 I will share with you today two secrets to marketing your plugin or your piece of software, which for everyone here mostly is plugins, to the end users and not to developers, right? You're so close to the code, sometimes you just get in it so close that you can't see out how to get it to your users. So I'm going to share two secrets with you. And typically the way that happens when a marketer starts telling developers what to do about this is they use this illustration of a drill. And I'm sure you've heard it before. You can even raise your hand if you've heard it before. I'm not going to stop telling it though, OK? So this is how it goes. It says, you're a developer. You built a drill and you want to sell that drill now. So what you do is you start saying, I've got the best drill. It's the most lightweight drill, the sharpest bits in the world, and it's ergonomically fit to your hand. And on top of that, it's got a lifetime warranty. That's how you move forward selling that drill. And you find out after a while that's not working very well. And the marketer says to the developer, that's because you shouldn't be selling the drill. You need to sell the hole. No one wakes up in the morning and says, I need to buy a drill. They say, I need a hole, right? See, nobody does that, right? Nobody does that. And that is very common advice to be told, don't market the drill, market the hole, market the result of what your software does. But it's wrong. It's wrong advice. And I promise if you stick with me for the next seven, eight, nine minutes, that I will show you why and what to do about it instead. So before we get into that, the very first secret that we're going to talk about in just a second is that the clicker's backwards. They already told me this, too. There we go. It means nothing to be right if you're not helpful first. So before, like I said, before we get into what that means before we unpack that, I want to know, does anyone want a Snickers bar? And someone's going to have to claim it. Oh, dang, he was quick. And I'm a good shot, too. Oh my gosh, that was almost snagged. So, OK, did you know that Snickers bars and Mars bars have basically the same ingredients, right? Their chocolate, their nougat, and their caramel. The only difference is that Snickers have what? Peanuts, that's right. Well, when the Mars company first introduced Snickers, they had a really hard time helping the consumer differentiate between the two. Because the way that they marketed it was to say Snickers has peanuts. Like, that's some big, huge news. Snickers has peanuts. And they tried to get people to understand that Snickers and Mars bars are different products altogether, and that you should choose Snickers. And that went on for a long time. Sales were kind of flat until they said, you know what? Let's actually talk to our people who are buying Snickers and find out why they bought it in the first place. So they did that. And what they found out was that the inclusion of the peanuts for buyers of Snickers turned it from a treat, a confection, which the Mars bar was, into a whole new category for buyers. It turned it into a food product. They were reaching for Snickers when they were hungry, when they needed to satisfy their hunger, not when they wanted a treat, not when they wanted a snack. Well, as the Mars company began to really understand that, what people wanted a Snickers bar for, they repositioned the marketing of it. And that's when they came up with the slogan, Snickers satisfies. And you can see that's through, even through to today, a lot of their marketing still revolves around Snickers, satisfies. So what did they do? What they did, the way they made that shift was to stop selling what the customer needed, which was a candy bar with peanuts, and instead started selling what they wanted. Now here's another example kind of more within our industry. So LiquidWeb, a hosting company here in the WordPress community, has a WooCommerce-specific hosting. Now there's a guy that works at LiquidWeb named Chris Lemma. And when he sells, when he presents WooCommerce's hosting, one of their primary features is their powerful caching that's already set up in their WooCommerce hosting. But he doesn't go out and say, hey, all you e-commerce store owners, you need caching. And he doesn't even go out and say, you need a fast website, you need a fast store. Instead, he comes one further and he says, you need to make more sales. And the way to make more sales in e-commerce is to have a fast website, because the slower websites have higher bounce rates and they rank lower in search. So if you want more sales, that's what the customer wants, then you need a fast website. And we need to sell you caching in order to get that. And so that plug-in developer, which I know it's not plug-in software, let's work with me here. You move from just selling the software to selling what the software does to selling what the customer wants in the first place. And that's a big shift. And I know this because I've been around long enough to see plug-in marketing sites. Like I know that the majority of plug-in marketing sites in the WordPress community are selling either the software itself. And then if they go one better, then they're trying to sell what it does. And almost none of you, I'll stay this with great love. I want you to win. Almost none of you are selling what the customer wants in the first place. The second secret is not that. The second secret is that no matter who you're helping, no matter who you're helping, so you built this plug-in and it might have been the very best plug-in in the market. It might have had like the milkiest work with me here, the milkiest chocolate, right? The creamiest Nougat, the freshest peanuts. You might be right in saying that your plug-in is the best. But if you can't help your customers learn how to translate that into what's helpful for them, you will not see sales go the way that you want them to go. And then one step further than that, the next secret is that no matter what that is, that you're helping them with it always, always tracks back to the individual person. So when marketers talk to developers, a lot of times they say, OK, the next thing you need to do is you need to go out and build your customer avatars. And you need to build these theoretical profiles of who's buying your product. And I say, who the crap has time for fake customers, right? Like, you don't have time, right? I mean, who has time for that? Instead, you've got to actually talk to your customer. You have to actually speak to your customers and find out some information. And here's an example of how that works itself out into the marketing of your software or maybe you're even a theme designer here or an agency. This really, it applies to you, too. Two minutes. Woo, OK, let's go. All right, so we worked with a law firm. And the law firm said that they wanted to their marketing site to be like, in your face. We're going to crush your competition. We're going to get your loved one out of jail. And it was directed to the criminal, right? So what we found out is we worked within that. It wasn't the criminal who ever purchased from them. It was the criminal's wealthy, well-to-do, well-put-together aunt. Or some other family member that the family considered to have their crap together. And that person would be contacted by the family and told, can you go talk with the lawyers for us? Can you go find out what's going to happen next? Well, that person has a very different want than this person, than the criminal. This person wants to be able to come back to their family and continue that appearance of having their stuff together, of being the one who always has the right answer. And you can see that that sales funnel that reaches that rich aunt is very different than the sales funnel that would reach a criminal, right? And they would have moved forward happily with their marketing to the criminal if we hadn't stopped to say, whoa, whoa, wait a minute. Let's talk to your people. What do they actually want? What are they here for? So how do you do that? You have to get on the phone with your customer. And I mean, you get on the phone with your customer. You talk to them face to face, voice to voice. You don't rely on analytics because that can't tell you intent. And you don't rely on heat maps, again, because that doesn't tell you intent. And you don't rely on just what's coming through your support tickets because that doesn't tell you anything about what they wanted you for in the first place. So instead you get on the phone and you say, why did you choose us? What problems were you having at the time that you were looking for a solution? Did we help you solve that problem? What other problems are you having that we might be able to help you solve as well? And when you start to put these things together, that's when the sweet stuff happens for your customers. And even begins to reveal new features that you need to build instead of you just sitting and thinking of features that might be helpful when you actually get on the phone with your customer or take a video with them and say, hey, can I just talk to you for a little bit about this product and how we might help you? Magic begins to happen. So that person with the drill, they didn't want the drill, right? They didn't wake up and say, I want the drill. And nobody says I want a hole because nobody says I want a quarter inch absence of wood or metal, right? Nobody says that. What they wanted and the reason your drill never sold was that they wanted a bookcase to put their gardening books on and they need the hole to put the shelf there and that's why they need the drill or they wanna keep their mother safe in the bathroom when she gets out and she need the hole to hang the grab bar and that's what they need the drill for. So here's what I want you to remember. All of this boils down to this. You have to sell your customers what they want and then deliver what they need, what you build delivers this thing that they wanted. That's all. Angie Meeker, thank you. All right, so we have time for one or two questions. So who's first? Yes, right behind you is the mic runner. On the right, yeah, in front of you. Yeah, sorry. A mic runner brings the mic so that everyone can hear the question. Okay, for sure. So what if your plugin is for developers who are implementing it for clients but then also the client could also be the person purchasing it. Where do you like, you know, where do you split the marketing copy between the two? So I think even in that case, you still, you're looking at your developer as the customer in that case and saying what does the developer want this for? And so because even developer to developer, it's still really easy to just say, I'm gonna sell you the hole because you know, you should know developer what this does. But that's not how marketing works. Marketing does not work on holes. It works on emotion. It works on what do I need? What's my goal? And it's just really easy for developers to just say, okay, now I'm talking to another developer so I don't need to actually market this. I can just present what it does and they'll understand and magically purchase. And when you have two segments like that, it's okay. It is okay to have two different audiences. That's, most of us have that. Most people in WordPress, we have those two audiences. One developer, one is the end user and it's okay to market to both of them but you still have to market to the developer. It's not like you get to just cast them away and say, oh, you're a developer so I'm not gonna market to you. I'm not gonna speak to what you want. I guess so the advice doesn't change. Excuse me. It's the same. All right. Do we have a last question? Yes, we do. Over there. Excuse me. It's actually almost as much as a comment as a question but one of the things that I found really successful for getting ahold of your users and talking to them, if you can get their email address, we send an automated email. It says, hey, I'm David and the CEO and in one sentence, could you just tell me why you signed up? And that's it. I get a ton of responses from that and oftentimes way more than one sentence and those lead to a lot of great conversations. So it's another idea to, I think it's super important to get ahold of your users. It's another idea to do that. So my addition to that is that that is a great part of your onboarding sequence for new customers but take it one step further and say, hey, I'm the president. Can I hop on the phone with you for a minute? There is something magic that happens when you actually speak to your customers because that's a conversation but it's not really two-way. It really is just the customer talking at him and he can reply and that's okay but it's very different when you're actually speaking to your customers and developers. A lot of us in our community are scared. They're just, we're just scared to get on the phone with customers and it can be really scary, honestly. You're like afraid they're gonna say something really terrible and awful about your software and they're not. They're gonna tell you how much they love it and what they bought it for. Thank you very much. You're welcome.