By Philip Walton on 2022-01-18 16:38 in Marketing & Communication

Date: Thursday 13 January 2022
Time: 16:00 UTC

Attendees on google meet:

Andrew Barber, Brian Teeman, Eli Ramalho, Stefanie Thielmann, Granit Gashi, Beat, Mark Fleeson, Phil Walton.

Total time of meeting: 1 hour 55 minutes.

Over Christmas Phil made use of the time to contact people and see if a more active marketing group could be formed within Glip and specifically titled the group Marketing Team - Active

The meeting was made up of the individuals who came forward and agreed to be part of that group.

One of our strengths is the international aspect of Joomla and the many languages that it covers. With this in mind the meeting notes may contain the additions of others who could not make the spoken meeting as it was not held in their primary language or at a time that allows but who are part of the team and expressed a desire to read the notes and contribute before publication.

We started with introductions as it was our first meeting then moved onto the first topic.

Organisation of github area https://github.com/joomla/joomla-marketing/projects and how we use it.

We discussed alternatives such as trello.

We agreed to try the github issues but one free alternative could be clickup

https://clickup.wistia.com/medias/pbfbsom7xi

Next Phil expressed the need for help with preparing all the articles and images as well as the newsletter for the Joomla releases. Eli agreed to help with the images and newsletter and so Phil will action that over the coming week.

We then had a lengthy discussion on the Joomla market, what / who our key audience is and how we should go about it.

Several conclusions came out of the discussion.

That we should always make positive statements about Joomla and not negative comparisons with other CMS solutions. Brian made the point that there is a lot of collaboration between teams.

He offered this as an example of how others market their products in a positive way.

https://www.drupal.org/community/agency-marketing/blog/promote-drupal-pitch-deck-everyone-is-welcome

We also felt that there are so many good things about Joomla 4 that we need to make a clear and detailed campaign on the aspects so that we get the benefits across and not focus on a “we are better than x or y campaign.

Beat made the point that Joomla is now more than a CMS: it is a true Web building application.

We felt that web agencies were a key target group but that there were many different users that such a multifaceted application can appeal to, so we need to identify the target groups and make campaigns that talk their language and to them using their channels.

We also talked about press relations, making Press Releases, sending them out to journals and blogs, and following up.

Stefanie made some good points and referenced a marketing workshop for the German Community, where they talked about Target Groups and defined 3:

Target group definition (Germany)

Cluster 1

School, clubs, societies, district fire brigades, aid organisations

Cluster 2

Professional web developers, agency owners, project managers

Web apprentices (such as media designers, universities, universities of applied sciences)

Cluster 3

SMEs, especially the managing directors who commission the website through agencies; public administration, in public administration, the tenderers are the contact persons.

Eli summed one strategy as marketing=product, place, promotion, price.

We then debated asking the community why they use it so we could look through their suggestions and case studies to help show the variety of user cases. Mark and Stefanie made the point that we should perhaps define the areas of response to help focus the community answers into ones we could use.

This developed into on a set of suggestions of the new Why and How of Joomla, we could then use those as examples for the poll for "I am using Joomla because...", which on one side would send out strong why messages, and on the other also help getting why-focussed replies.

We then decided to focus on few tasks at a time so that they can be completed in short time intervals (typically a week or less (?)). We decided to start with the first two tasks and to create 2 sub-groups that will be working: 

1. on marketing plans with people with marketing skills, and 

2. on Joomla advantages and benefits with people development skills, which actually describes the What. 

The meeting then finished on some action plans and Eli, Andrew and Stefanie will work on 1, a Marketing Plan.

Granit, Beat, Mark, Phil on 2 Joomla advantages and benefits

Phil, Granit, Mark and beat are going to work on a trademark approved version of the Joomla user group logo.

We agreed to meet monthly and Phil will reflect the group changes in the volunteer portal over the coming days.

Post meeting in the group chat Sandra helped to pull it all together reminding us of this document

https://community.joomla.org/blogs/leadership/be-loud-and-proud-the-marketing-strategy-for-joomla.html