Atlassian, the software company behind work management products such as Jira, Trello, and Confluence, had a blog that covered products, updates, and news going back to its founding in 2002. In February 2019, it launched its brand publication, Work Life. The redesign and content strategy pivot started when the Atlassian blog editors experimented with high-level teamwork content as a way to attract and support a wider audience. Now Natalie Mendes, Senior Content Marketing Manager, runs the day-to-day editorial operations as Work Life’s Managing Editor. Her “small and scrappy” team are working to scale up and optimize production to meet the tremendous traffic growth they’ve seen since the launch, and Work Life recently won Best B2B Branded Content Site from the Digiday Content Marketing Awards.
Did you lead the redesign and strategy pivot?
I was at the helm of it, but I had a lot of support from my team. The three of us had been editors across our product content on the blog. We have 13 products at Atlassian, so we were very busy, but we formulated a hypothesis: “If we talk about bigger topics around teamwork and productivity that are related to our products but not overtly selling them, we can bring in new customers to the company.”
We chose to talk about teamwork and how to work well among teams, because Atlassian’s company mission is to unleash the potential of every team. It’s a very lofty mission, but we believe that the way you work and the people you work with are just as important as the tools and software you use.
So we were writing about effective teamwork in our free time and we were discovering really great results. We were seeing higher traffic numbers on average to these types of stories, and attracting a whole new audience. Getting that information really armed us to be able to make a big pivot in our content strategy, which included our redesign.
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