Anatomy of an agile campaign

Back in another day and time, I wrote a blog post about transparency in marketing. This post today is about authenticity, and how Atlassian created a campaign that focuses on the user experience rather than the marketing message.

One of the several announcements Atlassian made at its first ever worldwide user conference was the launch of a new minisite, Agile @ Atlassian. While we were not Agile subject-matter experts, we could provide some important insights into our own understanding of Agile. That’s an important distinction, because it guided our decision on how to produce a campaign. There’s an excellent TED talk by Joseph Pine on creating an authentic voice in marketing. Our campaign was based on creating this type of authentic talk based on our experiences rather than on marketing messages.

A site is born.

Atlassian’s developers have been doing agile for 7 years, and many of our customers do as well using our developer tools. “Agile” in this context relates to how software developers engineer products. The Agile Manifesto and hundreds (thousands?) of agile evangelists are spreading the gospel that there’s an “enlightened” way to code.

Many people don’t know how to take advantage of Atlassian tools for agile software development. In fact, there’s a whole lot of agile developers that are searching for better ways and tools to make their team agile. Atlassian’s software was engineered more broadly to be used by any type of development, but they can be used for agile software development, and the mini-site provided a glimpse into how we take advantage of our own tools for agile.

Thus, Agile @ Atlassian was born. The campaign breaks down as follows:

• We spent a grand total of $1000 on the campaign and minisite — the money was spent on a professional videographer to tape our developers talking about how they do their jobs.
• The mini-site was designed and produced by our in-house design and web teams. The videos were edited and pimped out by an endlessly talented and creative developer on the marketing team.
• We included previously recorded customer webinars with S1 Corp and Replicate Tech that discuss how customers user our products for agile.
• Atlassian developers have been blogging about agile@atlassian, and an RSS feed of their blogs is included on the mini-site.
• New product descriptions were written to emphasize how our products can be used in an agile environment.
• To tie up all the loose pieces — videos, blogs, webinars — we design a brand for the agile@atlassian series that appears in the the blogs and anywhere agile is found on our website.
• We used the campaign as a platform to announce our latest agile project management offering, GreenHopper.

One Twitterer wrote:

“Listening to agile@Atlassian while working. I’m a huge Atlassian fan and this is a nice peak into their world.“

Since launching, the minisite has seen over 6,000 visits, with the average person viewing 5.63 pages on the site/visit. This is a short recap of the effort we put into the site, and I think it’s a very good template for other B2B marketers for creating similar campaigns, esp. those who dare to go from a marketing voice to an authentic one.