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Louise Hawkins

Marketing Meeting Minutes June 6th 2023

By Louise Hawkins on 2023-07-03 14:36 in Marketing Team

Tuesday June 6th 2023 UTC 17:00 GMT 18.00

DETAILS
Duration: 50 minutes

Participants:, Louise Hawkins, Philip Walton, Tom van der Laan, Mike Kritzer, Joshua Hawkins, Maria Skampoura

Apologies:

MEETING NOTES

 

1. Joomla 5 Design Challenge: So far only a few designs have been submitted. We viewed Elisa Foltyn’s design during the meeting, for me this is the strongest contender so far and the direction I think Joomla should go to entice new users and different demographics. Agreed to do a push on social media, Deadline for entries is Wednesday 14th June

 

2. Gelato: We are looking to redo the Joomla shop using Gelato. Gelato offers a global print-on demand service with a strong emphasis on sustainability. 87% of their orders are produced locally as they have 132 production hubs across 32 countries. The current Joomla store uses only two production hubs in two countries which can make delivery expensive and long. The new shop will also facilitate Joomla event merchandise, so event organisers can utilise the official shop as opposed to using independent local suppliers.

Phil to test API as there is no current standard integration between Joomla and Gelato. Once the API is working, LH to look at styling, image sizes etc… on the test site.


3. Market Research - LH demonstrated a tool which analyses data from surveys, social media etc. The software looks for patterns using keywords, this is helpful when analysing sentiment and customer pain points. This information is then used to craft our marketing messaging.

From the survey data we can establish that overall sentiment was very positive, to be somewhat expected though as we only survey Joomla users. From those 142 user comments the topics that were raised the most are shown as ‘Wordpress’, ‘Core Functionality' and ‘Training/Documentation’

Below, I have expanded on the comments regarding Training and Documentation:

 

  1. Sometimes really hard to understand answers in Joomla Forum when they are too technical.

  2. Joomla has the things you are going to need in it, but that makes it a little more complicated to start.

  3. lack of friendly training for dummies,

  4. With Joomla, if you want to customize it you almost need to be a web developer and actually know how to code, or shell out a lot of money for custom templates and extensions.

  5. I think for Joomla to remain relevant, easier to use customization tools need to be introduced, the settings need to be explained and presented in an easier to comprehend way, and some of the more advanced settings need to be simplified or abstracted.

  6. I would only recommend it to other more 'advanced users', if the business wants to build the site for themselves without any technical assistance I would not recommend joomla.

  7. Would like to see more practical tips and tricks and how-to's

  8. More quality than speed in documentation.

  9. too little high quality documentation

  10. Documentation for Joomla 4 is minimal or none in areas that changed significantly from Joomla 3.

  11. Programming documentation should be more available and up to date

  12. More options and central Joomla documentation to prove that it is easier than other competitors

  13. While Joomla is our preferred option from a technical perspective, it is difficult to sell Joomla as a solution to clients because brand recognition is low due to a lack of marketing, support and documentation is patchy

 

The free version of the software unfortunately doesn’t include the social media integrations and the licence is expensive. We can scrape data in a manual way for now, but I will look to see if there are any comparable software options at a better price.

 

If anyone is interested in market research, this is the link for the free software:

https://provalisresearch.com/products/qualitative-data-analysis-software/freeware/



4. Joomla Certification - We spoke about this a couple of months ago when Phil wrote an article on the topic. We all agree that this would be great to reinstate, however we have other priorities for now.

5. Social Media: LH gave an overview of the current status of Joomla Social Media which now comes under the Marketing umbrella. This creates additional roles and areas of responsibility for anyone who is interested? These include: Graphics, video Graphics, Daily Posting, Content Creation, Analytics, Strategy, Monitoring Messages. JH expressed an interest in helping with graphics, LH and MS currently covering  everything else. 

 

MS asked if there is an advertising budget for social media, this led to a discussion regarding a potential 10K allowance from Google that Joomla could qualify for but currently does not. (See Joomla Foundation)

 

6. Joomla Foundation: https://joomlafoundation.org/leadership

Foundation status qualifies Joomla for a potential 10K advertising allowance from Google. There are certain stipulations regarding this spend such as you can’t advertise an event that is paid for, however there is so much that could be done with that budget to promote Joomla. So what’s holding Joomla back? The current Joomla foundation website does not have the level of info required to satisfy Google. This is an easy fix and should be a priority. PW to see if we can find any examples of websites that did make the grade or some sort of list of requirements that need to be met. 

 

7. Articles API: PW talked about an API connection to Google Sheets which allows you to add multiple articles to your site easily, this can also be facilitated by a user who doesn’t need to login into the backend of Joomla. This is both a powerful feature and an excellent USP.




The next Marketing Team meeting is scheduled for Tuesday, 20th June, 17:00 UTC, 18:00 BST.