So, you’ve just launched your first WordPress product, and even after trying, you are not gaining any traction.

We understand that this could be frustrating.

Now, to help you overcome such a huge obstacle, we’ve come up with a beginner’s guide on WordPress product marketing.

In this guide, we will show you how to promote WordPress themes and plugins step-by-step.

01. Optimize Your WordPress Plugin readme.txt File

The first marketing you should do for your WordPress plugin or theme is to optimize your WordPress readme.txt file. Your potential customers will download your product from the WordPress repository and if you can’t rank there, you will lose out.

How to Optimize Your WordPress Plugin readme.txt File

To optimize your WordPress readme.txt, follow these steps:

Write a Title With Keywords: The most basic and yet important part of your WordPress readme.txt file is the product title. It’s a mistake to only use the brand name in the title of your product.

Instead, you should place some keywords in your title. When picking keywords, prioritize exact-match keywords because they work better.

For example, we can look at RioVizual, which is a WordPress table block plugin.

Place Keywords in Tags and Descriptions: Other than the title, tags, and descriptions are also great places to include more keywords. Keep in mind that, you can add five tags maximum.
Keep the Product Updated: If you don’t update your product regularly, it sends a negative signal to WordPress. That’s why it’s better to update your product once every three months. If there’s nothing to push, just make some minor updates.
Use FAQs: FAQs are a great way to include long-tail keywords that you cannot place in your description naturally.
Leverage Contributors: Contributor names are also a ranking factor, so remember to list all the contributors’ names.
Add Proper Images and Videos: Add necessary screenshots and possibly videos of your product. Doing so will help your users and send a positive signal to WordPress.
Include As Much Information As You can: Don’t leave out any information that is required, no matter how small or insignificant it may seem.

To give you a rough idea of what an ideal WordPress readme.txt should look like, here’s a template for you.

02. Content Marketing

Content marketing is an excellent way to tell your potential users how your WordPress plugin or theme solves their problems. Content marketing involves creating different forms of content and promoting them to establish your product as a brand.

How to Use Content Marketing to Promote Your WordPress Product

Here are the steps to follow to get started with marketing your content:

Find Your Audience and Their Pain Points: Understand your ideal WordPress user’s demographics and problems. This will help you create content that talks about their specific struggles and shows how your product solves them.

Choose the Best Content Format and the Platform: Select the content format (blog posts, videos, tutorials) that resonates best with your audience. Choose platforms (website, social media) where your target audience spends their time.

For example, if your users spend most of their time on Instagram, you could create reels and images.

Create Quality Content for Different Stages of the Sales Cycle: The sales cycle is the journey of your potential customers, from becoming aware of your product to being a customer.

For example, you want to sell a WordPress caching plugin. Here is how you create content for all three stages of the sales cycle:

Awareness: Your potential customers become aware of the problem they are having. For customers in this stage, you should create content addressing these problems.

Content Example: 5 Common Reasons Why Your WordPress Site is Slow (and How to Fix Them)

Consideration: Now that your customers are aware of the problem, they need a solution. This is where you present your solution.

Content Example: 10 Best WordPress Caching Plugins to Boost Your Site’s Speed

Decision: In this stage, you help your client to make a buying decision.

Content Example: X WordPress Caching Plugin Review

Set and Stick to a Schedule: Consistency is key to retaining your customer base. That’s why you should plan a regular content publishing schedule (weekly, bi-weekly) to keep your audience engaged and coming back for more.

Measure Results: Track key metrics like website traffic, user engagement, and lead generation to track the result of your content marketing efforts. Use this data to refine your strategy and optimize your content for better results.

03. Create User-Friendly and Interactive Landing Pages

So, you launched a successful content marketing campaign and managed to land your potential customers on your product website. Now, what?

That’s where landing pages come in.

Landing pages are the most effective weapon in your arsenal that can convert a potential customer into a customer.

How to Create a Landing Page That Converts

Here are our specialized tips on how to create a landing page that will increase your conversion rate:

Catchy Headline: A catchy headline that simply describes how your product can benefit your users is a must.

For example, let’s look at WP Rocket’s landing page-

With a catchy heading, it’s best to use a subheading that explains your product’s main benefits.

Visuals: Use high-quality visuals that are relevant to your product and visually appealing. This could be a product screenshot, an explainer video, or an image showcasing happy users.

See what Elementor did?

Explain Your Key Features: Explain your product’s features, but also focus on how they benefit the user. Keep the content short and easy to read.

Here’s how Elegant Themes converts their customers:

Use Testimonials and Brand Logos: Testimonials and brand logos can help build trust and credibility.

RankMath did this to build trust with their customers:

Optimized CTA Text: Place your CTA button strategically and use clever CTA text. For best results, try A/B testing to see what works.

04. Search Engine Optimization

Your quality content will be useless if it doesn’t rank on search engines. That’s why you need to put in a decent amount of effort to optimize your content for search engines.

Implementing an effective SEO strategy will increase traffic to your website, which will increase your conversion rate and revenue growth.

How to Optimize Your Content for SEO

Follow the steps we have mentioned below to optimize your website content for SEO.

Place Keywords in All the Important Places: To tell the search engine bot what your content is about, you should place your primary keyword in your title, meta description, URL, and heading.

Also, it’s best to place the primary keyword once or twice in the body of the content. But it’s important that you maintain the natural flow of your content and not overdo it.

Besides the primary keyword, you should keyword research tools to find relevant secondary keywords and place them in your content.

Image Alt Text: Google can’t understand the images you upload in your content. That’s why alt texts are necessary to make them understand what it’s about. Also, image alt texts are another great place to push keywords.

So, when writing alt text for your images, you need to describe the image and place keywords naturally if possible.

Internal Linking: Link to relevant internal pages on your website. This helps search engines understand the structure of your website and improves navigation for users.

The best example for internal linking is Wikipedia, just don’t place it too often.

Page Speed: It’s important that you make sure that your website loads quickly. A website that takes more than two seconds to load, loses out on traffic and conversions.

Mobile-friendliness: Make sure your website is mobile-friendly. A significant portion of web traffic comes from mobile devices, so a responsive design that adapts to different screen sizes is crucial.

Build Backlinks: Backlinks are like a token of recommendation from other websites to your website. When other sites mention your website on their web pages, you get a backlink.

Backlinks contribute to your overall domain authority. This means the quality of your backlink profile dictates your trustworthiness to search engines.

There are many link-building tactics you can use to build your backlink profile, such as HARO, guest posting, etc.

05. Social Media Marketing

In this day and age, everyone uses social media, so chances are your target audience uses them, too. That makes social media an important channel to reach your audience.

How to Implement Social Media Marketing

To effectively use social media marketing to promote your WordPress product, follow these steps:

Find Your Audience and Select Platform: Pinpoint which social media platforms your audience uses the most. Instead of just choosing one platform, choosing multiple platforms will benefit you the most.

Create Curated Content: Find out what type of content your target audience interacts with the most and double down on creating that specific type of content.

Also, the content type also depends on the platform you choose. For example, posting reels on LinkedIn will not be as effective as posting reels on Instagram or Facebook.

Besides these, you should also keep up with social media trends to create content or trending topics.

User-Generated Content: You can leverage social media to have your users create content for you. You can host live streams, polls, quizzes, contests, giveaways, etc. to promote your WordPress content.

Monitor Performance: Track how your social media marketing efforts are doing. Based on the collected data, you can optimize your social media marketing strategy and improve on it.

By implementing these strategies, you can use social media marketing effectively to promote your WordPress product, build a loyal community, and ultimately drive sales and user growth.

06. Email Marketing

Email marketing is a strategy that involves sending emails to current and potential customers to promote your WordPress product. These emails can contain information about your WordPress products, promotions, special offers, and more.

How to Use Email Marketing For Your WordPress Product

Follow these strategies to successfully launch your email marketing campaign:

Build Your Email List: Email opt-in forms are the most widely used form for building email lists.

Place email opt-in forms in your landing pages throughout your landing pages. Also, you can use WordPress popup plugins to create email opt-in popups.

Other than that, you can offer free resources in exchange for your visitors’ emails.

Categorize Your Email List: Categorize your users’ emails based on their user personas, interests, needs, and level of experience with WordPress. You can use this information for targeted email campaigns.

Provide Value: Aside from promoting your product make sure to provide valuable information, news, or important updates about the WordPress industry. A newsletter is the best form of content to achieve this.

Prioritize Personalization and User Experience: Make sure your users are not bombarded with promotional emails. Rather try to make them feel welcome by sending personalized emails. Doing this builds trust and credibility.

Offer Discounts: Offer special discounts to your email subscribers if possible.

Monitor Performance: Track key metrics like open rates, click-through rates, and conversion rates to measure the effectiveness of your email campaigns.

07. Influencer Marketing

Influencer marketing used to be a part of social media marketing, but because of its popularity, it has become a niche of its own. You must collaborate with an influencer who will promote your product to his audience by creating content.

Influencer content feels more natural and authentic and that’s why it increases your brand reputation and builds credibility.

How to Use Influencers to Promote Your WordPress Product

Here’s a quick rundown on how to use influencers to promote your product:

Make a List of Relevant Influencers: Find influencers who create content in your niche and have a decent audience count. It’s better to focus on micro-influencers who work in smaller niches.

Offer Partnership: Once you have a list of popular WordPress influencers, you can select a few and offer partnerships. Make sure to offer a deal that’s beneficial for both parties.

Set Goals and Guidelines: Provide clear guidelines outlining what you expect from the influencer, including the product features they should showcase and the message they should convey. Leave room for creative freedom to maintain authenticity.

Aside from this, set clear goals for your influencer marketing campaign, such as brand awareness, increased website traffic, or product trial sign-ups.

08. Community Marketing

Community marketing is a strategy that focuses on building a community around your brand or product. It creates a space where existing and potential customers can connect, share experiences, and learn from each other.

Building a strong community can lead to increased brand awareness, improved customer loyalty, valuable customer insights, and even product development ideas.

How to Implement Community Marketing

To use community marketing as your WordPress product marketing strategy, do these:

Create a Platform: Create a community space, it could be a forum, a Facebook group, a Discord channel, a subreddit, etc.

Set Community Guidelines: Set clear boundaries for respectful communication to maintain a positive atmosphere.

Participate: As the creator of the WordPress theme actively participate in discussions, Q&A sessions, solve your users’ problems, etc.

Share Updates and Resources: Share future updates about your WordPress product within your community and ask about your members’ opinions. This will make your users feel more valuable and important.

Also, you can share exclusive content like cheat sheets, early access to new features, or discounts for community members.

Host Webinars and Meetups: Just like WordPress arranges meetups like WordCamps, you can also host meetups to build relationships with your users. If that’s not possible, you can host webinars.

09. Get Featured on Popular Blogs

There are popular blogs with millions of traffic like WPBeginner that create content about WordPress themes and plugins. If you can get featured in their blogs, it will bring a lot of benefits to your website.

Apart from getting huge exposure to the WordPress community, you will also manage to get a backlink from them. A backlink from such reputable sites will be great for your website’s domain authority.

How to Get Featured on Popular Blogs About WordPress

Here are the steps to follow to get featured on WordPress blogs like WPBeginner:

Make a List of the WordPress Blogs: Find the WordPress blogs that have created content about products similar to yours. While listing the blogs, prioritize sites that have high domain authority and have lots of organic traffic.

Send Genuine, Personalized Email: Instead of sending generic AI generated emails, write an email with a personal touch to the blog’s writer or editor. Briefly introduce yourself, your product, and highlight how it could benefit their readers.
Free Product Access: If possible, consider offering bloggers free access to your product in exchange for an honest review. This allows them to test its features and provide valuable insights to their readers.

Build Relationships: Actively participate in the WordPress community by commenting on relevant blog posts, attending conferences, and engaging in online forums. This helps you build relationships with bloggers and establish yourself as a knowledgeable voice.

Then, when you reach out to them for collaboration, they will most likely accept.

10. Run Ad Campaigns

Running ad campaigns with other organic marketing strategies will really bring out the best results for your WordPress product. While SEO and other organic marketing techniques will build a foundation for your long-term growth, ads can give you an instant sales boost.

How to Run an Ad Campaign for Your WordPress Product

Here’s how you can run a successful ad campaign to promote your WordPress product:

Define Your Goals and Target Audience: Before you start building your ad campaign, define what you want out of it. The goal of your ad campaign could be getting more impressions, traffic, leads, or sales.

Also, to have a successful ad campaign, you must consider your audience’s demographics, interests, and pain points.

Pick a Platform: Decide where you want to run your ad campaign. It’s better to choose the platform your potential audience use the most. Also, each platform has their own, unique benefits.

Keep in mind that it’s better to pick multiple platforms, to get the best results.

Create Click Worthy Ad Content: When creating content for your ad, you must focus on writing a headline that grabs your users’ attention, a copy that relates to their pain point and use visuals that resonates with them.

Also, if you are running ads on different platforms, try creating different ads based on the platform

Campaign Budget and Bidding Strategy: When you have the content of your ads, it’s time you think about your budget and bidding strategy. Set a budget based on your goals and expected ROI.

As for bidding strategy, devise one that aligns with your campaign goals. For example, cost-per-click (CPC) bidding can be effective for driving traffic, while cost-per-acquisition (CPA) might be better suited for maximizing conversions.

Monitoring and Optimization: Monitor key metrics like impressions, clicks, conversion rates, and cost per acquisition (CPA) to measure your campaign’s effectiveness mid-campaign.

Use these data to identify what’s working and further optimize your ad.

11. Acquire Technical Partnerships

As a WordPress theme or plugin marketer, you can collaborate with other WordPress companies. With a technical partnership between two WordPress theme or plugin companies, both get access to each other’s client base. As a result, it extends your market reach.

For example, you have a WordPress theme and partner up with a WordPress plugin company. You can promote their plugin to your customers, where they will also promote your theme to their users.

This is a win-win scenario for both companies and their customers.

How to Acquire Technical Partnerships

Here’s how you can find and negotiate a partnership with a fellow WordPress product company:

Identify Potential Partners: Research and identify companies or developers whose products or services complement your WordPress product. Look for partners with a good reputation, a strong user base, and a shared target audience.

Develop a Value Proposition: Clearly define what your product brings to the table in a partnership. How will it benefit the other company and their users?

Initiate Contact: Reach out to potential partners through professional channels like email or attending industry events. Clearly communicate your value proposition and outline the potential benefits of a collaboration.

Negotiate a Partnership Agreement: If both parties are interested, work together to develop a formal partnership agreement that outlines the terms of collaboration, revenue sharing (if applicable), and development responsibilities.

Promote the Partnership: Once the partnership is finalized, promote it to your respective audiences through blog posts, social media announcements, or joint webinars to maximize its impact.

12. Upload Your Product on Product Hunt

Product Hunt is a website known for being a discovery platform for new tech products. It has a tech-savvy audience, including early adopters, developers, marketers, and all sorts of people from the global tech industry.

A core feature of Product Hunt is its upvote feature. Users can upvote products they find valuable. A product with the highest upvote rise to the top of the daily and category listings and because of this, the products get a lot of exposure.

That’s why, Product Hunt is a great platform to promote your WordPress theme or plugin, especially if it’s newly launched.

Best Practices to Follow When Uploading Your Product to Product Hunt

Follow this checklist if you want to get maximum exposure after uploading your product on product hunt:

Write a Great Post: Write a clear and concise description of your product that highlights its benefits and target audience within the character limit. Also, use high-quality visuals (screenshots or a video) that grab attention and visually represent your product’s functionalities.

In addition to these, choose relevant tags to increase discoverability within the Product Hunt platform.

Use Your Connections: Reach out to friends, colleagues, and industry connections to gather upvotes and comments on your product. This initial momentum can attract further attention from the global WordPress community.

Engage with the Community: Actively respond to comments and answer questions on Product Hunt. This shows your commitment to user feedback and creates positive impressions within the community.

Announce Your Launch: Announce your Product Hunt launch on your social media channels and within your WordPress product itself to drive traffic and encourage upvotes.

13. Sales and Promotions

Giving special discounts to your users are a great way to promote your WordPress product. With a comparatively cheaper price, a sale can attract new customers and increase sales.

Best Practices to Follow When Offering Discounts

Here are some tips that will help you gain more new customers during a promotion:

Choose the Right Time: Choose the right time to run your promotion. Consider seasonal sales periods, product launches, or competitor activity when planning your promotions.

Festivals or holidays are also a great time to offer sales promotions. Occasions like Christmas, New Year, Halloween, Black Friday, etc. are some of the best time for promotions because they generate the most sales and revenue.

Limited-Time and Quantity Offers: Create a sense of urgency by setting a time or product limit to your sale offer. This can urge users to take action before the promotion ends.

Multiple Discount Tiers: Consider offering tiered discounts based on purchase amount. This can make the users to purchase more.

Pricing Strategy: You can use a psychological pricing strategy that offers more discount to the premium plan of your product. This can make the users to buy the premium product, while you enjoy more profit.

Get a Complete WordPress Product Marketing Strategy With VizibleSEO

With our complete list, you have the full picture of how professional marketers optimize their WordPress product marketing strategy.

However, you have to understand that, to successfully market your WordPress theme or plugin, you must put effort on all of this altogether. Otherwise, you will not reach the full potential of your WordPress product.

But, if you are not a veteran marketer, juggling between all these tasks can be troublesome.

That’s why VizibleSEO is here to help!

If you are struggling to market your product then we are here to take the load off your shoulder. With out WordPress product marketing specialists, you will get the best service money can buy.

So, hurry up and claim your free consultation call!

WordPress Product Marketing: How to Promote WordPress Plugin & Theme?