Marketing¶

Introduction¶

Many organization have full departments devoted to their ‘marketing strategy’ and constantly refining their ‘marketing plan’. At OpenGeo we just don’t have the resources to do extensive market, SWOT or customer analysis. Nor do we plan to build up an extensive business team to be able to dominate a market. Instead we focus on building the best software we possibly can, and put the vast majority of our resources there. We view marketing as the way to educate people about the great software we’re building, to get more people to check out what we’re building and to join us. A typical marketing plan ultimately focuses on profit - our goal is ultimately focused on creating amazing software. So OpenGeo aims for simply enough revenue to keep making software, and hope to help build revenue streams for many others to be able to collaborate with us.

To this end we do believe that marketing, broadly defined, is very important. We do spend time on creating a strong brand, spreading the word about our software, making demos and writing papers to explain what we do. But our primary driver in this is education, to make sure potential users and clients know what is possible with our software so they can decide for themselves. We fully believe in the software we build, and we want more people to use it and help us make it even better. But since proprietary vendors spend millions on advertising and marketing we must spend some time and energy to make sure our software gets out there. This section will lay out the way we think about things that fall under a broadly defined category of ‘marketing’.

Open Source¶

The center of our ‘marketing’ is the software itself. We follow the path of successful open source companies like JBoss, SpringSource, RedHat, MySQL, Xen and more. The basic strategy is make the best software possible, make it available to all as open source, and sell things that complement the software itself to a small percentage of people. Since a good community is the key lifeblood of an open source project the strategy that has had the most success is to simply grow the number of users by making the best software. So you never have to sell to the community, you sell to people who are used to buying proprietary software. And they come to you because the software is simply better.

Seen cynically the general open source strategy is just a variation on the Freemium model, giving away a limited thing in order to sell a premium thing. We tend to think of it as the opposite, selling a premium thing in order to give away as much as possible. And we prefer to focus on ‘premium’ on things that actually demand our time, like support. See our Open Core Approach (need to figure out how to link to it) for more on this thinking. But the clear way that people find out about our software is because they can download it for free and try it out. They come to us when they need additional help, and if they don’t need anything at all then we’re happy with that as well.

The quality of our software has primarily spread through word of mouth, and these days most people investigating new software or a new standard will start with the open source version to be able to play around with no commitment. So the fact that our software is open source is a key advantage, since we have to spend much less time ‘selling’ - the majority of our paying clients are already running it at least in testing environments and come to us to help them take it to the next level.

Training and Documentation¶

Our main investments to promote our software are in documentation and training. Open Source in general suffers from a (often correct) perception that it is not as well documented and is harder to get up to speed with, even though it is often more powerful. We believe that making the software accessible is almost as important as the software itself. Sometimes open source companies try to make documentation or training materials a revenue stream. We view them as some of our best marketing materials, as they make our software accessible to more people, and are one of the first impressions the software makes. We also invest heavily in great workshop material, which we deliver at many conferences. We also make all of our training material available to everyone under a Creative Commons license, so that it can spread widely. We do also sell training, and include training in our Enterprise packages, for those who want dedicated time from us to help them. Our partners also can give trainings, translating it to other languages, and using it as a revenue stream or marketing. We believe it is some of the best marketing, as everyone who uses the training materials walks away with more knowledge and tools to hopefully help them in their job. The more people who use the software the higher chance there is that some of them will need further services from OpenGeo.

Website and Social Media¶

We use our website to educate people on the options, filling it with demos, white papers, case studies and product information. We are planning to do more of this than we have so far. Our goal is to offer a place to learn all about what we offer before one makes the decision to invest the time to download it and install. We strive for a very professional website, to project an image of true reliability, which we believe we consistently back up with our actions. Complemented the website is our embrace of social media, working to blog consistently and engage with others over twitter. The goal of all of this is to make everyone feel comfortable, from very conservative people who need to go to a destination with lots of depth to those adept with the latest online engagement. We prefer the more conversational style, but strive to make all feel comfortable through our online presence. Since we don’t employ a salesforce and are distributed throughout the world our website extremely important as the primary focal point of how people learn about us and what we do.

Advertising and Press¶

OpenGeo currently uses Google Adwords at a low level, to try to reach people who may be interested but don’t yet know about OpenGeo. The nice thing about Adwords is that it makes things very data driven, so you can easily see the conversion cost from someone clicking on an ad to doing an action you care about. We have also been using a lead scoring system called Marketo to help qualify leads, so that we can reach out to those who are most likely to be interested in an Enterprise contract to help them out. We have not had great success with the system, as most of our paying customers are already using our software. But it may just be that the time between trying out the Suite and becoming a client is on a longer time frame than we’ve seen yet. As we get lower priced products this type of advertising will likely become more effective. We have considered other advertising venues, but the data driven analytics possible with Google Adwords (or other online systems) is a plus for us with little money to spend. In the past we experimented with a PR firm to get stories in magazines and online publications, but it did not seem worth the money for where we were at. In general we anticipate spending more on advertising and press once we are fully recovering our costs, so as to make more people aware of our work, but it is not clear that it is the best use of our money, especially relative to making the software better.

Conferences¶

Conferences are an important outlet for us, as people are generally more receptive to learning about new technologies when they attend. FOSS4G is by far our favorite conference, primarily for seeing our friends and allies, but it is also a great place to meet people who want to do more with our software. We also try to attend regional conferences in the US, and a handful of European events. We try to only attend conferences where we speak or give workshops. We very much value attending, so as to talk to more people who actually use our software, or who have key reasons for not using it.

Messaging¶

Our messaging generally centers around a few themes:

• Technical flexibility, power and reliability, a concrete benefit of taking open source seriously.
• The guarantee of having a company filled with core developers standing behind the products and ensuring that clients are fully supported in all they do.
• A focus on solutions, created by working with existing systems. We don’t impose a new silo, but adapt to what technology is already in place.
• Freedom from vendor lock-in, as our architecture is firmly rooted in open standards, and with open source any other vendor can offer similar services.
• Web-based applications are the future, flexibly built to the task at hand, instead of requiring an expensive desktop tool and lots of training. We push the edge of what is possible in a browser, and provide tools to build custom applications.

Positioning¶

Relative to other Geospatial Servers we tend position ourselves as more standards compliant, faster (except for compared to MapServer), more reliable, and more flexible. We are built for the web from the ground up, and our flexibility helps build for the task at hand.