Welcome to Press This, the WordPress community podcast from WMR. Each episode features guests from around the community and discussions of the largest issues facing WordPress developers. The following is a transcription of the original recording.
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Doc Pop: You’re listening to Press This, a WordPress community podcast on WMR. Each week, we spotlight members of the WordPress community. I’m your host, Doc Pop, I support the WordPress community through my role at WP Engine and my contributions on Torquemag.io. You can subscribe to Press This on RedCircle, iTunes, Spotify, or your favorite podcasting app. Mine is Overcast. You can also download the episodes directly from WMR.fm.
Now, today we’re turning our focus to a crucial aspect of the WordPress universe, growing a passionate fan base for your WordPress product. And I’m thrilled to have as a special guest today, Adam Weeks, the co-founder of Cirrus Influence, a PR marketing agency specializing in WordPress products. Adam, thank you so much for joining. How are you doing today?
Adam Weeks: Doing well, sir. Thank you so much for having me on. It’s a beautiful day here in Northern California.
DP: Right on. Well, I want to kick this off, I’ve been hearing your voice around a lot on Do The Woo podcast and probably some other places. I’d just like to start this off by hearing how you got into WordPress.
AW: Well, it was a dark and stormy, well, not really. Um, so I come, honestly, from the world of education. I was a school teacher and a school principal, but always had some type of WordPress project going on. Been a bit of a nerd for…ever, and it was this thing that I used from time to time when the school would want a new website or something like that.
But really where I jumped into the community was in my transition from a school principal up in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho in the U.S. I was trying to figure out what comes next. I started a small marketing company specifically for private schools. And that was going well. But I did this road trip and it was really neat.
We sold our house, and most of our stuff, bought a motor home, and did a year-long road trip. And on that road trip with my family, did the whole homeschool thing, started that marketing company. And then when that was over, what comes next? And my good friend Jonathan Wold. He says, Hey, so what’s, what’s happening next? Are you going to be back to being a principal or are you trying to make this marketing thing work? And, you know, I’d really like to try something else. I’m not ready to get back into education. And that’s when Jonathan invited me to come help out at Post Status, at that time Sponsorships. And, you know, that was sort of growing.
And so, yeah, I met a ton of incredible people through helping out at Post Status with Sponsorships, that turned into meeting Bob at Do The Woo and yeah, and then through all that, what’s currently happening is I found out that there’s a bunch of companies in WordPress, product companies, primarily, that are looking to grow their exposure.
They’ve built something incredible. And they just need eyeballs. And so, yeah, I started Cirrus Influence, Cirrus, kind of the high clouds, and that’s what we do, cloud computing, I guess, is still what we call it. That’s kind of the history and current state of my WordPress experience.
DP: So you’re co-founder of Cirrus Influence. And as I said, at the top of the show, it’s a marketing agency specializing in WordPress products. So your specialty is not just broadly marketing, but how do we market within the WordPress ecosystem, right?
AW: Correct. And we don’t do a lot of work where we’re creating marketing materials or graphic design. We have access to that, but our main focus is the public relations, the PR aspect of this. Many people in WordPress, they may not love the public-facing part of this business as much as maybe other industries.
There’s a lot of need for, hey, how do I get exposure? How do I get our product, we built this amazing thing. We just need eyeballs on it, get some feedback and get some traction. So we build a plan for them and we create a strategy and help them make that happen.
DP: So I’d like to hear your thoughts on what makes marketing within the ecosystem unique. What are the challenges that WordPressers face that may not be in other software development kinds of marketing?
AW: You have this interesting aspect of both B2B and B2C. So you’re oftentimes selling your product to agencies, and that’s one type of demographic. Then you may also be selling your product to end consumers who are building their own websites. That is a unique thing to this industry. In addition to that, there are different layers of our industry.
For example, when you think about our community and the people who actually care about WordPress and most of those people are listening to this podcast. They’re the type of people that are going to meetups and going to WordCamps. But that’s not a ton of people. At most, I’ve heard it estimated, maybe you can correct me if you’ve heard different numbers, maybe between seven and 10, 000 people actually active in the community. Would you agree? Is that about an accurate number?
DP: I haven’t heard numbers, but when you look at the WordCamps and things, it definitely doesn’t feel like you’re seeing the 42 percent of the internet, you know, presence. It definitely feels like it’s more limited.
AW: Yeah. It was, it was funny. The first one I went to I was like, wow, look at all these people. I’ve never met these people before. And then I went to the next one, like, oh, they’re the same people. And then again, oh, hey, my friends. And you start to build friends with these people at these events and you see them in Slack and you see them popping up on your LinkedIn or Twitter and all that X, and it is a fairly small community, so marketing feels different. For instance, there’s probably not going to be tens of thousands of people that we’re going to see listening to this podcast. I wouldn’t imagine. I mean, this is a great podcast, but Doc, I don’t think that your numbers are maybe what in other industries you would assume like, oh yeah, we, you know, we put something out there and we get, you know, 20, 000 people. That’s unlikely to be most people’s experience.
DP: Yes, absolutely. So, I think that most companies would feel like community was part of their marketing. Like, there’s nobody marketing out there that doesn’t feel that community is part of it. But I guess what you’re saying is that our WordPress community is kind of smaller in terms of the active people, but there may be more influential…so you definitely want to be part of that community, not just targeting the influencers, but part of the community.
AW: Exactly. And so setting expectations accordingly, and you can have a certain plugin or certain aspect that is part of the business that, wow, I had a hundred people actually listening to a podcast that I was on because if you were in a room at a WordCamp with a hundred people, that would feel pretty good. Because you know, those hundred people are likely to be decision-makers.
But when you see a hundred people watched this YouTube video that you did, you’re like, oh, well, that’s not, our perception is really important. And I think sometimes we can get discouraged when, oh, we got, you know, a few likes, or we only got…you have to remember that our community is actually quite small, however, you can then contrast that with the larger group of people, the 42 percent of the internet, and you can have channels with thousands of subscribers, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, and knowing which audience you’re talking to is important.
DP: What about the open-source nature of WordPress? How does that affect it for marketing a product that may or may not be open source?
AW: This is one of the most important parts where a company coming into WordPress, maybe they’ve started realizing that their market share, more people are coming from WordPress. So they say, Hey, we need to be more present in that community. And I see companies making mistakes. Maybe you’ve seen this before where they come to a WordCamp and they treat it as a big selling opportunity.
And it’s buy buy buy buy. And you’re like, wait a second, this thing was built on the backs of volunteers. That’s not really what this is. And there’s right now a lot of discussion about the value of WordPress and WordCamps and what we do at those. And is it more of a business? Yeah. What are your thoughts on that?
DP: I don’t know. I, I know that consumers when we’re dealing with our consumers in our space might oftentimes get used to things being free. WordPress is free. Hosting is paid. Well, unless they’re on WordPress.com, but there’s kind of a lot of expectations for the consumers who might be looking to pick up a WordPress plugin that other things might not have just because of the open-source nature. I feel like maybe we’re starting people off with kind of like this expectation that free or cheap is the way to go.
AW: Yeah, we’re bringing them in with a free plan. And how does a product maker delineate from, all right, well, this part I’m willing to give away. I need lots of numbers, but I need to find that balance between functional for them and motivational. And then, let me gatekeep this important feature so that they’re willing to pay because at the end of the day, the people make these products in order to make a living. And how do you balance that?
DP: I think this is a good spot for us to take a short break. When we come back, we’ll pick up our conversation with Adam Weeks. So far, we’ve been talking about what makes WordPress special. Next, I want to get into maybe some common mistakes and some winning strategies for WordPressers. So stay tuned after the short break.
Welcome back to Press This, a WordPress Community Podcast. I’m your host, Doc Pop. Today, I’m talking to Adam Weeks, the co-founder of Serious Influence about marketing your WordPress product. So if you have a WordPress product, you definitely want to pay attention to this episode. And I think right now, we’re going to get into something that I like to kind of dive into just, almost kind of like a postmortem, you know, after a big video game comes out, I always like hearing the developers talk about mistakes they made and lessons they learned, and I’m just wondering, Adam, if you know of any common mistakes that the WordPressers make when marketing their products to other WordPressers.
AW: Yeah, that’s a great question. And I think it’s important to, this time of year, to review where your sales, well, what amount of these are organic, what of them came from maybe affiliate links or particularly doing your own content, what social channels were working, and really identify what has worked.
The caveat to that is we don’t always actually know, especially if it is organic. Okay, well, if it’s organic, did they just think to type that search query into Google and just happened across ours? Or was there something else? And what I would like to challenge is that there is a compounding effect and there’s a term called top-of-mind marketing. So Black Friday is this interesting experience where, for a week, or some people are doing it for a whole month, but a short amount of time where they’re putting this thing on sale, putting their best foot forward. Hey, buy this thing. Now, this is the time to buy it. What’s interesting is that if you think about your own buying habits, when do you buy something?
Well, typically at the moment that you need it, you’ve done some research. Yep, I need that. And how often will that correspond to the sale that you’re doing on Black Friday? Well, out of 52 weeks of the year, it’s a very small percentage that happens to be the exact week that they need that thing. So we can think about that as like our own buying habits and, all right, I’m going to…this is the best time of the year to buy this. And I think I will need it at another time. Top-of-mind marketing says, make sure that whenever someone is thinking about the problem that you solve, that they think of you first. Let me say that again.
Whenever someone is thinking about the problem that you solve, they’re thinking about you first. In order for them to think about you first, you have to be repeatedly in their consciousness, over and over and over again, so that’s when you will likely get that organic, you know, that link with that, that’s when that purchase will come.
An example would be, I’m guessing that as people are looking back at their Black Friday listings, maybe you got on a couple of dozen Black Friday lists, but the sales didn’t come from there. Well, there’s a good chance that people were looking at those sales. Maybe you did this, looking at those sales. Ooh, I need that thing.
But you don’t buy it right there. You kind of think about it and then when it’s, okay, now I’m sitting down, I’m actually going to purchase stuff. And then you remember that thing because you saw it on 20 different lists.
DP: Yes, absolutely. The whole repetition, seeing something a few times before you actually buy on it. It’s very rare some would argue that you hear of something and buy it maybe on that day, if it’s not something you needed, you know, if it’s an extra thing in your life, it probably takes a couple times of kind of hearing other people talk about it. And then you start to kind of ruminate on it and eventually the opportunity comes up and you click buy.
AW: Mm-hmm, exactly.
DP: Did we talk about a mistake that somebody does make? Like in, in terms of, you said, you know, maybe that we have to get people to hear names more often. Is there a mistake that folks might be making where they aren’t getting that conversation happening?
AW: So I think that a big mistake I often see products making is it’s difficult to remember what it was to not know something, and they assume that the person who is stumbling onto their product for the first time already knows a bunch of things. So here’s a few things that I see that I would like for people, when they’re marketing their product, to do less of.
One is to the terminology you use, be careful with insider speak, you may speak a certain way, but simplify your messaging as though someone knows very little about your product and you bring them in that way. And then you take them on a journey where you’re kind of educating them about your product.
And as someone kind of follows your journey through that, maybe you can use more technical speak, but I see a lot of jargon. Another element that I would like to see, it’s this idea of the hero’s journey. Are you familiar with the hero’s journey in marketing?
DP: Not in marketing.
AW: So marketing essentially states it this way is that we want to say, look at me, look at me, look at me. I have an amazing product. It’s incredible. But that’s not really what your consumer cares about. Who is the hero of their story? In the mirror, they’re looking at their hero when they wake up and brush their teeth in the morning. That’s the hero. I like to think of it in this terminology where we can simplify our messaging.
It’s in three points. The first part is the identification of the problem. People want to know that you understand where their pain point is, Oh, you know, maybe you have an affiliate plugin or something, managing your affiliates can be really time-consuming. And then the next part is you tell them what you do to solve that problem.
Our plugin quickly manages your affiliates so that, and then you tell them the third part. And that’s how it’s going to feel so that you can easily manage all of your affiliate marketers in a way to grow your business. That wasn’t a great example. It was off the top of my head, but essentially I’ll go over those three again.
It’s what’s the problem. So state your problem, what you do to solve their problem. So be clear about that, and don’t list like 30 things, list the main benefit, the main thing that you solve, like what you do. And the third one, and we miss this oftentimes is, it’s about how you feel. People buy things more often from how it makes them feel than necessarily a logical, you know, argument that you might give them. It’s a feeling it’s how it’s going to make you feel, because at the end of the day, you want things to be simpler, faster, quicker, make more money. That’s essentially what you’re going for.
DP: And as far as that field goes for WordPressers, it could be you’re not selling them something that makes eCommerce easier. You’re selling the idea that they might have more spare time because of all the ease that they’ll have, I’m just kind of guessing there, but like the more aspirational and less like, once you get this, you’ll no longer have to deal with spam and think of all the other stuff you can do.
AW: Exactly. You’re going to feel great about the sales that are coming in. You’re going to feel more responsive to your clients. They’re going to sing your praises because you have bought our product.
DP: And, you know, just this time of year, we’re recording this shortly after Black Friday and before Black Friday, I’m sure everybody’s just thinking about like, how are we going to maximize this? Everyone’s getting ready to have their sales or whatever biggest day of the year, they’re going to have on their site, and afterward, I think we get very reflective, it’s the end of the year. And I do kind of wish that, like Google Analytics or Woo had a sort of, like the Spotify wrapped, where at the end of the year we could just be like, oh, look at all this traffic that came from here and look at what’s doing well.
And this product did pretty well this year or something like that. I’m sure there’s some issues that would come along with that, but I am kind of wishing secretly that I had something like that for Google Analytics or something on my site.
AW: To give a little shout-out to Post Status and Cory, they’ve been doing a series on Post Status, which is building a product in public. And just last night I watched their, in their second series now, it’s basically they go back through their Black Friday, Cyber Monday sales and who actually bought their product and why.
And I would encourage, hey, figure out who’s buying your product and find, out why they bought it. See what metrics and data you have. And that is an important part of your postmortem for a campaign. You can even apply that for your year. Where did the sales come from? Why are people buying this?
And one thing I really appreciate about what Cory did was he had a hypothesis of who was buying their product. Then they actually looked at the data and said, Oh, wait, we were close, but this was a little bit different, you know, versus maybe if it’s agencies or more end users, who is buying your product and then take that information and use that to be more directive in your marketing approach. And this is a good time to start planning out your 2024 calendar. And one of the other things that’s unique about WordPress is our WordCamp schedule and being able to use our, your, the WordCamp schedule, your big tent events and maybe your local meetups to align with them as far as maybe another revision or another sale or something to catch the eye of people that are going to these WordCamps at that time of year and planning your calendar out and your social media calendar out accordingly.
DP: And on that note, we’re going to take our final break. And when we come back, we’re going to wrap up our conversation with Adam Weeks about marketing to WordPress users. So stay tuned after the short break.
And we’re back. You’re listening to Press This. I’m your host, Doc Pop. Today, I’m talking to Adam Weeks, and we’re going to wrap up this conversation with just something I was kind of wondering based on what we were saying in the last segment. When you have a WordPress product and you have users, I don’t know, like, should you be focusing, and maybe this is too broad, but should you be focusing on maintaining your current users?
Because a lot of WordPress products do have like upgrades or subscription fees, or should you be spending your time trying to recruit new users and always kind of adding new users rather than maintaining? Do you have any thoughts on that?
AW: That’s a great question. And what I would say is that your best marketing is honestly going to be at encouraging your current user base to be fans. And what I mean by that is providing value to the people who are currently using your product. There is no better marketing than word-of-mouth marketing and the difficulty with word-of-mouth marketing is that you don’t have much control over it, because you can’t buy it. However, what you can do is give your current people who are using your product, help them to create them into super fans where they love what you’re doing, you’re constantly providing them value and giving them talking points so that when they’re talking in Post Status Slack about whatever they can be, Oh, the customer service, you know, they had a problem here and the customer service I received for such and such a plugin. It was incredible. Definitely use that because that’s the type of marketing that you can’t buy.
I would focus your efforts on building your community, the people, and depending on what your plugin is, building a community and encouraging those people, thank you so much, uh, and then giving them the talking points that they need in order to share it with a friend. And of course that doesn’t say don’t look for new customers because we obviously need to grow those, but a lot of times what you, the people who’ve already bought your roduct have proven themselves as someone who was willing to purchase it and essentially do more of that. And they’re a great audience to go back to. And that’s, you know, be limited on this, but survey them, ask them questions and find out, are they happy and why did they buy your product?
DP: And on that note, why don’t we wrap up by you telling us where folks can find you or reach out to you if they have any questions?
AW: Oh, absolutely. Well, you can often find me in, in Post Status’ Slack, uh, LinkedIn is my social media of choice, but I’ve also got a presence there on the old Twitter X as well. And then, yeah, come find us at cirrusinfluence.com. If you have a product and you feel that, hey, I’ve built something really special here, I just need more people to learn about it and I need a partner, someone to walk alongside me and help get the word out, that’s what we do. And we’d love to talk to more people about it.
DP: Awesome. Well, thanks so much for joining us, Adam, and I appreciate everyone who’s tuned in and listened. Thanks for listening to Press This, a WordPress community podcast on WMR. You can follow my adventures on Twitter @TheTorqueMag. That’s TheTorqueMag. You can subscribe to Press This on RedCircle, iTunes, Spotify, or download it directly from WMR.fm. You can also find transcribed versions of these episodes on TorqueMag.io where you will also find lots of other stories about upcoming WordPress events and things like that. I’m your host, Dr. Popular. I support the WordPress community through my role at WP Engine, and I love spotlighting members of that community each and every week on Press This.
