Call for Marketing Contribution

Do you want to work with a great marketing team and help to boost TYPO3 marketing worldwide? Join us at the next TYPO3 Marketing Sprint or forward this post to your marketing or sales colleagues!

CMS Decision Making has Changed

Let’s consider an example. Osborn Industries Ltd. is a technology manufacturer with clients in five different countries. They’ve realized they could grow if they marketed the right message to their international audience. To deal with this challenge, they’ve hired Elizabeth, a marketer with lots of experience in international marketing who has a clear idea of what strategy, assets, and tactics they should use to succeed.

After a few days at work, Elizabeth outlines a plan for the communication strategy for the company. Here’s how she proposes executing the plan:

• Use a website for each of the company divisions
• Publish content in five different languages: English, French, Spanish, Italian, and Chinese
• Integrate the CMS with the company CRM to automate lead management
• Focus on content marketing and international SEO enhancement for inbound marketing

She realizes that the company needs both a redesign of the digital experience and a new content management system. Also, given the ambitious goals of the project, she wants a reliable solution to maximize the return on investment (ROI) while keeping the total cost of ownership as low as possible to keep the CFO happy. If they can do that, they’ll get a bigger marketing budget.

It is at this point she starts searching for the best possible choice of CMS.

How will she start her search? The most trusted recommendations often come via word-of-mouth:

• She might attend a local meetup about digital marketing, and hear about someone’s experience with a CMS
• She might attend a digital marketing conference and see some impressive CMS case studies to pique her curiosity
• She might even ask people in her social network directly such as on LinkedIn or Twitter.

Will she hear people talking about TYPO3 CMS?

She might also look for examples and case studies:

• What are people talking about on the blogs of digital agencies she respects?
• What are they using, why do they recommend a particular CMS?
• She may even look to see what her competitors are using for their multi-site implementations

Will she find TYPO3 mentioned in online case studies?

She may also look at CMS comparison sites if she has a good idea of the specific features she wants. Will she find TYPO3 alongside other CMSs?

We know TYPO3 CMS is a great solution for digital marketers. So how can we make sure these decision makers discover and bring TYPO3 CMS into their evaluation process?

One clear challenge is that if Elizabeth is English-speaking or outside of Germany, she may not come across TYPO3 at all. According to BuiltWith TYPO3 is the most popular CMS in Germany, while its market share in countries like the UK, USA, Spain, France… is below 4%.

The story of Elizabeth mirrors that of any digital marketer looking for an effective tool to boost their marketing efforts. To get TYPO3 on the table, we need to make sure we are in the places where digital marketers are searching and participating in the conversations that matter to businesses. That’s our real challenge: to create content that matters to marketing decision makers.

Is TYPO3 the Only One Dealing With These Issues?

It’s clear that other OSS CMS projects including WordPress or Drupal are also trying to reach this marketing audience. Marketing a CMS to the right people is a challenge, even more so if the communication is coordinated between many people with different backgrounds, availability, business culture, etc.

The storytelling expert Patti Sanchez sums up the challenge all of us face very well in this interview about knowing your target audience:

“This is a challenge we face every day. Tech companies talk about their ‘thing’, instead of talking about why their thing is important and how their thing helps people and organizations. Founders can forget, I think, that technology is just a tool used by humans. Yes, you do at some point have to explain in greater detail all the components of the platform, how they work together. But that doesn’t excuse you from the responsibility of helping people understand how this is actually useful to them.”

Again, if we want to spread the word about the amazing benefits that TYPO3 can deliver, we need to work as marketers and start producing content and resources aimed at a business audience.

What Do We Have to Gain if We Start Working on Marketing Content?

By working on this issue together we can generate value for everyone involved:

• For the TYPO3 community: we can spread the word and increase the popularity of the project, giving non-technical colleagues the chance to know more about the TYPO3 world
• For the TYPO3 agencies: we can attract different types of decision makers within companies by showing them case studies, articles, and resources from a financial or business point of view. As a result, this increases out our chances of being included in the decision-making process
• For potential clients: we provide them with valuable information to help them make well-informed decisions
• For me–as a contributor: you have the chance to work along talented and amazing people  – like Heather McNamee who helped me to improve this post – from different countries and learn to execute content marketing with a global perspective

How Can I Contribute?

We hope after reading this, you’ve built some empathy for decision makers looking for a great CMS. Are you ready to roll up your sleeves and start producing marketing assets? Here’s how to get involved.

• Attend the next Marketing Sprint in Venlo, Wed. 5 Dec. 2018 15:00–Fri. 7 Dec. 2018 15:00
• Submit your current case studies, translate others or write new ones. You can do so by joining the content group or getting in contact with the team leader
• Produce and share posts about non-technical or development topics, covering other issues to keep in mind for a CMS project. Check out the community writers program.

And most importantly, if you think any of your colleagues–project managers, consultants, trainers, etc.–might like to get involved, please forward this on!

What Do I Need to Start Contributing?

Just a couple of things:

• As you probably know already, all of the communication happens in Slack, so you need a Slack account. Also, you might need to find out how to use Slack in the TYPO3 Community.
• We use Google Docs to work and collaborate on documents, so you will need a valid Google account to share contents with you.

That’s all. Simple, right? Happy contributing!

Article by Carlos Llanos and Heather McNamee. Also thanks to Amy Hunt for the English proofreading. You see? It's really worth it to join the community writers program!