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Breaking Through Barriers: 4 Ways to Position Your Atlassian Products for Regulated Markets

Breaking through to regulated industries is a fruitful way to ensure the success of your Marketplace products. Not only do regulated industries tend to stick to the products they trust and are used to, making renewal a high possibility – but they also carry with them a strong reputation. Showing others that you’ve been able to work with a regulated industry proves that your app is trustworthy. 

The task at hand, however, is not an easy one.

During Brighttail’s Ignite: The Marketplace Growth Conference last year, SoftComply Head of Growth, Monika Isak spoke in depth about reaching regulated industries in the Atlassian Marketplace ecosystem. Below are some of the key lessons and strategies she shared during her presentation.

#1 Gain Deep Insight About Your Audience

Regulated industries are controlled by strict rules and regulations which ensure the safety, quality, and efficacy of their products and services. This is exactly why breaking through to a regulated industry helps to build trust and why regulated industries will likely stick to your app if it’s getting the job done. This opportunity, however, is also what makes breaking through challenging.

Carrying out industry-specific marketing techniques for regulated industries requires you to have a deep understanding of the people in these industries, only then will you be able to build a go-to-market strategy that hits the mark. 

Once you know your target audience’s needs and concerns, you can then build and improve your app to solve their problems. 

Isak noted in her presentation that SoftComplay first built its risk management products targeting medical startups. Only after it built the product, did it go to its potential customers and get feedback from them. 

Instead of improving its existing product based on that feedback, it built a completely new product, leaving the company with three different risk management products.

Pain Points

These industries are regulated because their businesses are critical such as aviation, fintech, healthcare, defense, IT service providers, and insurance providers. If you want to ensure your industry-specific marketing efforts are successful, identifying their pain points is crucial. 

One such pain point to be mindful of is the cost of time. Businesses in these industries do not have much time to spare and this is particularly a concern in terms of onboarding. Therefore, the solution you pitch must be easy for them to learn. 

Another pain point is disconnected data. These businesses tend to have a sense of bureaucracy and this causes a lot of disconnect between how different teams and departments work. Solving this issue may not always be achievable, but what you can do is find a way to ensure that your app does not disrupt their working processes. 

Mapping the Customer Journey

Mapping the customer’s journey will help you tailor-fit your marketing for regulated industries. The map (an example) helps you identify which channels are best suited to getting your potential customers to choose your app. However, Isak notes that the theory behind the customer’s journey is very different from reality. 

This is what the customer’s journey looks like in theory:

How should a marketing journey look like in theory
This was taken from one of the slides shared during Monika Isak’s presentation.

In reality, however, there are several touchpoints within each step of the journey which will require time and effort towards convincing your potential customer before you can get any further.

Another example of a customer's journey as shown in reality, looking at all different stages
Monika Isak also shared a sample of what the customer’s journey could look like in reality.

Pro Tip: Isak said that in SoftComply’s case, the most important step to focus time, money and energy on was “awareness” and that “word of mouth” was the most fruitful channel.

#2 Build Awareness and Educate You Audience

SoftComply’s success in breaking through to regulated industries is not only inspiring, it proves that applying proper industry-specific marketing techniques to build awareness does not require a huge budget.

Working on a tight budget and without a sales team, SoftComply began building awareness by posting educational content online. The team also went to startup incubators, accelerators, and industry events to network and share their expertise through demonstrations. Isak noted that SoftComply is still working on sales revenue that they had at the very beginning.

Based on SoftComply’s experience, here are some of the things you should be incorporating into your go-to-market strategy to build awareness:

  • Position yourself as an expert in your field by writing blog posts that educate your audience.
  • Focus on good SEO practices so you are ranking at the top on search pages.
  • Leverage social media and LinkedIn because as a B2B player, this is where your customers will be.
  • Post on Atlassian Community. This will also help boost your SEO as the platform has a good authority score.
  • Showcase trust signals such as Atlassian badges, reviews, and ratings to prove that your company is trustworthy.

While building awareness, it is also important to maintain communication with your audience especially when engagement is highest such as during and after demos. 

Share YouTube videos or SEO-driven articles such as listicles or comparison articles with your potential customers. Also, consider having nurture email campaigns for a cost-effective way to build stronger relationships. Nurture emails tell your potential customers that they matter.

#3 Providing Compliance-Focused Solutions

As expected, these industries are bound by strict rules and regulations. This needs to be a key focus when coming up with a marketing plan for regulated industries. Here are some of the things you can do to boost the confidence of your target market:

  • Offer templates that simplify and complete compliance requirements in Jira and Confluence.
    • Teams in regulated industries undergo a lot of stress to make sure that their businesses are running under the strict regulations aforementioned. Offering templates adds value by making following compliance easier as well as reducing risk.
  • Position your products as solutions that meet both operational needs and regulatory standards.
    • Find out what makes your solution unique compared to the alternatives and show your potential customers how your product adds value.
  • Be Confluent! Confluence’s database has all the materials about your target market’s pains.
    • Going through the database is an easy way to gain insights into available data for your industry-specific marketing needs.

#4 Positioning Your Product Effectively

Identifying your differentiated value is integral to your product positioning strategy. Take a magnified look at your product, feature by feature, and identify how your solution differs from any others your potential customers could be looking at.

This is an outline on how to find your key differentiator
Monika Isak shared a sample outline of how to go about finding your key differentiator.

A thorough understanding of your potential customer’s pain points will help you zero in on what your product may be able to solve. If you can provide a solution that is more efficient than the software they are currently using, yet, doesn’t require a steep learning curve, then you may have solved a pain (operational efficiency) that perhaps other alternatives in the marketplace have not.

Wynter CEO Peep Laja said you should not do any marketing until you know the top three problems of your potential customers, the value of solving those problems, and the channels your potential customers use to learn more about your solution. 

Remember this advice when trying to craft the perfect product positioning strategy.

Key Takeaways

Knowing your audience, gaining their trust, and tailoring your solution to one that responds to their concerns regarding compliance will determine whether your industry-specific marketing efforts are successful.

This was just a snapshot of one of the sessions during Brighttail’s Ignite: The Marketplace Growth Conference. To dive deeper into how SoftComply managed to break the barrier into regulated industries, check out the full clip of this session on our On-Demand Session and schedule a consultation with us!

Don’t forget that Brighttail will be holding another virtual conference with more experts and valuable information this year! Make sure you don’t miss out on our coming announcement for Ignite 2025.