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.
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The four choices we have as content marketers, from Joe Pulizzi’s Epic Content Marketing:
You have four choices:
- You can inform and help your customers live better lives, find better jobs, or be more successful in the jobs they have now.
- You can choose to entertain and begin to build an emotional connection with your customers.
- You can choose to develop lackluster content that doesn’t move the needle.
- You can choose to spend money on traditional marketing, such as paid advertising, traditional direct mail, and public relations.
Ben Hunt writes in Convert! (165):
In a medium like mail order advertising, long copy sells. The long-standing motto in direct mail is “The more you tell, the more you sell.” This has been proven time and again.
I would say the same principle applies to marketing on the Web. […] Some web marketers apply the long-copy approach directly to the sales pages, and create squeeze pages that are 10 screens long[…]. The reason they do that is because it has been proven to work.
Do not assume that the long sales format is the only solution for any of your web pages. These long pages typically sell only one thing. Your web site may need to represent the breadth of what you offer, which means it needs navigation.
Velocity Partners published a fantastic ebook that gets to the core of the problem with poor execution, unclear content strategy, and underinvestment in quality content.
