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Brighttail provides outsourced growth marketing solution for an Atlassian app vendor
Ricksoft
Marketing Strategy, Brand Development, Content Marketing, Creative Design, Go-to-market Campaign, SEO, Web Experience
Brighttail has delivered consistent results in the last 4 years, and they almost always exceed our expectations. One of the biggest perks of leveraging Brighttail’s marketing capabilities is it has allowed us to completely focus on product development.
Founded in 2016 in California, Ricksoft is an Atlassian Platinum Marketplace Partner specializing in Jira and Confluence project management apps. In 2018, Ricksoft’s CEO Sean Osawa was facing declining website traffic and evaluations for the company’s flagship product, WBS Gantt-Chart for Jira. He partnered with Brighttail to dramatically increase traffic and evaluations for Ricksoft’s app, thus strengthening its market positioning. More importantly, this success enabled the company to grow its product portfolio by launching six other solutions in the Atlassian Marketplace.
The Atlassian Marketplace gives app developers a one-stop solution for publishing, selling, and marketing their apps. However, it offers extremely limited marketing capabilities, leaving vendors reliant on organic traffic and paid ads.
Ricksoft entered the Atlassian Marketplace with WBS Gantt-chart for Jira, a comprehensive Gantt chart tool for Jira project managers. In the beginning, the app managed to gain traction because only a handful of vendors were occupying the space. However, as the Marketplace became more saturated and competitive, it was harder to stay afloat.
To top it off, Ricksoft, at the time, was solely managed by Sean Osawa with limited staff. He was running limited paid campaigns and relied almost exclusively on organic traffic. Scaling was almost impossible due to the lack of capacity, which eventually caused traffic to flatline.
Osawa needed a strategy that would not only boost app evaluations, but also provide a sustainable, predictable solution for customer acquisition and business growth. He engaged Brighttail after being introduced by another client of ours, Communardo, which had already seen impressive results from our marketing programs.
After completing a full-funnel audit of Ricksoft and its competitors, we identified the company’s biggest challenge: Its top competitor had doubled down on digital marketing, enabling it to leapfrog Ricksoft in search engine rankings. Over time, this had resulted in a massive decline in Ricksoft’s traffic and evaluations.
In order to compete, Ricksoft needed to take its marketing outside of the Atlassian Marketplace and build a comprehensive digital market program.
The first step was to regain rank for Ricksoft’s most valuable keywords. Our SEO audit revealed that we faced tough competition. So, we anchored our SEO strategy around pillar pages (also known as topic clusters). These gave us a leg up on the competition, which relied solely on short-form blog posts.
After resolving the decline in traffic, we turned our attention to building a predictable and sustainable digital marketing funnel, customized to the unique buying journey of Atlassian customers. Understanding that B2B buyers often evaluate multiple solutions over weeks or more, we needed a way to ensure that Ricksoft remained top of mind from initial investigation, through evaluation, to the ultimate purchase decision.
We started by deploying new marketing technology infrastructure to automate the buyer’s journey, enhance our targeting capabilities, and provide access to robust performance data. With this in place, we built an inbound marketing program with high-value content that aligned with the needs of Ricksoft’s target audiences. This was key in building brand awareness and helping move target audiences down the marketing funnel.
We also launched lead generation campaigns using Google, LinkedIn, and Facebook to reach new audiences, increase website traffic, and effectively convert it into leads. The new automation infrastructure then enabled us to nurture these leads, driving them to the Marketplace listing for evaluation and purchase.
In the words of Osawa, “Brighttail did everything from A to Z.”
With Brighttail’s help, Ricksoft leaped ahead of its top competitor, dramatically increasing both website traffic and app evaluations. Our pillar page strategy immediately reversed the decline in search performance, resulting in 2,191% traffic growth for Ricksoft in just 6 months (see the SEMrush case study)
We renewed our contract after 6 months; upon seeing results that excelled well beyond my expectations – it was easy to decide to continue the relationship.Sean OsawaCEO of Ricksoft Inc.
We renewed our contract after 6 months; upon seeing results that excelled well beyond my expectations – it was easy to decide to continue the relationship.
This marked the beginning of a long and growing partnership.
Today, Ricksoft is a trusted authority in the Atlassian project management space. And its flagship product WBS Gantt-chart for Jira has been installed in over 6,500 instances.
On top of that, Osawa now has his own in-house marketing talent that manages the partnership between Brighttail and Ricksoft. Having finally found the predictable solution he needed to drive business growth, he was able to turn his attention to building more great apps.
Working with Brighttail has been a pleasure. Every area of marketing is covered. My role is just to help out with additional marketing activities and serve as a liaison between Brighttail and Ricksoft, Inc.Eric HuangMarketing Coordinator of Ricksoft Inc.
Working with Brighttail has been a pleasure. Every area of marketing is covered. My role is just to help out with additional marketing activities and serve as a liaison between Brighttail and Ricksoft, Inc.
Under Osawa’s leadership, Ricksoft has expanded its product portfolio and launched six other solutions in the Atlassian Marketplace. In fact, a new app is released almost every quarter.
Our teams continue to work closely together to bring these new products to market and drive the ongoing growth of the business.
Brighttail has delivered consistent results in the last 4 years, and they almost always exceed our expectations. One of the biggest perks of leveraging Brighttail’s marketing capabilities is it has allowed us to completely focus on product development. The way we see it, there’s no reason not to invest even further into the partnership. While the agency can work autonomously, they are also very attuned to our needs and thoroughly understand our business priorities – which to us, is the most valuable aspect of this partnership.”
Creative Design
Seneca Gan, Yan Xin Tan, Pidal
Performance Marketing
Macy Yap, Leshea Low
Web Development
Allison Beh, Janvi Reddy
Copywriting
Mark Jensen
SEO & Content
Samuel Phua, Thula Tamilchelvan, Adlina Rahim
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Learn how to win out-of-market buyers with our new book—Buystander Personas.
Learn how to win out-of-market buyers with our new book—Buystander Personas.