Ahmed Ehsaan, Digital Marketing Manager of StorePress is with us today for an exclusive interview. So without further ado, let’s hear it from the man himself.
WPJuicer: Hi Ahmed, What is your background, & how did you first get involved with WordPress?
This is Faysal Ahmed. My self-given name is Ahmed Ehsaan. I am from Bangladesh and completed my graduation in English. After that, I steered away from the academic career and got involved with the WordPress platform.
The main reason for being involved with WordPress is it makes Web publishing easy. That helped me to run a few blog sites where I was able to publish technical content regularly.
Later on, I have started my digital experience and contributed to several companies. Currently, I provide Support at UX Themes and also working as a Chief Marketing Executive at StorePress.
WPJuicer: You work at StorePress as Chief Marketing Officer. Tell us something about your company?
StorePress has a small team of WordPress Enthusiasts. We started our journey to the web about 4 years ago, developing WordPress themes. After getting few sales through the Themeforest platform and personal website, we gathered valuable experience regarding WooCommerce plugins.
Later on, we came to an idea to contribute to those experiences by building some fantastic WooCommerce plugins for the industry. StorePress now has many sales-boosting WooCommerce plugins, including Variation Swatches and Additional Image Gallery.
Our Variation Swatches plugin is currently the best swatches plugin for WooCommerce. It has recently reached over 200K active installations and 350+ star ratings. We believe we will reach the 300K milestone very soon.
WPJuicer: How do you manage your responsibilities?
As a Chief Marketing Officer, I often oversee all activities in the marketing department. Also, I take the responsibility to create innovative marketing strategies that will build our companies’ brand and increase revenue.
Additionally, I always try to lead and drive branding and marketing efforts to build its growth and awareness targets.
WPJuicer: What should readers know about all the stuff you’re doing in WordPress these days?
In terms of downloads, active installations, and ratings, our WooCommerce Variation Swatches plugin has grown in popularity. That’s why we planned to develop more plugins, including Bundled and Duplicator.
These days I’m focusing more on setting up a strategy to help grow our existing WordPress plugins sales. As well as, I am getting ready for our new products that will be launched soon.
Also, I am handling support tickets related to the Flatsome theme, as I work as a Support Engineer at UX Themes.
WPJuicer: What are your perspectives on the future of WordPress? Do you think that the WordPress market will keep on growing?
When it comes to choosing a CMS, nothing beats WordPress. In my opinion, the future of WordPress is bright and becomes brighter with each new update. The WordPress plugin directory is stuffed with 55,000+ plugins and over 10,000 WordPress themes. It’s still growing based on user needs.
WordPress never stands still. It’s been getting better and more prominent from its inception as a blogging platform to its evolution as the world’s biggest CMS.
I hope the market will keep on growing. But, only time will tell how much of what I’m predicting will come true.
WPJuicer: What do you think is the most efficient way to market a WordPress product at this moment?
WordPress product marketing strategies are not about finding shortcuts to grow your sales and revenue.
It’s all about growing your products and bringing value to your customers. Shortcuts may work for a certain period, but they are not always useful.
It’s always great to develop unique and user-friendly products. You must follow a particular marketing strategy for reaching your desired customers. You will be different from the others when you can make an interaction between your product development and marketing,
I would recommend researching the market and document your product before starting to develop it. After that, research your target audience, offer free features or live demo, focus on SEO, and leverage content marketing.
WPJuicer: What is that one feature that you would love to see in WordPress? And what’s the one thing you’d like to change about WordPress?
WordPress comes with so many excellent features and is continuously changing. However, one feature improvement that I would love to see is better site search (Ajax). A better search algorithm should be a primary focus for the next release of WordPress.
Many themes have complex homepage layouts, custom templates, and other functionality that is not compatible between themes. If you often switch between themes, you know that feeling of lost widgets, menus, theme settings, and layouts. That’s what I would like to change about WordPress and find a better solution.
WPJuicer: Digital and social media marketing are already doing wonders. How do you see social media marketing in the future? In your opinion, what would be the trends in social media next year?
Social media has evolved into an excellent tool for marketing. The social media landscape is changing at a quick pace, just like other forms of marketing,
In my opinion, social media marketing is here to stay and grow. There is a rise in the popularity of augmented reality, AI-powered chatbots, and social commerce. Lots of marketers are using social media as an effective marketing and sales generation tool.
I think Facebook, YouTube, and LinkedIn will continue to be other popular social media marketing networks. Next year the most prominent social media trends will be live videos and conversational marketing.
WPJuicer: We have talked too much about your professional life. Let’s tell our readers about your hobbies and interests. What do you do other than work?
I’ve been passionate about hobbies my whole life. My area of interest is in learning, researching, and developing new skills.
In my free time, I spend time meeting new people around the community. Apart from that, I am also involved with an international non-profit Islamic organization called Dawat e Islami.
Also, I love to play table tennis enthusiastically, not caring about winning or losing. That helps me to enjoy the play more than the score.
