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welcome to WP product talk I'm Katie Keith from b 2 and I'm Amber Hines from
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equalized digital and today we're talking about audience growth unlocking
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more customers for your WordPress
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products this is WP product talk the place where every week we bring you
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insights of product marketing business management and growth customer experience product development
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and more it's your go-to podcast for WordPress product owners by WordPress
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product owners and now
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enjoy the biggest challenge for WordPress product owners is figuring out
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how to attract customers and make sales to grow your bottom line that's all what we're all here for making money uh but
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it's really hard not as easy as it sounds and so that's why we have invited Mike today to discuss audience growth
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let me add him in welcome Mike hey hi
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thanks for having me on the show we're excited to have you do you want to introduce yourself for all of our
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viewers yeah sure I'm Mike stots I currently work at automatic I've been building WordPress products since
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2011 um I started off doing it as a side business I didn't always work at automatic I used to work in pensions and
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insurance so I built websites as like ways to make a bit of money online when
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I was not enjoying my job at the time um I found WordPress I launched a social
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ebook store and then on the back of some of my audience wanting a particular
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feature I started looking into plug-in development um built my first plugin uh
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it was a giant Venture back in 2011 and then carried on building like
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my own plugins on the back of that giant Venture so I learned how to do it how to like get a plugin out on Cold Canyon at
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the time how to then get it onto wordpress.org repo and then quit my job
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in 2016 to focus on products fulltime uh launched a CRM called Zs CRM which got
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acquired by automatic in 2019 so I've been at automatic for about five years
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now and since joining automatic I've continued to work on the M as well as
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jetpack and some of the bigger WordPress products more recently launching jetpack newsletter and Jetpack Creator which is
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all about helping audience creators grow Their audience and scale their
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newsletters and then monetize those down the
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line well we are really excited to have you um I know we I talked just briefly
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about how this is such a challenge growing the audience and I don't know if either of you have you either of you
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ever seen the Field of Dreams movie is that just an American thing do you know that movie okay so this seems like a
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tangent but it has a point but uh basically it's a Kevin Cosner movie from
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the I don't know early 90s maybe uh where he's a farmer and I grew up in
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Iowa in Iowa with a cornfield and he has these dreams that's and and he hears
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this voice telling him if you build it they will come uh and so he built a baseball diamond in the middle of his
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field everyone should go watch it it's a class but uh but I think the thing that a lot of us think is if you build it
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they will come right we're just like we're going to create this Plugin or whatever it is right and it's going to
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be so awesome and everyone's just going to want to buy it but the reality
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is they if you build it they will not come right you have to figure out how to
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get this audience and grow them and attract them and so for me like when I'm thinking about why this topic matters
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and why we're here today talking about audience growth um I really think back to that and like that is one thing that
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I have learned over time probably even more between the first product that we
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launched and some of our free plugins we created to our current one today is that
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it's not really if you build it they will come like there is things that there are things that you have to do um so I'm excited that we're talking about
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this today Mike do you want to share a little bit of thoughts on why you think this topic is important and why it
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matters for WordPress plugin numers yeah absolutely um so similar
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themes so I was thinking that as a developer as an engineer building things is just fun like you've got a skill set
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you can you find a problem that you've got yourself and think actually I can fix this so you write a Plugin or
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something to do that and think okay it's an problem for me so loads of people are going to buy it and it doesn't happen
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and there's quite a lot of um things are like if you build something you put it in wordpress.org but if you've not built
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any type of list around that to then Market that product too then it's you're starting from scratch each time and
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you're relying on certain algorithms certain rankings around like the word.org search and is your plug-in
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going to pop up above other plugins is it a crowded Marketplace and that could
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change at any time and you not get the same type of traffic from there so having your own list that you go time is
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useful just for putting your products out there but also for knowing like the right things to build as well so if
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you're not talking to the people that are joining your list on the back of plugins and trying to figure out what they want you just end up building
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something that you think they want and then not necessarily going to grow the same way as if you were listening and
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always talking to your customers yeah that's true if you build
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it they will come is sort of an arrogant attitude in a way way in that it you think they'll come to you you don't have
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to do the hard work to get them once you've built the product but the other side you've touched on is that you need
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to know what your users want um you build it blind then why would they come
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um even if you did good marketing you need to listen to your users and build something that they genuinely want and
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then get the word out there so all of that is part of building an audience an audience to ask questions to and an
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audience to um promote to and ultimately sell to but I think this is particularly
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important uh because most customers aren't ready to buy the first time they see your product there's a lot of
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research around marketing funnels which shows that there's more of a drip drip effect and that customers need to see
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your product multiple times in and see your brand and your wider message before
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they're ready to buy and so um you need to build an audience of different stages
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of the purchasing journey and spread your message more generally it's not just make that sale straight away and to
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do that you need to learn about different strategies for growing your audience and I would say this is a
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particularly important topic for WordPress product owners because in my experience a lot of people launching
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WordPress products are Solo developers who are great developers they've always
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wanted to have a product and they build it but they may not have much or any marketing experience and they may not be
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at all interested in that that's not what makes them tick they want to be developers so they build a product they
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get it out there and then things stop people don't come and they don't necessarily have the skill set to do
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that so we need to think about what should they do should they learn those skills should they find a partner
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Outsource it all of those are different ways to build an audience um and you
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need to do something yeah I you know I think it would be interesting for us just briefly
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to Define for people what do we mean when we're talking about growing an audience and I don't know Mike if if you
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have thought specifically like because you mentioned a little bit about email lists um we could be talking about
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YouTube audiences or Facebook groups or all sorts of different things so in both
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of your minds what do you think that audience is that we're talking
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about so for me it's just that person so reaching a person and having them
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transact with you whether that's just giving an email that's the easiest thing you can get from day one and they're not
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having to pay you any money and to do that it might be like I'm writing this content I've got a Blog I'm writing
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regularly do you want to learn some more and then they give you that email and then you can start that building that relationship building that trust with
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the customer and so that's where and whether that's a YouTube subscriber
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whether that's a Twitter follower um whether that's a website subscriber or
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whether it's somebody subscribing to whatever you use for your email marketing whether that's um your
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WordPress site itself or whether it's something like MailChimp or any of the other email providers that are out
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there yeah it's a very wide definition your audience I suppose it's anybody
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that has exposure to your product or brand in any way um so I've done a lot
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of reflection on that in the last year as I've built my own Twitter profile because my audience is not necessarily
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potential customers so I've done a lot of thinking about that like the audience of this podcast for example is fellow
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product owners some of whom buy plugins obviously but the key thing is it's not
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directly people searching for plug-in Solutions like the ones my company offer so your audience might end up being um
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quite indirect but those things can um have business benefits so it comes from
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like your cold contacts um there's warm contacts on your email list or something
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hot contacts that have actively searched for a solution on Google or YouTube or something and they are looking for what
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your product does and then there's more General people that are aware of your brand and maybe they'll have a need in
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the future and come to you I would say all of that is part of your audience but of course you need to prioritize and
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think about which segments of that to particularly focus
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on so shall we transition to story time now where we share our personal experiences
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of building an audience uh would you like to start Mike yeah sure um so for me like I say
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my background is um I was just putting out plugins because they were easy to build and I released maybe 30 plugins
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and five themes under my epic plugins epic themes brand and across the period of 2011 to
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2016 and I thought if I just keep putting more products out then the business will grow because I'm
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building more more plugins so that was how I thought scale would happen and it didn't and then it was only when we
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launched zbs CRM and started really thinking about where can we capture that email and where can we start growing our
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email list was that's where that product took off and it eclipsed all 30 of the plugins combined and that's because we
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did some specific things along the way to make sure that we were capturing the
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customers where they hang out so so um the easiest thing any plugin can do is just put a newsletter signup form in
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their onboarding wizard so if you install it you activate it and then it pops up you capture that email um if you
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got a free version that gets them on there and then you can start to nurture that person through your email marketing
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and I believe you talked about that in detail in the last um WP product talk and then other things that like we
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looked at at the time were sort of where would people ask questions about crms so we looked at Reddit like Reddit has are
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a subreddit for CRM um C had a lot of questions around how do I choose a CRM so being active in those communities
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where people were searching outside of the WordPress space they were searching
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for a CRM solution and that got them onto WordPress but then also onto your solution so it was growing the audience
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that way um being active on social media as well sorry I I know you're like
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halfway through but I'm curious if you could expand a little bit more on that because that's one of the first times I've heard like a WordPress product
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owner talk about using Reddit or however you say that Cur um I know how to read
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it but I don't know how to pronounce it um to answer questions and I'm curious if there's a strategy there because I
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think you're not supposed to market right uh and and I'd love to hear more
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about how you did that in a way that felt helpful and still grew your audience without getting kicked off the
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platform yeah sure so Reddit is a bit more stricter so if people came up with ideas you might share you might write a
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blog post about um a particular pain that people are facing in CRM and then you could share it on that way so it's
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giving a bit of advice they that gets them to your website they read about it there and you're not just saying buy my
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product it's not direct marketing you're being a little bit more strategic in um being helpful in the community first so
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not just going straight into the subreddit but sort of answering questions being helpful in that area and
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the same in in C it's the same type of strategy to look at like it's another
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area where people asking questions and then you might say do a Roundup of 10 crms and yours would be one of the 10 in
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there that they could click through um so where was I up to um
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pretty much so that was some of the areas there is like finding subreddits finding Facebook communities that are
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talking about like whether it's a Facebook about CRM system whether it's
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um one about wo Commerce help and tips and tricks so we can share like links to those in the show notes afterwards and
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just being there and if you see pain points in those communities it might give you an idea of what to build next
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if you're struggling for
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ideas and that's PR then finally the final thing I said was just attend and sponsor word camps so for us um back in
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201 I think 18 17 no 20 2018 we sponsored word Camp us and then on the
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back of that Matt mullenweg reached out via our support desk and pointed out that you can actually run the CRM on
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wordpress.com but that got him aware of zbs CRM and that sort of then got automatic aware of it so it's not always
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like the direct returnal investment it's the awareness of your brand and your offering through sponsoring word camps
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attending word camps and trying to do innovative ways to capture customer
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details there which is what um Ban two did at word word Camp Europe they had a little WordPress quiz and people were
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put their email in they answered the quiz and that got you on to the band two list so that was a nice little way to
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capture some audience there that's really interesting and it fits with what I said earlier about
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Twitter about kind of building your audience within the WordPress Community can have other business benefits even if
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it's not um the direct sales you might expect so for you it actually ultimately led to your product being acquired and
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we've acquired a small plug-in last year as a result of somebody having seen me on Twitter rather than the brand they'd
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seen me so it's interesting The Wider consequences in a positive way that can
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happen from just getting your word out there and expanding different types of
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audience yeah absolutely and I think even things like this so some of the early growth strategies we had with CRM
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was we partnered with other plug-in developers so we followed a bunch on Twitter on various um other mediums and
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then we reached out and said look we could maybe do a partnership here you're collecting leads let's get them into the
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CRM and then we did a guest post and shared and a bit of cross promotion that way so building those connections
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building your audience and then you can segment them in different ways as well to say these are like business contacts
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these are actual leads that could be customers and growing it that way so it's all about doing the thing that's
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developers find tricky and that's sort of networking talking to people putting out content doing things like these
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video interviews video chats that it's not easy for a lot of introverted people to actually do that and get out there so
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I think that's important as you're growing your audience is actually getting people aware of what you do and
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what you what you offer that's a really interesting point about introverts which I believe applies
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to most people in the WordPress Community um I know my husband and
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co-director Andy and myself are both introverts and are never going to be direct salespeople and one way that this
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business suits us so well is because you can grow your audience in a way that doesn't require that kind of pressure
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face to-face type selling that many businesses do you don't really have to hustle and you probably could do really
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well if you did but it's really not necessary there's so many ways of more
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um introverted ways of spreading the word whether it's just through like written written online
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platforms through your own blog and SEO and newsletter all of which are much
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less scary than many businesses where you have to actually do business deals and whining and dining and all of
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that yeah yeah Amber what about your story time uh well you know it might be useful
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to start with some things we tried that didn't work U because you know like it's it's
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always nice to talk about what what works perfectly but I think there's also interesting lessons to be learned from
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things that were failures uh so our the first plugin that we made which we then
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um sold to liquid web seller WP um the events calendar we made a conference
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schedule plugin which you can now see an add-on on the events calendar that's based off that and that we made when we
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were not fully focused on accessibility and we were an agency like a lot of people you know you're doing agency work
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and you're building a plugin we're like we want to have a product and so we're starting to um create that and I tried
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to do a little bit of so we were doing some in-person meetups like running a
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Meetup and then um we tried to Niche down and have like a focus Meetup but it
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was in person in Austin um because we knew our town here in Georgetown I'm like 30 minutes north of Austin Texas
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was not not big enough but we're like okay we'll drive down to Austin and try and do it there uh and we would get
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maybe like 10 or 15 people who would come every month and it was just like it wasn't big enough like or we didn't do a
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good enough job promoting and I'm not really sure like it didn't it didn't grow or take off and then you know I
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tried doing a drip course where people could as like a
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lead magnet people could sign up and give their email address and then I
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recorded three different demographics so basically you'd say who you were from
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one of these three demographics and then you get added to a list in MailChimp and MailChimp would send you out I had
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videos and like written lesson in the email like one a week for like eight
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weeks or something it took a lot of work and people
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did sign up for it we got email addresses from it but those people didn't ever turn into anything and and
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maybe maybe like for a little bit there were some people some people would
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occasionally like in the beginning emails they would like I say you know write me back about XYZ and because I
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was trying to get them to engage right and and grow that audience of people who were interested in what we were doing
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and and then would want to try the product and a few people would on the beginnings but we'd always have drop off
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and I could see because they were YouTube videos that were invented I could see the wash statistics I was like no one's watching this
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and and I think you know like so then it's like why did that not work and why did that not turn into an interesting
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audience and I I think one of the things that I've noticed that we've done differently was um we put a lot more effort into
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content creation but not just on our own blog so last year I did a collaboration
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for example with the admin bar which is a Facebook group that's really large that's full of agency owners and I wrote
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an article a week for the entire year that got published on his website and
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shared in that group and and then we've done some other guest posts um with
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sometimes with hosting companies or other um organizations that might have audience overlap with the audience that
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we think we want to have I put a lot more effort into going into podcasts which honestly I think giving podcast
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interviews is really easy you just show up and talk you don't even have to you know it's usually an hour of a Time ver
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writing a blog post for someone might take me three hours depending on how much research or work I have to put into
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it um and so I felt like now I'm putting more effort into trying to utilize other
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people's audiences to bring myself there whereas before I was very siloed in I'm
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going to write content for my blog and I'm going to just create my own you know
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and the the Meetup it was in person now I think with zoom meetups it's a lot easier if you're having like a web-
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based Meetup to get a large number of people to attend because you're not limited by the geographic area or the
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literal like time and day in the same way that you are when someone can just log in from their computer at that time
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and day um so I think you know like we've been a lot more successful once we
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went outside of our own bubble I guess if that makes sense in growing our audience um and a lot of our leads and
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the plug-in purchases that we're seeing are coming because someone they'll say I
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heard about you in the admin bar or I saw um your the Meetup so we do it's the
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WordPress accessibility Meetup so that's another big driver for us um or we're in the accessibility weekly email
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newsletter we sponsor something there and so again like utilizing other
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people's audiences has helped us a lot in growing our own
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audience so oh what about you Katie how are are you growing audiences what's
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worked or not well strangely the thing that's worked always best for us is kind
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of being there when people are looking for what we do I think that's largely
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because at bar too most of our products are very specific very Niche like they
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do one task that people Google for so it might be that people are Googling for WordPress document library or
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woocommerce product filter Plugin or something like that and so by making
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sure that we are there whether they're searching on YouTube or a particular Facebook group as Mike mentioned earlier
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or on Google particularly by being there when they're searching we've always had
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the vast vast majority of our sales which has kind of allowed us to get a little bit lazy in growing a regular
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audience because that kind of wasn't the thing it's like if you build a general audience of say WordPress website owners
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it it's going to take a long time before one of our plugins meets their specific needs perhaps so we have done work to
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build an audience we've with our like MailChimp list for example as we talked about on the previous episode before
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Christmas and um our on our YouTube channel we now have a full-time YouTube
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person and he always reports that most of our views and sales from video come
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from people searching for something specific which which has always been our story like I said but we have got 4 and
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a half thousand subscribers now so we need to kind of think about how to provide regular interesting content for
24:38
them rather than just really specific stuff about things in our plugins and use that as an opportunity to have a
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wider audience and social is an interesting one because it's quite good for
24:51
generating awareness and if you're active in particular communities then you can really get sales from Facebook
24:57
because when people are asking how do I do so and so how do I make my WordPress
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website accessible or something then if Amber's there to say you need accessibility Checker then that can
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directly get sales whereas simply kind of shouting out to your followers is
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less likely to but it's sort of still worth doing in a limited sense but I don't think that's necessarily the
25:21
biggest way to get sales and we don't get much from our own social media accounts What Happ works for is being on
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other people's which fits with what Amber said about go with other people's audience is guest posts um another one
25:36
is partnering with other WordPress product companies um find some kind of
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source of overlap where you can benefit each other's users um so where you're not directly competing but your products
25:48
offer relevant functionality um to their users on top of what their products
25:53
offer and then you might be able to get them to email or blog about you or something like that so that's another
26:01
good way to get in with existing audiences um but overall I think it's
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interesting that you can Target existing audiences um that you've built um over
26:12
time or just be there when they're looking for you and that kind of bypasses the
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issue yeah and I think like so I think there's like there's so much you can do
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in this area that you just need to be very like specific what you do spend your time on because it's not an infinite resource and I think depending
26:33
what you spend your time on sort of depends on where you are in your journey so if you're just starting out with a product and you got no users then maybe
26:39
you will go on Twitter and follow people and maybe reach out to them via a DM after a bit of time and say I've got
26:46
this product I'd like some feedback whereas if you're a more established product business you might be then looking at going talking to hosts and
26:52
saying can I get on the onboarding flow I've got this product it's it's really helps with accessib ability
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um maybe can it be offered as like one of the pre-installed plugins that every host created like every site created
27:08
with a particular host would install your plugin and I think it's depending on how big you are there's certain host
27:14
that will be open to conversations like that and other ones that won't be open to things like that and that could be a
27:19
completely new acquisition Channel that I think a lot of smaller product owners don't really pay that much attention to
27:26
is going finding Maybe a smaller web host maybe one based in the UK that's getting this number of sites if you
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become the recommended plugin on that install flow then that can help and find a complete new source of audience that
27:39
you're not having to reach in the ways that we've talked about already now do you know anybody that's had success with
27:46
that because people are always suggesting it to me as this Holy Grail but I haven't found anybody that's
27:53
actually successfully got onto a host onboarding flow in a way that generated significant users or
28:00
Revenue um I say say jetpacks the biggest example there on quite a few
28:06
like they partner with quite a lot of big host there to get themselves um as a recommended plugin on the instel flaws
28:13
I've seen other ones such as some of the W aome multi plugins I've seen on
28:18
various hosting flows so I think it depends on your Connections in your scale and what type of product you're
28:24
offering so if it's a connection if it's a woocommerce plugin that enhances
28:29
woocommerce then maybe that's something to talk to wo Express about because that's a holed um woocommerce instance
28:37
that like they have a lot of plugins that they could recommend and feature so they might test certain products there
28:44
whereas if it's an accessibility plugin that might appeal to more hosts because
28:49
that becoming more and more top of Mind of people wanting a site that is accessible so I think it depends on the
28:55
exact product um when we looked at it for CRM we were too small I think to join the Gold daddy partner program you
29:01
needed to have a certain number of active installs to then be considered but once you're past that it's just
29:07
opening that line of conversation and picking like which host are worth partnering if you could show that it's
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working on some smaller host and then it's helping that host keep that website from churning then that's a good way of
29:20
going to a bigger host and say look we partner with host ABC this has really helped them to keep their customers and
29:27
renew then let's discuss maybe getting it with a bigger host and sort of work from
29:33
there yeah we've had a lot of these conversations this interesting I feel
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like we could probably have a whole WP product talk episode on how to make this
29:45
happen right Ting partn we should look for a guest for that but I I think
29:52
um I think the so I think you have to plan for it being a really long
29:58
partnership conversation like maybe you're going to be talking to a host for a year or more before it actually
30:05
happens and there's probably things you know things that we've gotten right is
30:11
um so for example with Nexus they have their plug-in installer when you're
30:17
that's like built into the dashboard and we we got in there um and it's not Auto
30:23
installed but they were like well we'll put you in heat here and then they watch
30:29
our install accounts because the hosts can see what plugins are being used they
30:34
can even access you know what terms people are searching for when they're in the word in their WordPress site and
30:41
searching for plugins um and then they're like if we see that there's growth and that there's a lot of
30:48
interest in this then that's you know the next step is maybe it becomes an autoinstall plugin um but I think
30:55
there's also little things too like there they'll say well how about we have you do guest post for our blog first and
31:02
then maybe if they're like GoDaddy runs meetups right like maybe you can come speak at one of our GoDaddy Pro meetups
31:10
like I think there's a a lot of little steps that happen before you get that I
31:16
think it's rare that a host is like yeah we're gonna autoinstall your plugin starting next
31:23
month which brings us to kind of what I said earlier about personality types and
31:29
um introverts and all of that that to do that it's sort of a different level of
31:35
negotiation skill required I suppose and how to understand how these things work and get in with the right people at a
31:42
larger company uh so I think that's to be applauded when people can bring their partnership skills to that level because
31:49
hopefully the benefits are there but that's kind of the next level of skill I
31:55
think yeah I mean I it's very very much a sales like an Enterprise sales kind of
32:00
skill more than it's even marketing but you know I think something that's interesting like shifting slightly back
32:07
to audience growth right is um just having a really large
32:14
audience can be really attractive whether it's down the road for
32:19
acquisition right um I think I've seen even some plugins that were percentage
32:25
wise barely monetized it was almost all free users and they got acquired for a
32:31
lot of money because um the company who purchased them wanted that audience of
32:39
free users um and I don't know if either of you have any thoughts or experience with that um if you've seen that at
32:46
automatic Mike as something where the audience really can matter more beyond
32:51
your you know we might talk about growing Revenue because of having an audience but maybe it's not even about
32:57
the revenue now it's about what your in-game for your plugin is yeah um so the one that comes to mind
33:05
it's it wasn't an acquisition so the first aaci um created WP SuperCash which
33:10
is one of the most popular cashing plugins with two million active installs and that that joined the jetpack family
33:17
in about a public it feels like only six months ago but it was probably a year
33:22
ago now um and then in jackpack we've got a performance plugin called jetpod
33:28
boost and we utilize this super cach user base by saying well you're caching
33:34
maybe you want a performance plugin and that then cross promoted through having
33:40
that value of a free user base so good WP SuperCash had a lot of users and then
33:45
that helps jetpack boost grow on the on the back of it being a recommendation to the SuperCash users so that's sort of
33:52
like the value in having a free just a free plugin out there whether you choose and WP SuperCash isn't monetized there's
33:59
nothing there's no pro version there's nothing in there that would like people would pay for it's just all free users
34:05
and it's been free since 2007 so it's it's that's the main thing that comes to
34:10
mind there is that the value of having that type of connection is useful if you do have
34:17
another product that does have a paid upgrade sometimes I think having an
34:25
unpaid plug-in can be helpful for audience growth because people don't
34:30
wonder what the catch is do you know what I mean like I think people are more
34:36
easily able to recommend a totally free rather than a
34:42
premium plugin and we've talked about that like we have like we put out our
34:47
accessibility new window warnings plugin which is free it's not going to ever have a pro version it Standalone it
34:52
could work with our plugin but it doesn't have to um and and for us like it's something where
35:00
I've noticed like a lot of people are like just go use this and like they'll start recommending it as a solution now
35:05
we don't have millions of users right now because it's pretty new I think it's got like 600 right it's tiny but um but
35:11
I but I've noticed that that when there isn't a monetized aspect to it people are more willing to include it in
35:18
roundups or do other things and then you can then leverage the audience from that
35:24
plugin for your paid prod s so how can you leverage the audience
35:31
for your paid products given that typically you wouldn't have their email address for
35:37
example well you can have email addresses on like just because it's not monetized doesn't mean that you couldn't
35:43
use either something like freemius or your own email optin in an onboarding wizard in a free plug-in um so you could
35:50
still get email addresses um in that way mean the dreaded plug-in banners
35:58
yeah they work they do work right so you can have an advertisement for your paid
36:04
plugin and I'm guessing that's how um jetpack boost is doing it there's probably a banner somewhere right that
36:12
advertises in the WordPress admin in WP super is that how that works it's just a
36:18
little nudge to install the free version of boost so it's not even pushing a paid version it's saying here's another free
36:23
plugin that you can use to speed up your website and then boost itself does the
36:29
these are things you can do to like it it will help you resize all your images
36:34
it'll help you um create critical CSS and then that's some more convenience
36:40
factors on the top of that is what the paid upgrade would give you so you wouldn't have to do it manually it would happen automatically so it's that's s of
36:48
a little bit out of the audience building but it's more like it's getting that whether it's that email or that
36:54
install onto a website so then like its advertisement space in your own plugin Pages um there's a there is the like the
37:02
notification spam across like the non plugin Pages which is a bit of an issue that like you go onto the dashboard and
37:09
there's a thousand like plugin notifications and that is making WordPress just harder to use so it' be
37:14
good to see those go away and have the plugins focus more on their own pages and and then that makes the email
37:22
marketing and the grow the audience that bit more important because if you can't just PL ads all over WordPress you have
37:28
to try and get that um attention in other means and I think the best way for
37:33
that is to start pushing people to your website and onto a onto a newsletter onto an email list to to capture their
37:40
attention and keep them engaged so that you don't just email them once a year on Black Friday and say Here's a coupon and
37:47
they've not heard from you for 12 months yeah I think too um you know one
37:54
thing that we've done in addition to having the email sign up on our plugin page on our plug-in page and in our
38:00
dashboard widget we also have I think we showed two upcoming WordPress
38:06
accessibility meetup events and so again like getting them to come and connect
38:12
with us in some other way because then if they attend the Meetup they get asked when they register on Zoom do you want
38:18
to join our email list so that's another way that we can ask them whereas maybe in WordPress dashboard people are like
38:23
no I don't actually want to give you my email address so that's not going to convert as well but but seeing like
38:29
other things of value in there I know I've seen some plugins where they add their blog posts in a dashboard widget
38:36
or maybe links to YouTube videos or something like that so that you can just
38:41
get them to come to another platform and then that increases you know them
38:47
feeling like they're part of a community or being part of your audience
38:53
so all those ideas yeah I wonder if we should transition to our best advice for new
39:01
product owners Mike do you want to go first sure I can do I think my main
39:09
thing is just start a newsletter from day day one if you got an idea for a product get an email for start catching
39:15
those emails and then use that connection um I've got an actual a book on my desk that I don't know if you can
39:21
see this which I found is it mirrored on the camera it's called continuous discovery have it and it's all about
39:29
discovering problem products that create customer value and business value so it's the idea of that is you you get
39:36
that contact and then before you go and develop a new feature you're continuously talking to the people that
39:41
are using your product to say to discover like is it designed the way they want it to be so you get a designer
39:47
a developer and maybe someone from your support team if you've got a bigger product and then learn from the customer
39:53
always get the customer to talk to you about it maybe once every two weeks or once a month just have that um back and
40:00
forth with the customers that you're building through your list because need can change over time and with CRM we did
40:06
that with webinars we did a product s once a month and people were asking the same question like every month saying
40:13
like how do I add a custom status I'm like well you can do that but it's in settings so that sort of we from those
40:19
chats we need to sort of highlight that a little bit more because a lot of people were un uninstalling because they
40:25
couldn't find this this feature that was already there and through talking to them we just made
40:30
that a little bit easier to to find and use and then you could see how that impacted your retention over time so
40:37
just always start with the email start with the newsletter start talking to your customers and just go from there
40:44
that would be my biggest piece of advice is just don't build what you think people want just talk to people as they
40:50
sign up to your list keep them engaged through an autoresponder that might have an email
40:55
in there says do you want a quick 15- minute chat with me over Zoom to talk about why you installed the plugin what
41:01
you were looking for and what features it has or doesn't have and then that doesn't take a lot of time and that
41:07
feeds into the product Ro map to knowing what customers want from your
41:13
products yeah all great advice so my best advice would be well we've talked
41:19
about multiple ways and channels for growing your audience so my advice would be to analyze all the channels that
41:26
relevant to your WordPress product and choose a few to prioritize the ones that
41:31
you think are going to have the biggest impact for the minimal effort I suppose and yes it should take effort but you're
41:38
looking for Roi ultimately um and so once you've chosen those Implement them
41:44
but always always evaluate each growth strategy is it growing your audience is
41:50
it attracting the right type of people that are going to or are buying your products and there's various ways which
41:56
we've talked about in previous episodes of WP product talk of how to get that data that you need and things like that
42:03
so evaluate each channel that you're using to grow your audience and then keep making changes and improvements
42:09
maybe stop some channels introduce new ones to really fine-tune what you're doing and get the best results over
42:18
time yeah so my advice is um I think going back to what I was saying in my
42:25
experience is just try and get out of your own audience and find people that
42:30
you people or companies that you can partner with that have a similar
42:36
demographic of user or customer whatever that may be to to who you're targeting
42:43
and see if you can collaborate with them um don't just think that you have to
42:48
stay in a silo by yourself trying to grow your audience there are a lot of people who are that it makes sense to
42:55
collaborate and the two of you could even grow audiences together by sharing
43:00
so absolutely well that's a w so Mike thank you so much for joining us where can
43:07
people find you online um so there's my Twitter which is atm. WP and there's links there to
43:15
YouTube and my website as well if you want to follow along with the things I'm producing there um I'm also hang around
43:23
um various jetpack products different which one I'm working at on at the current time so you can find me reach
43:30
out I'm happy to talk to anybody about anything excellent thank you well next
43:36
week our other co-hosts Matt and Zach are going to discuss content marketing with YouTube takes you to strange places
43:44
with special guest Jamie marshan and Jamie has been absolutely killing it lately with growing his audience on
43:51
YouTube he he's always posting amazing subscriber miles stones and um so it' be
43:58
really interesting to hear what he has to say about the YouTube side of things I am definitely excited for that
44:04
one uh we want to say thank you to post status for being our green room if you
44:09
enjoy these shows do us a favor please hit the like button on YouTube subscribe
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44:22
collaborating and sharing audiences we appreciate and most of all we hope to see you next
44:29
week bye bye