I started paying attention to Atlassian when I first used their Confluence wiki software. In its day, it was a brilliant tool. As a company, they’ve done a lot of things right: Their documentation was superb (thanks in no small part to fellow HP telecomm alum, Sarah Maddox). And their marketing was…well…inspired. Their company culture? Exceedingly open and inviting.
As an example of their open culture, consider the following: At one point a number of years ago I struck up a correspondence with their marketing team (Matt Hodges, John Sloat and Ryan Anderson) regarding a phenomenal drip campaign they were running for Confluence. It was brilliant. When you signed up for a trial license, you’d get a sequence of emails over the next two weeks slowly introducing you to features, urging you to keep exploring, and providing assistance with common problems you’d likely encounter. Trust me, it was really great content marketing before we even called it “content marketing”.
My correspondence quickly put me in touch with their marketing team, and over the next couple weeks I spent a not-insignificant amount of time working with them on their campaign, answering questions, making suggestions, rewriting copy, and learning.
It struck me then, as it does now, that any company that would so eagerly seek to pair outside the office walls was certainly one to watch.
And so it was with no small amount of anticipation that I reviewed their recent video on agile marketing. Once again, Atlassian hits a home run with content marketing. This time, they use a seminar on agile marketing as a vehicle to sell licenses to their own software products. While marketing teams new to agile can pull some helpful (if basic) insights about agile marketing, the crux of the video is about how Confluence, Jira and HipChat are all indispensable to their marketing team’s work.
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