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
- Name: Ashley Faus
- What she does: Ashley Faus is the Director of Integrated Product Marketing at Atlassian.
- Company: Atlassian
- Noteworthy: Ashley works for Atlassian, a collaborative software maker on a mission to unleash the power of every team. Ashley has handled all aspects of marketing strategy and execution, from social media to content and editorial to demand-gen and events. Her work has been featured in TIME, Forbes, The Journal of Brand Strategy, and MarketingProfs, and she's shared insights with audiences of Harvard Business Review, INBOUND, and MarketingProfs. Ashley is a marketer, writer, and speaker by day, and a singer, actor, and fitness fiend by night.
Key Insights
- Product marketers should not be focused on a single product. Product marketing is a subsection of marketing that focuses on the product. What a product marketing team will look like, in terms of numbers and roles, varies from company to company, industry to industry. Companies structure their marketing teams differently, and Ashley points out that the biggest mistake people make when they put together product marketing teams is having all the product marketers focus on a single product. "In a larger organization like ours, where we have a portfolio of products, where we're looking to upsell, or we're looking to cross-sell into more of that solution mindset, or across multiple products, having individuals so completely focused on just their product — and that goes for the goals, that goes for the channels that they use, that goes for all of the campaigns that they run, where everything is singularly focused on their product — it makes it really hard when you are ready to move upmarket, start talking about being more of a platform, start selling from more of a solution mindset."
- Do not separate the content and distribution pieces from product marketing. Content creation is the process of generating ideas about topics that appeal to your buyer persona, creating written or visual content around those ideas, and making the information accessible to your audience in the form of a blog, video, or other formats. According to Ashley, most product marketers at Atlassian have a strong skill set in content creation, which includes long-form content, distribution skills around email, ads, social media, community building, and events. However, in other companies, content and marketing work completely separately, which is not good. "They don't have shared goals, they don't have shared language, and they don't have shared plans. This is why I get so frustrated about the funnel. There's this, like, 'Content is top of the funnel, and then product marketing is middle of the funnel, and then sales is bottom of the funnel.' And I'm like, 'Why do you not have all your people talking and planning and sharing their goals to create a journey that is holistic for the audience?'"
- In integrated marketing, several departments are involved. Product content integration is an overarching term that describes all efforts to import, integrate, or merge product data and content from discrete sources into one centralized overview or information file. Ashley says that Atlassian is focused on being integrated across their channels and ensuring they're not just siloed into one channel where you're doing your own thing because the audience can feel that. "For example, we just launched Global Issue Create in Jira software. This has been something that was a highly requested feature from our customers. So one, it pulls in that customer insight. Then, our social media team worked with the product marketing team and with our PMs to craft a whole social series of posts that went on their personal handles. So yes, the brand said, 'Hey, we've launched this feature,' but the PMs who worked on it were able to put their spin on it and say, 'As a product manager, I am proud to ship this,’ or ‘As a product manager, one of my favorite things of turning customer content or customer request into reality is this. And here's an example.'"
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.”