Be Theme Case Study

How it all began

Background

The year 2014 was a turning point for WordPress themes. Prior to that year, WordPress was used mainly for blogs, and the market was infinitely less competitive than today.

Few imagined back then that WordPress Themes will start competing with website builders as web designers’ favorite tool for building websites on a budget.

The turning point came when WordPress theme developers either began to integrate Visual Composer into their products, or developed their own page builders and editors.

Today, it is common place for someone to buy a WordPress theme to build a business site, but back in 2014, people were using HTML or a website builder.

Before

We started collaborating with Be Theme in November 2014. They were selling around 190 licenses each week and they had a market share of 2% in Themeforest Top Sellers.

Be Theme was a Themeforest Top Seller challenger. A small but talented team of coders from Poland was starting a quite unusual product.

A key feature was a selection of 50 beautiful demos, any of which could easily be customized to match a specific business type or domain. Other multipurpose theme products were on the market, but they were still a rarity at the time.

We found Be to be an excellent, innovative product. We also realized that it wasn’t getting the attention it deserved.

The first thing we did was to understand the market and it competition. We found an opportunity. The key was figuring out the audience insight.

What did web designers need?

One of the first things our research discovered was that web designers tended to perceive the theme’s demos as nothing more than showcases designed to generate ideas as to what could be accomplished with the theme. They did not realize that the “demos” themselves could be used for building a site.

We also discovered that web design freelancers were struggling with code. While a few enjoyed the opportunity to work with the frontend on occasion, many creative designers didn’t care much for coding, and would avoid frontend work whenever possible.

They wanted comfort and abundance.

The first thing we did was to change Be’s positioning in the market, with the objective of changing audience perceptions as quickly as possible. We replaced the term “demos”, with “pre-built websites”. This new description was not only more accurate; it proved to be a game changer.

We also began to explore ways to highlight Be’s benefits in campaigns. We wanted to convince web designers that Be was the ideal solution to the daily challenges they faced; that it required no coding skills; and it was easy to work with.

We worked with media publishers that served communities of professionals and who were on top of the game. We used a mix of medias to get Be’s message across.

We also looked into various insights from Be’s community, as well as the web design community as a whole, to better understand their needs.

What happened?

In the first year after we started working with them,
Be Theme moved from 190 weekly sales to 430 weekly sales.
And from a market share of 2% to a market share of 5.74%
on November 20, 2016.

Weekly sales went up from $11,210 to $31,270. They moved
from Themeforest top seller 13 to 4. Their audience was
really getting the message we delivered. Interest over
time (organic searches on Google) is – until now, on
an ascendant line.

Only two years later, Be Theme managed to help over
51,000 web designers and online professionals to
create beautiful websites. The number of
pre-built websites is now over 230. Be Theme made
almost 3 million dollars from sales.

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