Marketing is a key factor to growing Drupal adoption and spreading the goodness of Drupal. One way to do that is by exhibiting at key industry events. The CMS Garden team has done a great job getting Drupal included in some key events in Europe and now the Drupal Association will take on a parallel effort.

The initiative will be an experimental “co-marketing” campaign to promote Drupal in the European marketplace. It is called a “co-marketing” campaign because it will be crowdfunded by a group of Drupal businesses (if you would like to find out how your Drupal business can get involved, keep reading). This is a pilot program that will allow us to experiment with the best ways to promote Drupal in the global marketplace and reach the CMS evaluator audience.

Why Europe? Data from our DrupalCon surveys show that relative to DrupalCon North America, DrupalCon Europe has a higher percentage of developer attendees but a lower percentage of CMS “evaluator” attendees. From that standpoint, it makes sense to target Europe evaluators in this pilot program. The evaluators we are targeting in the pilot program are digital marketers who have significant sway over CMS selection.

So what’s the plan?

This year, Drupal Association will secure exhibit space at two European digital marketing industry events (dmexco in Germany and Festival of Marketing in the UK). We will exhibit as Drupal and together with representatives from the anchor sponsors who have already signed on (including Wunderkraut (Germany), Wunder (UK) and Deeson (UK), we will promote Drupal and the sponsoring companies’ expertise and successes with Digital Marketing and Drupal. Leads generated from the exhibit presence will go to the sponsoring companies. We are offering first right of refusal to sponsor the effort to Drupal Premium Supporting Partners, followed by other Supporters.

Why these two events? There are many events in Europe that target the audiences we want to reach. After researching attendee types, costs and other factors, we determined the abovementioned events make the most sense for this pilot project.

If you would like to learn more about how your business can participate in this exciting initiative, please contact Johanna Bergmann. johanna@association.drupal.org.