 Welcome to marketers are future how to get them to choose Drupal. We're gonna be sitting in a panel type Situation feel free to stay where you are or if you want a better view come on over this way But you should be able to hear us We get a little closer I'm Kelly Delaney. I'm the development director at Drupal Association So I actually work with partners these people from agencies and word we do fundraising and partner marketing And let me introduce our panel today. I'm joined by Rosie Gladden director of marketing at image X Jenna van Orte director of marketing at odds and design at 10 design. I said it I knew I was like I'm gonna say it wrong. I said it wrong and right and Annie Stone senior digital strategist at phase 2 and I'm like get my head up there We'll have a Q&A at the end here Oh, we'll leave a few minutes five ten minutes if anyone has questions to follow up and we'll get started kind of a panel situation I'll start questions and Our panel here will answer them Rosie I'm gonna start with you. What do you think is the most significant significant barrier to marketers being aware of Drupal? I would suggest that it's not necessarily a barrier, but I think in my opinion marketers fall into kind of two camps So they either have never heard of Drupal And my own experience was I joined image X five years ago. I heard about Drupal five years ago That's kind of my Understanding and I'd been through three or four web redesigns in that time never heard of Drupal was very much Looked for sector specification So anyway back to my original point. I think they either have never heard of Drupal or Still there's this preconceived idea that Drupal is for developers, you know built for developers for developers. It's clunky potentially very expensive to create something and ultimately Marketers can't use it for what they need which as we all know is not necessarily the case Jenna how about you? Sure, I I started at Atten design group two years ago, and I also did not know what Drupal was when I started So I definitely think there is a big barrier For marketers to be aware of Drupal. I See that the community is primarily made of developers which is fantastic But I think expanding the community to a more non-technical audience more marketers content editors would just help Generally expand awareness as well. I'd love to see more Marketing content at Drupal cons and Drupal camps more content about digital strategy Drupal design project management things like that And I'd also love to see a better intersection of the Drupal community with existing marketing conferences like Digital Summit and some conferences that we get involved in at Atten like higher ed web and non-profit technology network Yeah, I'll just hop in there. I completely agree with Jenna and Rosie and I think One of the big barriers right now is just for marketers to understand what Drupal is if you go to Drupal.org For a marketer. It's hard to understand what it is You have to like actually go and search in the user guidelines to get a definition of what Drupal is So I would say that's like low-hanging fruit to kind of help with awareness and understanding Thank you Next question What are marketers looking for when they're evaluating a new cms and annie? How about we start with you? Yeah My voice is a little weird today. Hopefully you guys can hear me So marketers are under a lot of pressure to drive business results. So speed to market is really important Flexibility to you know, make sure that the cms or the website is going to Meet the marketers, you know specific use cases is really important for marketers And because marketing strategies evolve a lot. So flexibility is really important You need to be able to pivot integrate with you know, different martech tools And then privacy and security is also really important Yeah, I would add to that. I think it might be controversial, but marketers Don't necessarily care about the tech You know, they Exactly what annie was saying They want something that they can use for their goals their objectives and can ultimately grow with them and the organization They don't want to be doing a redesign every three to five years less So now, you know, we're kind of moving in such a fast-paced environment. Sorry Um So yeah, something the flexible scalable sounds familiar, right? It's kind of everything Drupal has to offer I completely agree with that rosie. I tell my colleagues often that uh, marketers don't have loyalty to technology like developers do so Um, they're looking for things in a little bit of a different way We at at and work primarily with nonprofits and um government entities who don't necessarily have huge teams or the opportunity to have in-house developers So we consistently hear from them that their marketing teams are looking for a cms That's easy to use and can streamline their content editing workflow Um, so I think that's what we see most often coming from marketers And I have a question about that. So when you're working with your nonprofit end users Who would you say is evaluating on the end user side? Are you talking to a lot of marketing folks over there, too? At our perspective clients. Yeah, definitely. Um, I think we talk we talk to even at non-profit, um organizations, we're talking to Organization directors, not necessarily even marketers who are just tasked with taking care of the website as well. So We're working with a variety of non-technical folks That have a variety of resources That's good. That goes back to kind of what can Drupal.org do to Make us the cms of choice is have another audience for those end users that aren't marketers But they're organizational leaders, but they don't they can't Get through all the technical language right away at the beginning What are marketers trying to accomplish did I already say that one? Nope Listen, you're right Okay, what are marketers trying to accomplish with a cms and a website? Annie. Let's start with you again Yeah, um, so I I think marketers, you know From a very basic level are using websites to increase awareness of their brand So, you know seo for instance is really important for them just to increase awareness on the internet And in general the website is just one of many digital touchpoints and channels that a marketer is using To try to influence their target audience down the marketing funnel to complete whatever that ultimate conversion is for that business Go ahead. Annie. Oh, sorry Other Annie I would add to that though the the website is often like the nucleus of the ecosystem and with them for marketers Sorry, so, you know even even looking at offline channels like events, um, you know Direct mail there's going to be something on their website qr code that's directing them to the website And if that is not working well, everything else falls apart or can fall apart so Is there anything your agency is doing already to promote Drupal to perspective end users Yeah, um, so on the product side of things we've heard the complaints of Drupal being so flexible and powerful, but again difficult for content editors to use So our agency built a drag and drop editing solution on top of layout paragraphs called mercury editor And it's um released on Drupal.org fully open source module that you can go check out yourself But we built it to lessen the learning curve for non technical users um And as a Drupal shop, we love Drupal and we will take any and all opportunities to pitch Drupal to our prospective clients um But again, this ease of use comes up when folks are not sold on any specific CMS yet, um So in those conversations we demo mercury editor for them and I've heard responses to those demos along the lines of Drupal was out of the running until I saw this and this is the wordpress style authoring experience I've been looking for but with the power of Drupal So really excited to see what else we can do and promote with mercury editor um So at image x we also do some contributions in terms of like different modules to help with user experience like bootstrap layout builder and as a blocks module as well but also just actively targeting non Drupal users and trying to kind of Widen the the net um, ultimately of that of the product and the knowledge and you know Everything all three of us do it, you know, we're competing agencies, but we're all sat on this panel saying the same thing We're all trying to broaden the reach and the growth of Drupal as a as a CMS option of choice yeah, I'll just add from from my role as a Digital strategist I often come to our clients sort of from a tech agnostic perspective and sort of talk to them about their business goals and their technical requirements, but often what I do recommend is Drupal and especially when I'm talking to marketers It's because of the flexibility and the fact that they can integrate with their existing martech stack And they're not necessarily locked into a suite of tools like adobe. So um, I just wanted to add that And you have a good perspective. She was actually the former director of marketing at phase two So that's pretty helpful for your new role And she used to work for the da. That's true How can we connect the dots between promoting Drupal and helping the Drupal association promote Drupal efficiently What advice do you have for the da in Drupal.org as marketers? Let's see Yeah, I think there are a lot of opportunities that We could all contribute to I think One thing I mentioned earlier was just in terms of increasing awareness like thinking about the seo strategy and diversifying some of the the ways that we describe Drupal Rather than just content management system. Maybe we talk about websites a little bit more Or digital experience platforms, you know, just Sort of exploring that keyword strategy and then in terms of The positioning on Drupal.org And there's actually been a ton of work over the years done for this and talking about it in different ways on Drupal.org So I wanted to acknowledge that but Making it a little bit more clear to understand what it is and how it's going to benefit a marketer or drive results um, and then I think there's an opportunity to Optimize the the marketplace for marketers as well. I think some of You know, for instance, the the filters are so detailed and technical that a marketer might look at the filters for options of like How to you know, view different agencies and be like this is not for me So, yeah, I don't know Yeah, I have two two things So one exactly like Annie said there's lots of work being done already in the promote Drupal Committees and things. So I've been on the evaluator committee for 18 months now We're helping look at Drupal.org redesign We are kind of building in this extra user persona and I think at the community summit Suzanne is going to do a session with maybe some sneak peeks of design. So Go and have a look at those but then there's also this element of storytelling and I think there's a real Lack at the minute and I think it was echoed this morning Tim mentioned Before the grease note about, you know, we're not telling the story to the end users necessarily in the best way so Agencies are the partners. There's so much content out there. So using existing content repurposing and there's already a level happening But what more can be done to kind of pull together all those resources and just One of that phrase just expose them further and get the reach further I love what both of you guys have said so far Atten is proud to be an agency partner of the Drupal Association agency program And we've seen a lot of success from that. I'd love to see more success from that I'd love to see more opportunities as a part of that partnership marketing program That kind of integrate everything that rosie and annie have already said I'd love more opportunities for different types of content exposure on Drupal.org and Again, would like to see just a little bit more marketing friendly Agency page that tells the full story of what we do outside of just our contributions to the project Rosie you brought up the promote Drupal Committee, I just wanted to ask are all the folks on that? Would you say they're all marketer focused or marketing backgrounds or are there some people on there that are from other walks of the Drupal community. There's a real mix. So I would say maybe 50-50 So Jenna has just joined as well. So nice more marketers I think if you know at your organizations or You know people in your own ecosystems if there are non-technical people with marketing expertise event management expertise like those opportunities I know we've talked about them before at different events, but there may be not I think I wasn't sure how to get involved and I feel in a form and it just you know, thankfully people to kind of Tell me what to do Um, but yeah, there's so much like even on the Drupal.org site It can only move forward as quickly as the amount of volunteers and the amount of people contributing and You know looking at the information architecture looking at the metadata looking at the content There's so much that everyone knows goes into building and redesigning a site and There are designs and now it's how do we get that to you know, look at the size of Drupal.org? How do we get all of that into this kind of Looks great You know package Thank you Okay, what more can the Drupal community be doing to help promote Drupal and increase its awareness And jenna, how about we start with you? Sure I'd love to see More of an infrastructure for creating both the product that the marketing non-technical folks are looking for the decision makers, of course And then also an infrastructure for creating the messaging that resonates best with marketers I was really excited to hear Dries talk about this project browser that's coming out That sounds like a good opportunity to Spotlight new innovations and I'd love to see how that looks and to see if it is Speaking to a marketing audience and how it's distilling which audience Is most interested in which innovation Within that infrastructure, I'd love to see some type of umbrella messaging that All agencies can leverage and utilize within our own marketing that are maybe speaking points of why Drupal is the cms for marketers to choose I that would make my job a whole lot easier. I'm realizing how tough it is to translate all of the wonderful Solutions we're coming up with When creating Drupal websites to marketers in a way that resonates with them I'd love to see some type of cohesive consistent messaging come from the top that I can use within my own job and I think I think all agencies would be happy to share that even though again, we're competing Yeah, I would just say that That would really help like Stop having the kind of misunderstandings that annie mentioned at the beginning like We're all saying ever so slightly different things because there isn't this Cohesive, but we're all trying to get to the same point and to the same people. So yeah, if we had cohesiveness, that would be great I I just had one other thought Um, I I think it would be really cool if we could all Like, you know in the spirit of open source Pulled together to put together like a user research project where we really go out there and talk to marketers and And sort of address like what are the gaps right now? What are the future opportunities? and um, because I think any like digital strategy that Drupal Association might want to Uh embark on really has to be founded in that that user research Thank you. That was all very good. And I do just want to recognize how it how fun it is You all are from different organizations, but you're right. Um together we can make Drupal the CMS of choice Um, we're there's enough and there's enough in the community for all of us because Drupal is huge and is growing and it's gonna need all of the community to move forward Okay Jenna, this is for you How do you talk to developers in aton about changing changing shift in the market? Yeah, this is a conversation I have often When I first started at aton design group our target audience was definitely the technical Drupal developer And that had worked for them for 20 years They brought me on in a new marketing position to help grow the agency And when I started we dug into all of our target Audiences and who they should be and I found a big gap in the messaging and marketing to non-technical marketers So I assured the developers in my team including my boss who's a developer that we should not stop what we were doing before We should not stop embracing the Drupal developer community that has um been such a strong source of business for us and We are really proud to be a part of this really strong developer community But we do need to expand our messaging to expand our audience in general And I think that applies to the community as a whole Not just my agency I think all three of us agree that we don't want anything to change with the way that The Drupal community communicates with developers. We just want to see A bigger audience and a more expanded audience also As I think we all know Drupal developers don't need to be sold on Drupal. They love it But again marketers do need to be sold on that so need to Shift the priority for that market Rosie, how could developers specifically help marketers understand the Drupal CMS platform better? I didn't answer this one Um So ultimately developers can do what we cannot like we none of us can develop We don't have the skills. We don't have the knowledge, you know We have other other skills. I assure you Um, but yeah, so demos, you know visualizing what we're trying to achieve like helping us distill That very technical information. Um, I think Jenna mentioned earlier into messaging that we can Put to non-technical folk. So that may not be necessarily marketers. It might be You know C-suite in some of the smaller orgs and things like that. So Yeah, just resources and be kind of open to The pleas of your your marketing friends, I suppose for kind of helping in building those resources to then Be utilized across the community What do other competitors of Drupal do that Drupal could use as inspiration Annie? Yeah, so this is definitely tough, right because Drupal Association or like the Drupal.org website Has so many audiences. So it's tough to kind of compare apples to apples but if you look at the site of You know adobe site core even optimizely they are positioning a product and their product is positioning positioned to Drive business results for their audience And we're just not doing that for Drupal. So I think we should try to You know really think about how we might do that for for Drupal. Maybe there's A micro site. I don't know some way to position it that way Um, because I think that that would make a big difference Yeah, I think I'm kind of a broken record at this point, but other other CMSs are easy to use and I think Drupal has that reputation of being tough for non-technical users. So I'm excited to Work with the community and see how we can continue to promote mercury editor and continue to innovate and make it better I just had a thought I wonder whether at the da level as well there's opportunities to kind of partner with um organizations on the kind of edge of the Sphere effectively. So, you know crm systems, um, you know marketing automation systems are there Places that in the way that we work with partners within the community Can we do it with partners outside of the community and not just at agency level? Maybe I don't know I like it So this is like a really good start conversation. So, um The Drupal association and our strategic plan that's coming out. That's going to be uh, Like for the next three years tim dole briefly Touched on it today. He said innovation philanthropy and marketing So we will definitely be making plans all of these ideas that you all were saying for the next three years to make Drupal the CMS of choice And get some product marketing behind it all those great ideas you all had and um, let's see, let me get into Sorry What's one way to accomplish that from your perspective as a marketer to make see Make Drupal the CMS of choice. Maybe the Sum up the things you've all said like maybe the first thing we can all do at Drupal.org Or at your agencies to help promote Drupal Um, I think I have a lot of ideas here. I'd like to see first I'd love to see if the Drupal association could conduct that user research any was talking about to determine exactly how Drupal excels for marketers and Then distill that into messaging that can really resonate Uh to the marketing audience that again the entire community can adopt whether it's me as an agency marketer My colleagues at my agency hosting providers Um Anybody else inside of the community if we can all just share again share that messaging I was just thinking, um, you know word of mouth has always been the strongest thing for for Drupal and really for anything that you're marketing. Um, and so if we think about what that means digitally I think like video testimonials from marketers From all across industries would be really powerful to promote Yeah, I think, um, similar to that is kind of it's that storytelling piece. Um, I think twofold. So Uh, Dries mentioned at Portland like he changed the phrase to ambitious site builders reiterated today Um in my mind that's not always somebody like pulling the coding It's quite often, you know, I think we're ambitious site builders to be perfectly honest like I Expect a lot from my website and my team will tell tell you that I do um but Ultimately To connect that piece to the end user there's that lack of story and you know, there's all these impactful brands that Are on Drupal we we hear about them within the community, you know, nasa fizer My favorite the royal family, but we'll talk about that later. Um, but How are those being used outside of these events so that I think aquia did a video for Drupal con Prague I've not seen it since like Um, we could use that in so many ways and it's just building the pool of resources and having those open to anyone that wants to use them and you know we In theory could have the same video on both of us or three of our sites and that could be pooling together, I don't know That's amazing Well, thank you. You three we um have left to open now We've got our official questions done But we wanted to open it to our audience to see if we can have a discussion on marketing or if anyone had questions to That we could um riff off of from what we spoke about I can also Talk more about Drupal association from our side These ideas are so good as you know, actually, maybe you don't know our team is really small So we have this wonderful promote Drupal organization and I encourage people if they're interested in marketing to get a to get um In touch with them, uh, rosie, can you remember off the top of your head how? Uh I'm just gonna look that up Yeah, but um, so the storytelling is a big one We are our engineering team is so great and we work with them a lot But talk about ambitious site builders when I think about how the marketers can kind of come into helping the development of websites, it's definitely The hard part on my side is the storytelling that I assist with Drupal.org And it's working so closely with engineers And I want to know do your organizations have a developer advocate that Kind of talks to you about Drupal or is it just by yourselves? Let's see anyone is their developer advocates that like work with Drupal or they The developer advocates like work with marketing even you all like So I was thinking so these are like brainstorm things so sometimes when I'm talking to an organization that has a developer advocate That's specifically like my Drupal contact Oftentimes I get on a call with them in marketing and so they're talking we're talking about like a case study Case status are really great on Drupal.org. It's for end users to get the word out but and it's Developers who are doing these projects, but then it's marketers who are doing these case studies So I have a question for you all if you're developing a case study Do you work with your developer teams on doing that or who writes those and things like that If they respond to me Yeah, so it's myself and my team and we will pull information from developers But we will head up what's needed and we will ultimately either kind of interview them for 10 50 minutes or Just ask them to give us some bullets and then we'll put it all together and get them to review so You're looking at it. That's awesome. Okay Yeah, uh same I I found When writing case studies, um lately I've been focusing more on the strategy and design side and then I ask My developers to give me the high level Highlights of what went down and then I have to ask them a lot of follow-up questions because I don't understand what they're talking about But we're I think it gets better every time. I'm I'm learning what questions to ask them and learning what um What maybe it will resonate best to marketers when developing those case studies as far as the actual code and Drupally part goes I would say yeah I love that question um, I think Yes, we do We we have a lot of really good technical Drupal content Mostly for any in-house developers that perspective clients And I've kind of argued with folks sometimes to say Like hey, this particular proposal isn't going to developers It's going to marketers and they will not understand what this means And they've pushed back and said but it makes a sound really good. So I don't have any like data around if that works or not because I always Kind of use the rule of thumb if I don't understand something other marketers probably won't either um, I'd love to hear y'all's perspective Um So if you check out the image x website if you'd like to um, there's very little technical content on there um, so all our case studies ultimately We want a prospect to come to our website and recognize themselves in terms of the types of projects the types of organization the verticals Ideally they would then kind of follow the bio journey and the technical piece comes in when they meet with our solution architects Meet with our sales team And then they delve into the technical pieces and we'll do a more technical proposal. So from my perspective If there's a bit in terms of statistics and kind of what was the actual kind of Provable ROI on those projects and they might go into some technical pieces, but unless it's out of the ordinary We made this kind of crazy innovative Module just for this organization Then it's very limited in what we would do I think that's also an interesting question. So I was talking to a client recently who uh, University of limerick is on droopal and I was talking to the Person the developer who is running at university of limerick and they are a droopal developer from they used to work for an agency So when they were evaluating what they should do to their website moving forward they were on droopal Seven they were evaluating if they should stay with droopal or go to another site So that though is one instance where a technical case study would be beneficial So I think when folks don't know anything about droopal and their marketers or their evaluators Having one that's not too technical could be really helpful But there's definitely a case for some technical ones when the in-house person has the experience to know Know what droopal is and read about it. So and as you notice, I mean we were kind of Touching on it droopal.org is very developer focused. So folks that do go there It's like droopal.org needs a little bit more marketing end user content But then maybe agency websites may need a little Technical area. I don't know Could be both I think it depends what you're selling If you're selling Drupal expertise it may make sense to have that kind of Content if you're selling you know driving Revenue Then you're going to have different services that you're positioning and different skills and things like that Does anyone else have a topic that we should discuss at length? That's okay. If you don't Yeah Often yeah Alternative to like a different CMS Often site core adobe optimizely um Yeah, pretty much any other like digital experience platform Is sort of lined up against droopal and then like we often do like A market assessment and kind of get the clients technical requirements business requirements And then like line up the solutions and which one's going to fit best and you know, there's going to be pros and cons With all of these so it's what's the best fit for the organization? What can they live without what do they really need and and we kind of come to a decision there? On Oh, yeah word wordpress as well I've we generally work with uh at face to larger organizations Which still sometimes use wordpress for smaller sites and things like that, but yeah, absolutely I think Jeff had a question to you Yeah, so this morning the pitch bird Thing I was just curious what the marketers thought in terms of how How those pitches were presented I full transparency only saw the first one and I I didn't leave because of this. I had something else I needed to do But I left thinking wow, I have absolutely no idea what that was And like I have of course heard the language in in my agency But if if someone tried to use that to pitch droopal to a marketer, they would absolutely not resonate. Yeah Um, do you mean like specifically how they were presented or do you mean the content itself? I mean, I think they were perfect for the use case Yeah, that's what I would say and I think It was interesting to see I guess maybe three or three out of four um Something that would help The marketer with droopal. So, you know Gutenberg layout builder. Yeah, that was right And then a The mentoring so on a much Different level like the more mentoring then ultimately the more kind of non technical people are coming in as well Um, and then there were again full transparency. I sat next to my cto Had to ask him what a couple of the things were so there was a real mix and I'm really intrigued to see what the other Quick math 28 videos are going to be um to see exactly that, you know, how many are helping the kind of user experience the ux side of Drupal and how many are more really technical And I just wouldn't have a clear Along that lines, I would say also with that there could have been marketers who Entered that contest and I didn't even consider it. It was potentially part of the pitch of for all of us Didn't even we were just thinking, you know, when we think innovation We definitely want to innovate Drupal, but there's marketing to be innovated there to for the uh to choose them as a CMS of platform of choice. Anyways, I'd be it's interesting now just to reconsider that Maybe we missed the boat, but next year pitch land 2024 maybe Yes Yeah, I think I'm you know, I'm gonna slightly bat track. We do care like ultimately um But what we care about is the functionality, you know, the ease of use Is it going to make our lives harder? Ultimately, are we going to have to ask a dev for every single Change of a color or like change a banner, you know, I've had that in a past life and it was not pretty um But in terms of the tech stack, you know, I think that applies to everything so You know things like CRM's sales force has the ultimate You know market share doesn't necessarily mean it's the best product But it's probably sold the best So realistically When certainly I approach any tech You've got to evaluate the use case, you know, what's my goal? What's my objective and is that going to make my life easier or is it going to make my life harder? And then I I would maybe depend on um somebody in my more technical team for advice But and I think this is the whole point of this Session I'm the decision maker So they can give me advice and I can take that on But if I don't really like the way it kind of feels when I'm using it, I'm probably not going to use it Does that answer your question? kind of I think it's a blend so um Depending on the size of organization that we work with some of them don't have technical people at all um And then you have the other end of the spectrum where we become kind of an arm of their dev team and actually Those organizations have maybe already decided what they want to use or They come to us with more of a strategic overview and then Kind of similar to what Annie was saying we help them recognize that Drupal is a great fit And then yeah, they have technical people so it's this isn't kind of everything this is Maybe just the point that the decision maker has changed in a lot of cases Um, and yes, they may have a technical person that can help them But I think in our experience because we're agencies somebody Needs more resource if they're coming to us. So it you know, it's maybe a slightly Small of you, but um yeah Yeah, I would just add I think it's a really great point. Um, I think Uh Drupal when you're building like a large cms platform There's so much complexity and nuance and Sort of abstraction when you're talking about the value of like, you know the modules that you're building And I think from that perspective, it's like a marketer is going to be like, okay, but when is it going to be done? So I think that's what we're like You know when when we were saying don't care about the technology We just have to drive those business results But it's not that we don't care and we need it to work In that case we really do care about the technology Um, and I think another Thing is like we we need all of our martech stack to work together and um For the data, I think marketers care a lot about the data and Having that feed through all the systems to be able to measure the impact of what we're doing on these systems Um, you know to prove our our success and our efficacy and our value Our sales team, if it's not the digital marketeer It sounds like putting on events is something that you can do in your sleep But running the digital marketing program is very complex to have all those systems tied into the scale But I think it I think it is working towards that though, and I think it's like even in the five years. I've been in the triple community. It's You know I feel that's a technical question No, I I think Drupal is fairly flexible. I think you could absolutely use it for that. Yeah I would say though at even at the Drupal association. There are some instances where Drupal isn't the um Platform of choice. So when we're we have to migrate, you know all the end of life seven away from something's happening It's kind of a big deal And there might be this like one small organization and they have like a very limited amount of needs And when they might it maybe migration isn't the best for them and it might be wordpress or something like that I would say kind of What you're asking a little bit there, but We have a few more minutes left. Does anyone have any last minute questions for the panel I love this conversation. You all were involved in I want to thank you all for coming. That was really Wonderful to chat and thank you for the panelists. I appreciate it Thank you Kelly