especially leery.
WP as a standalone solution is harder to market head-to-head with the Webflows of the world (though it can more than hold its own). WP + extensibility via the plugin community is what I’d bank on. Nothing offers the feature set of WP when plugins like Elementor are factored in.
What professional organizations and IT departments need to see are examples of proper and sustainable implementation. This will vary by organizational need. Extremely technical implementations might make sense for enterprise if the site is run by devs, but mid-sized organizations need some balance where marketers can use the properties without needing an engineering degree, or to wait in a queue for overworked dev help.