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Top 5 Lessons from Brighttail’s Ignite 2024 That Will Improve Your Atlassian Marketplace Marketing

The Atlassian Marketplace is a crowded ecosystem boasting over 5,700 apps and integrations. Improving your Atlassian Marketplace marketing and building on your demand creation strategy requires continuous learning and adaptation.

In September 2024, Brighttail hosted Ignite: The Marketplace Growth Conference – a virtual conference featuring 11 engaging tracks focused on branding, community engagement, demand creation, growth marketing, and solution selling. The tracks showcased Atlassian Marketplace marketing leaders from companies such as Kolekti, Adaptavist, Elements, Seibert Media, and Tempo.

By bringing together industry leaders, successful partners, and marketing professionals, the conference aimed to spark new ideas, foster collaboration, and inspire partners to elevate their Marketplace presence and drive long-term success. Below are some of the valuable lessons the panel of experts shared:

1. Stand out in the Atlassian’s Marketplace

Good branding techniques can set you apart from your sea of competitors and ensure your Atlassian Marketplace marketing efforts are not in vain. Strong branding is integral to effective growth marketing for SaaS. A strong brand establishes trust, influences perceived value, and helps with cross-selling. 

Building a strong brand, however, demands you to consistently communicate your unique selling proposition (USP) to your audience by identifying your target audience, focusing on how your product benefits them, and testing how your USP resonates with them.

Equally important is ensuring you are constantly keeping checks on how your target audience evolves and how you need to adapt to those changes. Combining good branding techniques and products that perform well ensures long-term success for your app.

A graphic in red and white featuring the text "Defining and Communicating Your Unique Selling Proposition -- understand your target audience and market, highlight customer benefits over features, and test your USPs with your audience.
During her presentation, Elements Chief Strategy Officer Julie d’Antin highlighted three steps to communicating your USPs – understanding your target audience and market, highlighting customer benefits over features, and testing your USPs with your audience.

Actionable Steps:

  • Invest in branding to build creditability as well as differentiate your app from your competitors. Make sure you balance keeping up with trends and the pursuit of uniqueness.
  • Combine your branding efforts with performance-based strategies that highlight how your product can not only solve your customers’ problems but also improve their experience.
  • Prioritize strong brand messaging while delivering exceptional product quality. Ensuring your product is of quality and delivers what you promise helps lift your brand in the eye of the customer.
  • Keep a consistent brand throughout your range of products to help with cross-selling. If existing customers have had good experiences with one of your products, they will be more willing to try others.

2. Leverage Data for Growth

The ability to effectively capture, analyze, and act on data is what separates successful Atlassian Marketplace marketing efforts from those that fall flat.

Data being crucial to your growth marketing strategy may not be news. However, the abundance of data at hand is usually overwhelming. Being able to make sense of the data and focusing on what is important will help you personalize your marketing decisions to best drive engagement and conversions, as well as highlight growth opportunities within the Atlassian Marketplace.

Actionable Steps:

  • Identify what matters most to you – your North Star metric. Your North Star metric is what best represents and aligns with your marketing goals.
  • Use data insights to create personalized marketing strategies. Marketers have a wide array of tools and avenues at their disposal, being able to personalize a marketing strategy will ensure that you’re spending time, money, and energy on what works and optimizing your campaigns, channels, and user experiences.
A pyramid illustration featuring the phrase "applying this frame of thinking" to emphasize strategic marketing focus.
During her presentation, Brighttail’s Director of Strategy Leshea Low explained that the North Star metric helps focus your marketing efforts.
  • Continuously analyze and refine marketing tactics based on performance metrics. Zoom out and in on the data to get a full picture of whether your efforts are bearing fruit. 
  • Zooming out gives you a high-level view of your performance. This broader perspective is crucial for identifying overarching trends in marketing efforts and shows whether your performance metrics are moving in the right direction.
  • However, it only tells you part of the story. To understand the root cause of these trends, you need to zoom in. Dive into the granular details of your data so you can identify precise areas for optimizations and make more targeted optimizations.
    • Keep in mind that marketing performance can be influenced by multiple factors including seasonality, market dynamics, and changes within the digital landscape. Always consider the context in which the data presents itself.

3. Look Beyond Traditional Audiences

Research from the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute for Marketing Science found that only 5% of active buyers are in the market. This means 95% of the market is either unaware of your app or they’re resistant to change. Brighttail’s Founder Matthew Lewsadder calls this phenomenon The Bystander Opportunity.

It would be a grave mistake to not realize the opportunity this other 95% presents to your SaaS growth strategy. Ensure your demand creation marketing efforts revolve around attracting these “bystanders”.

Actionable steps:

  • Build insights into existing audiences. Find out why non-buyers are stuck in the existing status quo and how you can change that.
  • Develop creative campaigns to engage audiences and introduce them to your solutions. Consider creating a “Why Change Now Story” in which you craft a strategic narrative that raises the stakes and creates urgency.
Matthew Lewsadder discusses strategies for vendors to craft a compelling "Why Change Now Story" during his presentation
During his presentation, Brighttail’s Founder Matthew Lewsadder highlighted how vendors could build a “Why Change Now Story” to engage non-buyers.
  • Focus on thought leadership content to generate awareness and build credibility. Getting non-buyers out of their status quo necessitates that you give them a new understanding of what their world currently looks like and how it can be better, and you need to be convincing!

4. Tell a story

The Atlassian Marketplace is a competitive ecosystem. With thousands of app vendors vying for attention, you need to be able to cut through that noise. Storytelling can help you achieve this because it humanizes your brand, making it relatable and memorable. 

The Huffington Post Co-Founder and Thrive Global Founder Arianna Huffington said it best when she said “People think in stories, not statistics.” People – your audience included – are probably not going to relate to nor remember how many users signed on to your app last year, but if you’re able to tell a compelling story about how your app solved those users’ problems, well then that’s the kind of stuff that sticks!  

A good narrative evokes emotion and is therefore memorable, making it integral to any serious plan for Atlassian marketplace marketing strategies.

Actionable steps:

  • Craft compelling narratives that align with your product’s value and customer pain points. First, understand your audience’s challenges then create a narrative that highlights your unique value proposition to address those challenges.
  • Use customer success stories and testimonials to illustrate the impact of your solution. Highlighting user experiences and success stories makes your story relatable to your audience.
  • Integrate storytelling across marketing channels. Tailor content to fit the format and audience of each channel including blogs, social media posts, videos, and presentations, but always maintain a unified brand voice and message.
Kolekti's Tim Sadler highlights storytelling techniques' significance in marketing during his insightful presentation.
During his presentation, Kolekti Product Marketing Lead Tim Sadler pointed out the power of storytelling techniques.

5. Collaborate Within the Atlassian’s Ecosystem

In 2023, the Atlassian community featured 3.3 million members, 5 million unique views every month, and 70,000 new posts, questions, and articles per year. That number is still growing.

On one hand, this emphasizes just how competitive the ecosystem is. On the other, it also presents an opportunity! Collaborations within the Atlassian ecosystem fuel innovation and growth, giving you valuable insights into how to improve your Atlassian Marketplace marketing strategies.

Did you know that Atlassian Marketplace is 50% partner-driven? Some market partners are at about 70% solution partner-driven. Solution partners are their salesforce. It’s imperative you know how these partners work. Salesforce said 70% of their installations globally are done by partners. If you don’t understand how your Solution partners work, then you’re not bringing anything to your partners.

Despite the vastness of the Marketplace, do not underestimate the power of one-to-one community engagements. These engagements can lead to strong one-to-one relationships generating word-of-mouth promotions. These relationships also have the potential to grow exponentially. Ultimately, beginning with one-to-one community engagements can lead you to build more profit for your business or help you improve.

2. Visual representation of one-to-one community engagement, emphasizing how personal connections drive profit and improvement.
During his presentation, Accoil Analytics Co-Founder and Co-CEO Peter Preston pointed out how one-to-one relationships eventually lead to profit or improvement.

Actionable steps:

  • Build strong relationships with Atlassian Solution Partners to expand
    your reach and sales force. The Marketplace is about 50% Solution Partner-driven. It is imperative that you know how they work.
  • Actively engage with the Atlassian Community to foster collaboration
    and gain insights into customer needs. According to Higher Logic, 68% of branded communities say the community helped create new leads, 66% say the community has had an impact on customer retention and 55% say the community contributed to an increase in sales.
  • Participate in diverse communities to discover innovative ideas and
    stay ahead of market trends. Attending community events gives you access to many different perspectives and new ideas that you wouldn’t otherwise have if you were in a silo.

Maximizing Your Atlassian Marketplace Marketing Efforts

Whether it be branding, community engagement, demand creation, growth marketing, or solution selling for your SaaS growth strategy, utilizing these lessons will ensure that you’re maximizing your Atlassian Marketplace marketing strategies.

The information shared here is just the tip of the iceberg of knowledge that the expert panel shared during Ignite: The Marketplace Growth Conference. Check out the full sessions here!

Make sure you don’t miss out on the valuable insights you can gain on how to improve your Atlassian Marketplace marketing strategies coming at Ignite 2025. See you there!