“If you’re customers (existing or prospective) do not understand what you are telling them; everything you say will purely be marketing speak.”
I wrote that bit down recently as I was contemplating additions & tweaks to WooThemes and realized that as marketers we have an integral part to play in the education process for our products & services. See, I don’t think it’s that easy to sell your products & services to someone that is uneducated about what they are really purchasing and spending money on.
Prime example of this (in our context), would be the addition of ExpressionEngine themes to WooThemes’ collection. Instead of just being able to market them (side-by-side) with our WordPress themes, we’re busy building its own, unique channels, with its own angles. It’d be a lie if I said that it has been easy to introduce our WordPress users to the idea of using EE as an alternative CMS. But why?
Simply put, the only way I ever see a WordPress user switching to ExpressionEngine** is if they are properly educated about the pros & cons of such a decision. So part of our marketing strategy should be to include that educational information and in such a way, interact with our users about those pros & cons. Without that understanding of why they’d potentially make such a decision, all of our EE marketing talk would be limited to sounding like us just pushing something new & shiny at them.
So just something to consider in your marketing efforts: people can’t spend money on something that they don’t understand.
** This is not a WP vs EE post and neither is it about the viability of platforms.