AMA: Atlassian Head of Lifecycle Marketing, Portfolio, Ashley Faus on Product Marketing / Demand Gen Alignment

Depending on the size of the launch, we have multiple teams involved, not just Product Marketing and Demand-Gen. I'll also note that Product Marketing and Demand-Gen teams SHOULD be working closely together, all the time. Both teams should be contributing to the short- and long-term success of product sales, and a launch is just one moment in time.For example, for a Tier 1 launch, which means that it's an important launch, receiving lots of marketing support, we break down the following:For up t ...Read More

This answer differs, depending on the size and structure of the organization.However, there's some common themes, including:- Product Marketing should be the experts in the product, audiences, and messaging. They should be able to articulate WHO we should be talking to, and WHAT we should be talking about that will resonate with those people.- Demand-gen and growth teams should be experts in reaching relevant audiences. This means that they know WHERE we should be talking, and HOW to talk in eac ...Read More

For folks who are unfamiliar, here's a short note on some key elements of the Content Playground framework:- The traditional funnel struggles to capture the full buyer's journey, since it only starts when the marketing team recognizes that someone is on a journey. Most people are NOT in the market to buy, and they do a lot of their research before they raise their hand to show that they're buying.- Thus, we need to stop mapping content to the traditional phases (awareness, consideration, and dec ...Read More

We have a dedicated ABM team, but they partner with the Product Marketing team when they need specific proof-points related to a persona, vertical, or pain-point within an account. They create personalized landing pages, host curated events like roundtables, and go on-site for larger customers. They have much more niche segmentation for their digital campaigns. In contrast, traditional marketing is more scalable and created for a bigger target audience. Our Product Marketing and Customer Lifecyc ...Read More

The biggest key is alignment on priorities and goals. We can't run a campaign for every single feature update or asset, particularly if we have a large portfolio of products.So, we need to know which product(s) are the priority for each quarter, half, or year. And we need to know which goals are most important for those products.If we're announcing a brand new product, awareness might be the biggest goal, and we might have a larger budget to put into paid media, since we're trying to drive a net ...Read More

This varies widely by company, org structure, and maturity.When I worked for smaller start-ups, we only had 2 dedicated marketers: me (generalist) and my VP (also a generalist, but she was running sales as well!).In that case, I had to divide my time by priorities for the business. This was determined as part of quarterly planning and product launches. If we had a product launch, then that quarter was dedicated to building the materials for the launch, and promoting the new product. In quarters ...Read More