How to build an integrated content marketing engine for your SaaS platform with Ashley Faus

14C7608F_49 - Camille Trent - Content Logistics - Ashley Faus - Quotecard 3

Episode Summary

Integrated marketing is a strategy for delivering a unified message across all the marketing channels your brand uses. It lets businesses have a cohesive narrative about their brand and have a significant impact with their campaigns. And with an integrated marketing strategy, you can deliver mixed media messages or communicate in an independent voice. 

But marketing across multiple channels is also a challenge. The more you use, the more difficult it becomes to ensure message consistency. Given the complexity of digital marketing channels, integrated marketing usually requires focused planning and effort, and that’s where an integrated marketing strategy can be of great help. 

In this episode of Content Logistics, our host Camille Trent welcomes Ashley Faus, the director of Integrated Product Marketing at Atlassian. Ashley gets into the structuring of a marketing team and why it’s important not to separate the content and distribution parts from product marketing. Ashley and Camille discuss integrated marketing, the importance of shared goals for creating the right content strategy, and Ashley’s different roles.

Guest Profile

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Key Insights

Episode Highlights

Being Audience-focused in Different Marketing Roles

“The continuous thread is really on the audience focus. Where are they? What do they care about? What will resonate with them? And then, how do I tell those stories from the organizational perspective in a way that will resonate with that audience? And so, I got to cover a wide variety of different intents when I was sitting more on the comm side of the house and the integrated media side of the house; those intents were more of a trust or credibility intent. I want to build back affinity, relationship trust, and rapport with the audience; so, thinking more at the thought leadership or brand level. In my current role, the content strategy, and now, as the integrated product marketing role, it’s thinking about connecting from what would be traditionally called the top of the funnel, which I don’t ascribe to the funnel as we know; I’m like, ‘Nobody thinks that way. We need to build a playground where it’s all connected.’ But thinking about it, as we find people who are looking to learn about practices and learn about how tools can help them improve their ways of working, that starts to get into a learn intent and a buy intent from a product perspective. And so, that’s what I’m working on now.”

Shared Goals Help You Create the Right Content Strategy

“In my case, I’m responsible for more traditional content marketing goals around driving traffic from an SEO perspective, ranking from an SEO perspective, engagement impressions, click throughs from social media, open rates, and those things from email. However, I also work very closely with my counterparts to look at conversion rates. So that’s the first bridge — the conversion rates from, ‘Great, you brought in this traffic. Now, how many of those people sign up for a free trial, or click into the product tour, or sign up for the product?’ At that point, then, it gets handed over to a team that’s responsible for what we call that first-week metric. So, you’re not going to get people to stay in the product for months and years if you can’t even get them to stay in the first week. And so, as we think about — again, this is a bridge from a deliverable perspective — how do we empower those users to get some quick wins? So we have product guides for that; we have templates for that; we have onboarding information that’s public.”

Playground Versus Funnel

“When I think about the playground, the analogy I always give is like, ‘What’s the right way to play on the playground? Is it to go to the slides, then swing, then merry-go-round?’ No, you could go to the merry-go-round and then the slides, or you could skip the swings altogether. If you watch kids play on a playground, they go up the slide, not down the slide; they are just digging in the dirt. You’ve got this huge playground for them, and they’re over here digging in the dirt. When we apply that to our audience, we start to realize that we have to make this a smart journey. We have to enable them to go in whatever order they want.”