Ashley Faus, Sr. Manager, Integrated Media - Atlassian

My name is Ashley Faus, and I'm the Senior Manager of Integrated Media for Atlassian. So Atlassian is a collaboration software maker, so we do things to help improve teamwork and project management and productivity. Our main tools are Jira, Confluence, and Trello. And we've got a booth actually downstairs showing people how they can really work for project management and productivity. Video is the next big thing in marketing, and I know people have been saying that for years, but I think that social video and live video in particular are going to be huge over the next couple years. So Facebook Live, for example, gets six times the engagement of natively uploaded videos. LinkedIn recently came out with their LinkedIn Live Beta program to really improve that connectivity with the community. And I think that's the big thing is just having that personal connection with the people who are watching. It's so much more engaging than just a static post or something that goes to a link. It doesn't give you that two-way engagement the way that video does. So Atlassian uses video in a number of different ways. We've recently rolled out a whole new YouTube strategy. We're working with our Agile Coach series and a demo den series for our flagship product, Jira. And so we do that in a couple of ways. For the Agile Coach series, it's broken down into a series of videos talking about different ways to use Kanban boards or Scrum or Agile methodologies. And they're just short videos that tackle one specific piece of the problem. And so depending on where you are in your Agile journey, you can engage in different ways. And then those link off to an Agile microsite that talks about all of the Agile manifesto, all of the ways that the Agile methodologies have changed. And then it gives you a really nice back and forth if you want to read the content or view the videos. And you can go at different depths. And then we also have our demo den series, and that's paired with an Ask Me Anything in our community. So an engineer will sit down. They'll do a demo of a specific feature of a product. And then for the next 24 to 48 hours, they'll be in the community to answer questions. And the nice thing about that is that it gives other people the opportunity to come in and say, hey, I have these tips or I have these tricks or I have these questions. And that thread lives on. So it gives that chance for people to engage over a long period of time. And I think that's one of the biggest things with how we've shifted our YouTube strategy, again, to be more engaging and to give people the opportunity to ask more questions and have a conversation instead of just saying, hey, watch this one video and then there's nothing for you to go on to. Right. We want to make sure that people can continue their journey with us. And then from a social media standpoint, we recently incorporated Facebook Live at our user conference earlier this year. So we've had an on demand live stream strategy for a while. This year we paired that with a Facebook Live strategy. So we were interviewing the different breakout speakers and the different keynote speakers about their content. And then within the description, we were able to link to either a full recording of their session or over to a piece of blog content or the agile micro site if they talked about those kinds of methodologies. And so it gave people who weren't at the conference the ability to gain insights from the presenters and engage with the content, whether they came to us from social media, came to us on the website or if they were actually at the conference, but they missed some of the sessions. At Last Scene actually takes a very different approach to Legion. So we don't really approach it from the traditional funnel. We talk a lot about having the flywheel and getting people involved and this bottoms up approach where somebody can come in. The pricing is transparent and they now have the ability to jump in with a free trial and see how things go. And as it works for their team, then they can expand and use more of the products or use more of the features. And that's worked really well for us. We've now started to expand that conversation to, you know, additional products. Like if you started with us in JIRA, a lot of people then move on to Confluence or then also add Trello to their stack, just depending on what their team needs. We also have Bitbucket for code repositories. You can use JIRA from a project management standpoint and then Bitbucket from a repository standpoint. So we give people the option to use a number of different products at a number of different points in their journey. The other thing that we do is we think about it kind of more in a content playground instead of a content funnel. So traditionally the funnel says you need to bring people in and you work them through these very specific levels and the whole goal is to drive them to a purchase. Instead, we think about it as people can enter and exit as they please. They can explore in whatever order they need to explore. They can go in the journey in whatever way makes sense for them. And that's how we kind of build that flywheel is we make the content available. We make the products available. We make the pricing available. And we let you choose instead of us saying there's only one way for you to come and engage with us. Video is a huge piece of the content playground. Again, the goal is to make it as engaging as possible and as delightful as possible. And we also want to build that relationship over the long run. And so that's much easier to do with video content. It gives us the ability to talk with people directly via live video on social. It gives people the ability to kind of look at us in the eye and really put a face on the brand and the company more so than what we can do in writing. So obviously we have a strong voice and tone in our written content, but it comes through so much more when you can put someone on video and particularly for something like the agile coach series where there's only two or three presenters. And so in some cases, they're kind of representing different mentalities about some of the tools used in agile methodology. And so you can almost say like, oh, I want to join Team Ashley or, oh, I want to join, you know, Team J instead of thinking that, you know, I'm just going to engage with it lastly. And it's like, no, no, I can now put a face to this content and to these concepts. So video is huge for us. I know a lot of our other product marketers are going to be using video a lot more in the next year. So doing things like webinars, doing things like demos, having some office hours and really trying to experiment with the ways that we create content, particularly with continuous development and iterative content. You know, it's really hard to keep your demos up to date if you're constantly releasing new features. And so figuring out that balance of, you know, practical application and showing people how to use the product and what's changed with the production quality and making sure that, you know, you have the correct screenshots and that the audio is good. It's a hard balance to strike. And I think it's great that there's a lot of new tools coming out both from a social standpoint and from an on demand standpoint to help bridge that gap. The nice thing about all of the social media video, obviously on demand for YouTube, there's really rich analytics. And now all of the social video is starting to bring that level of granularity into their platforms as well. So when we produce live videos or use Facebook Live or something like that, we look at a bunch of different metrics. So we look at the reach. We found that the reach is significantly higher than native uploads. And then we also look at the retention time and the average watch time. And so right now we're finding that that content has about the same average watch time as the native videos. So we're really experimenting with how do we engage those people both while they're watching live and from an on demand standpoint so that we can increase that average retention and that average watch time. We also use video outside of kind of the social media or event based video. We do include a number of videos on our landing pages. We also have explainer videos. We use it in our social media advertising and in our ads in general, like to basically say, hey, the new JIRA is here. We created a video for that. We also have done some content around open. So that's a huge piece of our kind of thought leadership and the way we think about work. We believe that you should work in an open way. So that's having more communication. That's having context. That's having transparency and trust with your team. So recently we did an entire series for YouTube and for social media. And then it also went on a landing page sharing these stories of people who are working in an open way. And it had nothing to do with products. It had nothing to do with, you know, the way that we work specifically and more just around this idea of how other people are collaborating and finding those intersections to trust each other, collaborate, give feedback. And so that gets used in a variety of different ways. Like I say, sometimes those videos live on a landing page. We did send those out as part of our newsletter to all of our followers. And then we've included some snippets of those on social media as well. So the platforms are really greedy. They want you to stay in their feed. They don't want you to go off to another place. So when we think about adding video, whether that's on social media, whether that's on YouTube, we want to make sure that we're putting it in a variety of places. That's two reasons. One is because the platforms want you to stay there. So YouTube is obviously enticed to keep people on YouTube and keep showing them those videos. They don't want them to go over to your landing page because then they leave YouTube. So we want to make sure that we're providing that content across a variety of different feeds and a full journey in the feed so that people will stay with our story and not just stay on the platform. The other reason is that we know people are hanging out in a lot of different places. They may not come to us from a landing page. They may come to us on YouTube or they may come to us on a social media channel or they may come to us. They may have subscribed to our email newsletter and just want to consume content that way. And so when we think about putting video in the place where our audience is spending time and where our audience wants to have that conversation, it's our job as marketers to go where they are. We can't keep insisting that they come to us. Like the build it and they will come strategy doesn't work. We have to go and be ambassadors to them. We have to go and have that conversation where they want to talk. The buyer journey has been changing for decades now. And we have kind of always known that this linear funnel, the traditional way that we all understand the buyer's journey doesn't work. Like if you think about, oh, I'm hungry, you don't sit down and go, OK, let me map out what kind of food do I want? I want a healthy food or I want a burger. OK, now I've decided to go the healthy route. Let me find a salad. Nobody thinks that they basically like, I'm kind of hungry. Oh, there's actually coffee. Oh, maybe I'll go see a movie. Wait, but I'm still hungry. OK, but I can get popcorn for a snack. So when you think about how we do that for such a small decision about what we're going to eat and we do that all the time, why would we think that it's not more complicated when we're going to go spend, you know, fifty, a hundred, two hundred fifty thousand dollars on tools or products that are going to stay with us and be rolled out to hundreds or thousands of users? So we've always kind of known that that traditional funnel doesn't really work because that's not how humans behave. So whenever we think about, OK, how should we approach that funnel? That's why we're thinking about the flywheel model. That's why we're thinking about something like a playground where it meets people where they are and it gives people the opportunity to travel that journey in a way that's more human. And so as we think about what's happening in the future of marketing, people are more connected. They have their personal devices. They have more channels than ever. They have the entire Internet, which is literally all the world's knowledge at their fingertips. Why are they coming to you to ask these questions? What are you specifically providing that's better than all the noise that they could engage with? And so particularly from a video standpoint, as we do more with, you know, things like VR, for example, or a second screen experience where I can hold things up to a QR code or I could hold things up to, you know, an image that's on the screen. And that pops out to an additional piece of content that delights me or, you know, things like projection mapping. For example, I've seen some of those where it's like, oh, it's just lights on a cube. And it's like, well, that's okay versus some of the projection mapping that's happening on like museums, for example. And, you know, it shatters it and it recreates a historic event or historic fire that happened at that museum. That's so powerful because it brings the users in so much more than what they could just Google. And so as we think about how to engage people with video in this new buyer's journey where they have all the options, they are informed. What's the unique thing that I'm going to provide to them to enhance their experience, not just add to the noise that they're already experiencing?