TYPO3 Talk with Luisa: Head of Marketing Team

Hey Sanjay! My name is – obviously – Luisa, I’m 24 years old, working as a project manager at Marketing Factory Consulting GmbH in Düsseldorf. Besides that, I’m currently enrolled in a masters programme at FOM (M.Sc. Marketing & Communications) and I’m the TYPO3 Marketing Team Lead :)

I first got into contact with TYPO3 at Marketing Factory when I started working there as an intern in 2015. Marketing Factory has been working with TYPO3 since 2003 and developed around 400 websites based on the CMS since. 

I took my first steps in the TYPO3 Backend as an editor, creating and editing content for our customers for different target groups. For example, I created around 40 different “advisory texts'' concerning home life. Those included: How to take care of certain plants, how to grow pumpkins/strawberries in your own garden, how to deep clean your car’s interior etc.

My first actual contact with the TYPO3 community was during TYPO3 Camp Rhine Ruhr in 2016. Even though I was a little bit intimidated and hesitant at first, this is where I fell in love with the community.

I personally contribute to TYPO3 by trying my best to be a good Marketing Team Lead and  bring up new ideas and ways to improve the marketing efforts. I’m really passionate about the topic of marketing – hence why I’m studying it – and I think there’s still a lot of room for improvement for TYPO3 specifically. 

I’ve been working at Marketing Factory for almost 6 years as of now and ever since I started, I’ve been really impressed at how much they encourage contribution to TYPO3. Almost the entire company attends several Camps and Events each year and a lot of employees are enrolled in teams or committees of some sort. I’ve always felt supported in my contribution efforts and I really appreciate it.

Since I don’t own a business, I’d just like to send an appeal to everyone who does: 

TYPO3 is a great CMS and I strongly stand behind it, BUT it simply doesn’t fit every need. I think a lot of frustration when it comes to TYPO3 is linked to the CMS not being able to sufficiently cater to the customers actual needs. Also: Talk more about the system itself. Educate your customers. Let them know which possibilities they have with TYPO3 and don’t only let them use it, but teach them tips & tricks.

I’m really content with the way TYPO3 is currently heading at. I think the product itself has improved, as well as the community has grown immensely and I really love that we’re slowly, but surely reaching more people internationally! Especially the last year has opened up a lot of new doors. Due to the pandemic, all meetings and sprints had to be moved online – but thereby, we enabled so many more people to contribute. This certainly wouldn’t have been possible before and it allowed us to gain valuable insights into markets that we’re simply out of reach for us before. 

For the future, I think TYPO3 is going to become more of a standard and widely used CMS. All of the efforts concerning internationalization as well as standardization are opening up completely new ways. Ready to use templates, website starter kits and better documentation should lower currently existing entry / adaptation boundaries and make TYPO3 appeal to more people and use cases

From a Marketing Team perspective: Our focus is strongly put on helping agencies being able to sell TYPO3 better. We are creating a variety of marketing resources and documents for marketers, decision makers and managers. 

Besides that, our goal is to increase the usage of TYPO3 overseas. Especially in the USA, TYPO3 is barely known and used, but the potential there is just insane. 

All in all, TYPO3 is going to be more versatile, as well as more standardized to be able to scale to different needs better.

I think in the early days of TYPO3, it quickly rose in popularity in Germany, Austria and Switzerland, which led to the creation of a lot of german speaking camps and usergroups. The opportunity to look beyond our borders was simply not taken, so other competitors took over instead and are now established standards. Also, in my opinion, TYPO3 focussed on a pretty niché market and excluded quite a few possible users (especially small websites).

We need to enable people all around the globe to find information about TYPO3 easier and connect better to the community. Region-specific landing pages with basic product information, as well as possibilities to connect to user groups in different languages are much needed and should be one of our main focuses. We need to lower entry boundaries, improve documentation and help newbies get around easier. The mentorship programme is a great example for that!

First of all: Thank you so much for taking that approach and creating such an amazing variety of templates! Standard, ready to use templates are something that TYPO3 is missing and something that sets us back in comparison to other competitors. 

I like that you cater to a lot of different needs and provide both simple, as well as more comprehensive solutions! Additionally, the premium extensions provide sleek solutions for highly and regularly requested features! t3planet.com is neatly structured, easy to navigate and all in all a really great platform.

You’ve mentioned 2 of them in your question already: Multisite & multilingual. I think those are 2 of the biggest attributes to TYPO3’s success, because barely any other CMS can provide this out-of-the-box without any plugins or extensions. 

Besides those, I see the structured backend approach as a big plus for TYPO3. Everything is really logical and easy to find and navigating through the backend is easy to learn. 

Also scalability and extensibility are factors that appear to a wide audience  – TYPO3 can cater to almost every need and can easily and seamlessly be integrated into almost every third party system out there.

My personal hero when it comes to TYPO3 is definitely my colleague Simon Schmidt. He’s been my mentor at Marketing Factory since day one and is able to solve every problem I come across. Besides that, he’s also a great teacher and really patient. 

Another personal hero is Mathias Bolt Lesniak for sure. He’s someone that always knows the answer to everything and amazes me with his communication skills. Ever since I started contributing to the Marketing Team in some way or another, he has been there when I needed help and also gave me a lot of personal advice and leadership tips.  

Mentor / Hero Number 3 would be Benni Mack. Benni is one of the most compassionate people I’ve ever met, a great teacher and it’s always a pleasure to work with him. If you need to know anything about TYPO3 CMS, Benni is always the person to ask. 

Another mentor would definitely be Ronald Meeuwissen from MaxServ. He’s involved in several initiatives as well as the marketing team and one of the first people I met at the Venlo sprint 4 years ago. Currently, he’s working on the improvement of t3versions.com together with Torben Hansen and produces a lot of valuable market share and TYPO3 usage insights. 

Last but not least I’d actually like to list a few regular contributors to TYPO3, which deserve a lot love and appreciation as well:

• Jeffrey A. “Jam” McGuire, Tracy Evans and Heather McNamee from Open Strategy Partners
• Fabian Stein from the Design Team
• Michael Telgkamp from the Accessibility Team

If you have a specific problem and are not able to find the answer anywhere online, or if you’d like to know anything on a certain topic in general, I would highly suggest just reaching out to people or join channels in TYPO3 slack! TYPO3 slack is a really active place and lots of people would love to help you out in your quest. 

For blogs, I would suggest the already known and established ones:

• https://t3planet.de/en/blog/ for really fun, lovely to read and on the point posts about a variety of topics
• https://news.typo3.com/ for general community news and reports from teams
• https://news.typo3.com/article/ for product and company-related, more business-y news
• https://typo3blogger.de for german readers only, but always a nice overview over current topics from the TYPO3 universe
• https://daniel-siepmann.de
• https://www.sebkln.de/tutorials/ also for german readers only, but provides a lot of helpful tricks for frequent problems with TYPO3
• https://wwagner.net also for german readers only, but also provides a lot of video tutorials and is one of the first “TYPO3 people” I stumbled upon

https://blog.marketing-factory.de shameless self promotion here – My colleagues and I write interesting, problem solving blog posts concerning a wide array of topics as well

While I think that TYPO3 already has a pretty stable base of contributors, I also think we could all benefit from even more active contributors. Especially concerning the international marketing efforts, we definitely need more, region specific marketing and content team members who can help us, spread the word about TYPO3 locally. 

In our last marketing sprints we found that people overseas are missing local TYPO3 user groups and agency clusters. In order to be able to establish TYPO3 internationally, we will need to figure out how to help individuals find their way into TYPO3. Paul Hansen for example has already done a great job reaching out to more agencies in North America and Canada and bringing them back into the TYPO3 universe. We need more people like Paul, who have connections to other local agencies and individuals and help them guide these into our community. That in turn, circles back to question number 9. I think we need to first and foremost improve the global representation of TYPO3 and appeal to more people in different languages.

I’ve been a festival enthusiast ever since I turned 18, but due to the pandemic, those didn’t happen in a while. However during the several lockdowns, I found my passion for cooking, experimenting with new ingredients, reading and ballet again.