AMA: Atlassian Director of Integrated Product Marketing, Ashley Faus on Messaging

If you speak the language of your audience, they will be engaged! I think it's a myth that technical topics are "boring" or "dry". These topics are VERY interesting to your technical audience, so mirroring their language on these topics is key. A few tips to help: * Be specific. For example, I market to developers, so there's high overlap with interest in video games. The phrase "Level Up!" comes up as a marketing suggestion often. But what does "level up" actually mean? If you talk about leveling up a character in a video game, the game matters, which release of the video game matters, which character matters, and which spells/weapons/damage/visibility/etc. "level up" unlocks matters! Simply saying "level up" doesn't signal to the audience that you genuinely understand why they're trying to achieve by moving to the next level. * Quantify the impact. How much faster or more efficient? How many minutes or hours saved? What's the ROI? How many breaches prevented? It's not enough to say, "Ship faster" or "better performance". Most technical folks like to see the hard data, so quantifying the impact piques their interest. * Be concise. Sometimes marketers get into a narrative or prose mindset. We want to write a long story, describing each character, creating metaphors, and repeating the same information in slightly different ways. NO. Technical audiences want you to get to the point! Long-form copy or extended narratives tend to signal "created by a marketer" to this audience, so trim, trim, trim and share the core message.

You should have different types of messaging: - Overarching brand message - Product messaging - Campaign/event/launch messaging This^^ allows you to adapt to market and customer changes without scrambling or pivoting so often that your audience can't remember what you do. Too many teams try to create a single message house, meant to cover all use cases. But having messages tailored for the audience, offering, and time horizon helps you strike this balance. I'd say the overarching brand message and product message can go through the annual refresh and alignment process, while the campaign/event/launch messaging goes through a quarterly or half refresh, based on the timing of the relevant event. If there's a market-moving change, then you can revisit the brand or product messaging before the annual refresh.

Step 1: Create a DACI DACI stands for: Driver Approver Contributor Informed You can grab a free template: https://www.atlassian.com/team-playbook/plays/daci The Driver is responsible for making sure all stakeholders are aware of what’s happening, gathering information, getting questions answered and action items completed. The Approver is the one person who has the final say in approving the decision. The Contributors are people who have knowledge that will inform the decision-making process. The Informed are people and teams who may need to change their work as a result of the decision made and will need to know the outcome. If there's a hierarchy of approvers, that should be noted as part of the DACI and the overall review timeline. Build in review milestones for each relevant decision-maker, and note the type of feedback you're seeking from them. For example, the final approver might just give it a check that it's good to go, while earlier approvers might give feedback on nitty gritty grammar or word choice.

First, messaging shouldn't be so focused on features. It should be about the unique value you provide to your customers. While features ARE part of that value, they're not the ONLY thing that adds value. This is particularly true in a saturated market with feature parity. A few additional differentiators that you might consider: * Integrations with other owned products and/or lots of integrations with industry-leading products that your prospects likely have in their tech stack already * Ease of onboarding/roll-out/setup, particularly if you're in a space that's known to be more complex * Benefits like ROI, time savings, accuracy, etc.