Bridget Willard wants to teach WordCamp DFW attendees how to make marketing timeline for their products that parallels their development timeline.

She finds it sad that many developers in the WordPress space devalue marketing and in her talk, – Concept Car Marketing – Learning From the Car Industry, she taps into the automobile industry to explain why there are so many abandoned products and plugins (and what to do about it!).

I see so many of my friends build amazing products, neglect to market them, and then wonder why they aren’t making any money. I feel like we need to learn from other industries.The automobile industry does this well. The concepts are always marketed years before they go into production.

Bridget Willard’s website is on WordPress, which she built in April 2015 and was her first self-hosted WordPress site, and she is a marketing consultant who works with WordPress products and agencies.

Bridget Willard’s client Codebrain Media is located in Texas and she thought it would be a good reason to get some facetime with them and attend WordCamp DFW, so we are excited.

Her experience with the WordPress community can be described as “the best of times and the worst of times,”:

I love people. But being a marketer in a developer’s world is challenging. 

Her journey with WordPress began when her friend Pam from Pam Ann Marketing said she wanted to meet at WordCamp Orange County in 2013. Carol Stephen and her went and Pam couldn’t attend, and they have been going to WordCamps ever since. The resulting blog post opened a door for Bridget to write about plugins. Bridget Willard was hired as the Marketing Manager at ThoughtHouse and was promoted to Director of Marketing.

Not only has she spoken at many WordCamps since, but she’s also been on organizing teams and lead the Make WordPress Marketing Team for two years.

Since October of 2017, Bridget Willard has been a freelancer who specializes in helping WordPress Products and Agencies with Marketing (training, strategy, social media management, copywriting, and even collections.)

Bridget Willard is most proud of the case studies she wrote for Staging Pilot and the About Page Copy for WordPress 4.8 for which she “earned brackets.”

You can tweet at Bridget Willard during her session at @YouTooCanBeGuru, using the hashtag #WCDFW. Make sure you ask her about how she was the second-string nose guard for her 8th grade flag football team — and the only girl!

If you haven’t yet registered for this year’s WordCamp DFW, head over to the Tickets page. We look forward to seeing you!