 that we're coming from. Also some good things to know about me is I came into marketing by way of writing. So everything that I'm gonna be talking about definitely has kind of a content spin on it. Obviously marketing is a huge, huge topic and there's a lot of different ways to do strategy. But I'm gonna be focusing a lot on content creation and how those strategies can inform that. Just my own personal bias. With that in mind, here's a few things to know. I'm still learning, like both as a content marketer and as a human. So it is my intention to use your time really well to present everything, but I am still learning and everything I'm presenting to you is stuff that I'm actively thinking about that's still changing. And as a human, I'm always trying to be respectful and informative and if I make any missteps know that that is never my intention. I want this to be a positive experience for all of us. There's a couple different ways to approach this so that you guys might be wanting to learn about marketing strategies because you've made an open source product and now you need to market it or you might be similar to us in that you are marketing your expertise. You were doing consulting or you're building things using open source software and those inform very different strategies. So we're gonna talk about them from both perspectives and I'll tell you more about how we handle that but obviously there's differences and I want it to be useful to you no matter where you're coming from. I always welcome questions, even when I don't know the answers I hope that this will be a really positive discussion. There is a time for questions at the end but if you just like really can't handle it and you must ask, feel free to indicate that to me in some way. So how do you sell something that's free? You don't. That's the end of my session. I hope you guys had a good time. Obviously when you're approaching marketing from an open source perspective you're not going to be selling the thing. You're selling knowledge, you're selling ideas, you're selling inspiration in a lot of different ways. So everything we're talking about will relate to that but that's just kind of where we're coming from and it's a question I get asked the most often to people in other fields. All right, so there's different kind of companies which I already talked about. There's companies that might be promoting an open source project and those goals are going to be very different from a company that's promoting their selves as services. So the goals for a company that has created an open source project, you've solved a problem, you've created a piece of software, it's really helpful and you want to get the word out about it. Your goals are usually going to be to increase contribution and adoption, right? You want people to use it, you want people to improve it. Your audience is going to be a lot of peers, people who know similar things to you are on a same level of knowledge or within a couple of standard deviations of that. And your content is going to be, sometimes marketing in these spaces can be seen as inauthentic or unnecessary which I think as a marketer is a mistake, right? But if you're a company that's promoting your services or you're using open source to build things, your audience is going to be different. Your audience is going to be both technical and non-technical people. It might be C level executives and your goals are going to be to increase your client base, increase your sales, more of a kind of standard idea of what we think of as like marketing. It's easy in that case to adopt a philosophy that more content is always better to just be putting out stuff to be on every platform but that's often not the case. And then there's companies that are doing both which is the case of Amazie Labs and Amazie IO. We're both people who like create and maintain open source software and we're people who consult and have clients and we build things for them using open source software. You can marry these two strategies even though they kind of have different goals. The key to that I believe is to identify places where they overlap and to maintain a balance. But the key about maintaining a balance is to know when you're doing which one, right? To not try and think that you can create a piece of content that is going to achieve all the different goals but it is okay to switch between them as long as you know that. If you're marketing for an open source project, if you've made something that you want to do, the three key things to get started are to make contribution very easy to create useful content and to ask for help. When you're making something that you want people to adopt or contribute to, you need to really focus on your documentation. There's this idea that like if you build it, they will come. If you've created an awesome solution, people will know and they'll just come and help you with it. That's not necessarily the case. Documentation can sometimes take a backseat when you're developing and you're in the mode of like just going and going but it does really affect how people use things, what questions they ask, how much onboarding you have to do and all of those things are made easier by documentation. It also can really affect the perception of what you've created. If you've made the best thing and your documentation isn't up to par, people might not know that it's the best thing. Contribution guides are also something that can be really important even when people have the skill set that you need and can really give you a lot of knowledge. They might not necessarily know how to give it to you. They might not know what's priority. They might not know what areas can be expanded on and if you make that information available to them, if you make first time contributions really easy and focused after that, then people will be able to contribute a lot more. And then there's also the rule of three. This is not just obviously in this case, but in general, if you've answered a question three times, that means you need content around it. So if people are always asking how do you do this or is there a bug fix for this, then you need to address it. That saves you time and also serves a marketing purpose. You can see that's where your business strategy and your marketing strategy can really align. Creating useful content. A lot of people think when you think of creating content, it can seem really overwhelming. You might think that it needs to be really slick, that it needs to be super awesome all the time. And that's just not the case. Creating content should stem from things that you're already doing. If you're giving a talk, if you're doing a training, if you're just having a conversation, if you're onboarding someone, those are all useful pieces of knowledge that can easily be transformed into content. And in the case of open source stuff, there is really an atmosphere that people want things to be authentic. In fact, if your marketing materials are super, super slick, there can almost be a distrust of it. Like that thing might not have the chops, it might not have the technical things. And that's really powerful because even if you're working in a very small environment, you can embrace that transparency and bring the transparency into your marketing strategy. You can be like, this is us, sitting around, having coffee, talking about the next release. Like that's content that can be useful and already exists. And then ask for help. Investing in the community, obviously you guys are all here at Drupal Hunt, so I feel like a little bit I'm preaching to the choir, but it's important to go to events, to speak at events, offer trainings. This promotes your product, but also shows your investment. And it gives time for that cross-pollination, not just with other developers, but with designers, with marketers, being at this meeting, for example, you can seek out skill sets. And remember to work on other people's projects too. There's this idea that like, just because something is mutually beneficial, doesn't mean that it's like icky or salesy, right? If you can find a way to use somebody's technology, if you can find a way to offer contributions or offer promotions to them, like that helps everybody. And it's always important to remember to give back. I'm really excited that Drupal Hunt is also offering contributions for like marketing and content now, documentation and stuff like that, so that like more people can kind of be involved with that, including me. You can do a better job of improving the world if people know what you're doing. Like you've got a great thing, let's tell people about it. On the other hand, there's companies that might be like agencies or something else where you're using open source software, but you are selling at service. You do need client materials. It's gonna involve a different strategy. And in that case, you need to kind of go back to the basics, like B2B business to business marketing. Market research is important, but on all of these things I've focused here on how you can do this like right now, like you can leave this room. All of these things can sound like something that you need really high level experts for and they can, like you can definitely use those, but you can also just do it on your own. Market research is understanding your industry and where you fit in it, identifying your competitors. This can be a really detailed report or you can go look at somebody's website or Twitter feed and kind of see what they're doing and see how it compares to what you're doing. Can be relatively simple. Same with client personas. You probably already have a lot of data about the kind of people that you've worked with. You know, like you have general impressions of them. You have developers or project managers who've worked with them. You can start gathering that data with very little effort and just kind of drawing some conclusions from it. Then you can take the next steps, doing surveys, like creating personas. There's also, you can also use personas that have been created by other people if they're like relevant to your things. You don't have to reinvent the wheel. You can go back and kind of see what's useful there. So you need to be creating targeted content. When I was talking about the like more is more kind of idea. When you identify that your niche and your specialization, there is definitely something that your company is doing that is different from how other companies are doing that. And one thing that's great about that is that it informs every part of marketing. If you know exactly what you're doing, then you probably know who you should be talking to. And then you probably know what platforms you should be bringing it to. So those are very similar. Like it might seem like you're narrowing things, but actually the more narrowed, the more that you can get content in front of people who are looking for it and people who are looking for you or your products. But what if you're doing both at once as we are? You can focus on shared values. You're always going to be promoting your expertise, whether you're talking about a new module that you've made or whether you're talking about consulting for somebody. You need to show that you're an expert in that space. And you're always focused on that transparency, that kind of collaborative effort. You can use those materials to tie to both of those things. And the overall strategy, even though the way that the strategy is gonna play out, even though it's going to look different on both of them, in both cases, you're doing the same thing. You're trying to get someone to pay attention to you, you're trying to keep their attention, and then you're trying to earn their attention, right? The devil, of course, is always in the implementation, but when you combine these values with the individual strategies, you're gonna know exactly what content to create and where to put it, with smaller learning curve than you might think. Align your strategy with your goals and then measure everything. Analytics is something that can be really overwhelming, but all marketing should be data-based. And with that in mind, here's some very simple things that you can do right now. Even without being an expert, maximizing your SEO is still one of the best strategies for business to business marketing. You can make small changes that make a big difference. These things also change. Sometimes there can be different things, but the old tried and true methods that you can find very easily, they still work, right? Like backlinks, content, keywords. You can read like a Buzzfeed article on like five things to improve your SEO, and you can make a world of difference, just with the very simple things. In social media, the general idea, engagement is more than reach. There was a lot of focus like kind of early on, early adoption that people were like, we just need more people, we need farther things, but actually who's paying attention to your stuff is more important. Going to a smaller group of people who are more targeted might be a better decision than like a bigger group of people most of whom are not interested in what you're saying. Another strategy that you can implement really quickly is to boost things that are already successful. So instead of trying to guess and forecast what content that you have that people are gonna be really interested in, look at what they're already interested in. Put some money there and spread that around a little bit. Google Analytics, that you can do so much with it, but you can also just start very simply, make some very simple traffic segmentation, find out where people are coming from, like that's gonna inform a lot of your strategy. One of the biggest things about data is if you dive into data without knowing what your goals are, you're gonna get lost so quickly because there's so much information. But if you know your goals and you know who you're trying to reach and what you need to say to them, then you can start collecting data that is relevant to that. And you can start it at a very simple level and increase the complexity as you grow, as you get help, as you kind of get more specialized. Optimization, there's a lot of free AB test things you can use on newsletters, press releases, even like design things, can make a big difference. The overall takeaway is that I would just like you to know that you can do things right now that you don't have to have a lot of expertise or a lot of tools you can use all these things right now. But the strategy is where everything needs to come from because other than that, you're kind of just like seeing what sticks. That said, if you do need some experts, may I just plug another lazy company that specializes in just that? And there's a lot of companies, of course, that can do things like that. I know I moved through that fairly quickly and we have a short amount of time but I would love to hear from you guys what you're thinking about and what you wanna know. We can just all stare at this cute dog too. It's perfectly acceptable for the end of the day. Nothing? Yeah? No, no, no, I'll repeat it so everyone can hear. So as a developer, is there anything I can do to help? Absolutely. Thank you for asking. So you asked as a developer, is there something she can do to help inform these marketing strategies? And yes, of course. So like in a position like I'm in, marketing person but not necessarily knowing. So I might have a good idea what content needs to be created but you have an insight, like the thing we were talking about, like the three questions. You might know what those questions are a lot more than I do. So you might be like, you guys are pushing this guide but this guide doesn't say this and so people keep coming to me asking this. You're also gonna know like what's a question I like to ask developers is like what's innovative about this? Like we might be talking about a module or a patch release or a feature or something but you're gonna know a lot better than I do why this is different, why it's important. And if you can share with that with your marketing team or even put it out there yourself into the world then that can really inform the marketing strategy. Does that answer your question? Okay, great. Question, it's not necessarily related to open source. Yeah. It's more about your view on using Facebook for beauty marketing because my agency talks about it a lot and I'm of the view that a lot of the beauty marketing has to be context specific and hence LinkedIn is a better channel. Right, yes. Because Facebook, I keep getting there a lot so I wanna hear the views. Yeah, and I've heard the same thing. So we're kind of in the same boat where LinkedIn is really taking off a lot more than at least I anticipated as a content platform and can be super specific. There's just so many people on Facebook that I understand why people still think that it's important to put stuff out there. One thing that's been kind of interesting and some of the things I've been reading about marketing is Facebook groups because that's already audience segmentation, right? So just posting on your Facebook page, only people who've liked it can see it and there's some algorithms to overdo. But if you have a group that's like Drupal developers working on this, that might be a super good place. And you have to respect the rules and respect the community, but if they're already segmenting themselves then that can be advantageous. But overall, I think I agree with you that LinkedIn is probably superior. Yeah. How do you measure your quantum marketing goals? Yeah, sorry, the which marketing goals? The quantum marketing strategy or you measure that? Yeah, so that's one of the biggest questions and stuff and we're still doing it in the kind of traditional way. So we do web traffic, traffic segmentation, social media reports and stuff like that. Finding out which metrics are the best. Like we've been focused a little bit more like I talked about on engagement metrics than just pure reach. So not just how many people saw it, but how many people shared it, commented on it and stuff like that. So there can be a little focus in there, but we're using pretty much the like recommended, for example, if you wanted to go in and like kind of start your own thing, if you take like the boilerplate, like kind of stats from Google Analytics or one of those other reports, there's only a few things that you need to add or tweak to there to make it useful, which you can, yeah. How did GDPR change your effort? Yeah, so I can't speak to that as much as someone else at my company probably could, even people in this room. But it definitely affects things. We have always been pretty careful about it before, during and after, but things like newsletter lists and stuff, which just gets more specific. But while that can be seen sort of as a weakness, like because we don't have like all this data that we've been, I think it can still be used as a strength because then you get more opt-ins, right? Like you know that the people who are signing up for this newsletter want that content and that can give you the opportunity for super focused marketing, right? If they came to you asking for a webinar, you can give them more stuff about webinars. If they came to you asking for this article, then you can give them more stuff like that. Does that answer your question? These are great questions. We still have one whole minute. I hope that there's like some sort of award or pin we get for being on time. No. Yeah? For a very small agency, to treat people, what would be in your opinion be the best way to start because we don't have the money for a full time? Yes, and that's a great question and that's one of the things that I wanted to encourage you. So start creating content that you already have like we talked about, coffee chats, lunch chats, if you do a session, if you even attend a session, making some posts about that, like this is what it means to me, reacting to stuff like that, it does take a little bit of time but probably not as much time as you think. But just make sure and do that work because like all that stuff we talked about, like imagining personas and doing market research, like I said, you can get an expert to do that but you know, like you know your company, you know your clients. It's worth drafting like a small Google doc being like, who are our clients right now? What kind of clients do we want? And even just that bit of guidance, once you get that it's like, we want this kind of client. Oh, then we should probably make a document that speaks to that kind of client and you can just make decisions like that that will go a long way. So just make sure you just avoid like feeling like you just have to produce stuff all the time or put it everywhere because making a small focused effort, you can make a lot of things happen like that. Does that make sense? Okay, all right. Well, thank you guys all for coming. At the end of the day, I appreciate you and I hope you have a great rest of your DrupalCon.