[00:00:00] Donny Dvorin: Yeah, no industry changes faster than modern marketing. Great marketers need an edge. Great marketers need to be brave. The brave marketer podcast provides an opportunity for each guest to share a story where they exhibited bravery by taking a risk. They made a dramatic impact in the market. Our guests are marketers from top brands and agencies who share the exact strategy.

[00:00:30] Tactics they used in their brief marketing moment. We then dive deep into topics like ethical advertising, consumer privacy, crypto marketing, brand safety, and navigating a future without third party cookies, hosted by brave software and me Donny. Head of sales outbreak together. We’ll get a backstage view of the brave marketing moments and creative mindset work that shaping today’s most influential [00:01:00] brands.

[00:01:02] Hello, brave marketing community. You’re listening to a new episode of the brave marketer podcast. And this one features Natalie Mendes. In this episode, we’re going to talk about Atlassian . Which is the parent company for JIRA and Trello. You may use some of those tools and we’re going to talk about emerging marketers.

[00:01:20] We’re going to talk about the blog, the awards that she won, the recent promotion that Natalie had, and really just dive deep into what are the benefits of content marketing? What are the benefits of blogging? Why is this so important in the B2B space. So if you’re a B2B marketer definitely tune in, but I think the theme is definitely appliable to B, to C as well.

[00:01:44] before we hop into today’s episode, we want to highlight our brief pick of the week. Every episode we choose a brand that has run an ad campaign with brave. And this week, we’re choosing one of our favorite clients. We shouldn’t say that, but we’re going to say it is each Horowitz because we speak to them every week.

[00:01:58] And they’ve been doing sponsored [00:02:00] images and push notifications for a while now, probably over a year. And they choose brave because their target market is very aligned with the brave users. Early adopters tech savvy into crypto and ITAR knew that a hundred percent of their advertising dollars with brave will be placed in front of people who had opted in and had an interest in their ad.

[00:02:17] we have a case study on our website@brave.com, then hit advertisers section and you’ll see their case study. and on a tear. So now in this week’s episode, you’re going to meet Natalie Mendez brand content team lead Atlassian .

[00:02:31] She has a background of journalism, PR and advertising. Natalie’s a full-stack content marketer who specializes in building brand centric, content marketing programs, and in her work at Atlassian where she is the brand content lead, her work has earned multiple awards and delights our customers every day.

[00:02:46] It with no further ado, here’s today’s episode of the brave marketer.

[00:02:55] Natalie. Welcome to the brave marketer podcast. How you doing?

[00:02:59] Natalie Mendes: [00:03:00] Hey, thanks for having me. I’m doing great and happy to be here.

[00:03:03] Donny Dvorin: So Natalie, before we get into the brave marketing moment, why don’t you just share for our listeners your exact role at Atlassian and what the company does?

[00:03:12] Natalie Mendes: Sure. So I’m the brand content team lead at Atlassian and Atlassian is actually a. Software company that launched out of Sydney, Australia. we’re about 20 years old. and we are super highly beloved in Australia, like the Google of Australia. but we’ve been gaining traction globally. We have offices across the world. we create software productivity, software to help teams work together better.

[00:03:41] We started with engineering teams. So you probably heard of JIRA. but we also have a ton of other products for non-technical teams like Trello and confluence. for more project management

[00:03:55] Donny Dvorin: I’ve used Trello in the past at a never stop marketing to [00:04:00] basically track. Articles that I saw that were interesting, that we wanted to put in our newsletter.

[00:04:04] I love the Trello extension, which I still have and still use. And I can’t think of a company recently that I’ve been at that doesn’t use JIRA. It seems just like the go-to for software people. That’s great. So as you know, the brave marketer is all about marketers sharing their brief moments.

[00:04:23] And so why don’t you take a few moments and share your story with us?

[00:04:27] Natalie Mendes: Yeah, so my story begins the day I decided to blow up the Atlassian blog which is the blog that I was hired to help create. but one day I was looking at the numbers and I was looking at our company trajectory and marketing mission and decided maybe we’re not really doing the right thing here.

[00:04:46] So we decided to make a change. it took some doing, it’s not as dramatic as we canceled the blog and shut it down, but we decided to change our direction. in a pretty dramatic way. the blog Atlassian had been [00:05:00] started by our founders. the company is 20 years old, so they wrote the first blog post announcing the birth of our product JIRA.

[00:05:08] and ever since then, it had been really a product focused blog, with our updates and new additions to our products coming out. When I joined, we were sort of at this point where growth on the blog was flat. We felt like weren’t getting the ROI that we wanted out of these product updates that we were publishing every day.

[00:05:27] And I took a look at what is our company mission and what do our readers really want from. And we pitched a new version of the blog, a new content strategy, where we would be talking about topics that mattered to our users and our readers. as opposed to just focusing on what was new in our products.

[00:05:45] Donny Dvorin: Talk to me about, did you have any fears or was there a risk along the way?

[00:05:49] Natalie Mendes: Yeah. pretty risky venture. When I joined this blog was supporting, the marketing efforts of a hundred person marketing team. And so to [00:06:00] shift, like this was like a real big change for the way a lot of people had been running their marketing campaigns.

[00:06:06] And there was this fear of, are we losing something? if we pivot in a new directionwill we still be able to deliver on our goals? And luckily. It’s been nothing but successful. ever since the pivot, the blog has grown 400%. we are delighting our readers and our users and we are bringing in sales with our new content strategy.

[00:06:28] So I’d say it was all worth it, but it definitely took some education and a real, just reframing of how do we use content for our marketing.

[00:06:39] Donny Dvorin: Yeah. What are the challenges with content marketing, as it’s not easily trucks to an ROI? you mentioned some sales are coming in. but how do you see the true benefit of the blog?

[00:06:49] Natalie Mendes: Yeah the blog is, a great top of funnel driver for us, blogs can rank for organic search terms really easily. We see it as the front door of our, [00:07:00] Atlassian marketing, especially from an organic search perspective. as we widen the net and we bring people in we sorta have this handoff that happens between.

[00:07:09] the top of funnel activities we’re doing on the blog and a deeper experience into product clicking in to see product tours and going down the funnelthat way

[00:07:20] Donny Dvorin: and you have tracking set up at each point or during the funnel.

[00:07:24] Natalie Mendes: Yeah, we do. We have a analytics team that is amazing. They can track every and anything.

[00:07:30] and so, yeah. A really good understanding of how people are coming through.

[00:07:33] Got it. Good. what else excites you about your role? since we made this pivot we’re seeing that brand content has become more important to the business. And it’s really interesting because what inspired this change in the first place?

[00:07:48] Was listening to the founders of atlassian in a town hall, which is one of our weekly all hands for the company. And they were talking about our company mission, which is to [00:08:00] unleash the potential of all teams. And as I sat there, listening to that mission statement, I just thought, wow, there’s so much we can do as a brand from a content perspective to help teams unleash their potential.

[00:08:14] So we have our blog, which is called worklife and it’s advice about leadership productivity working with teams. but we’ve also launched a podcast which is called team history. And it’s all about exploring the unknown. Heroes teams behind huge moments in history. So landing a man on the moon or photographing a black hole or exploring the IC SLOs in Antarctica.

[00:08:42] we’ve seen a lot of interest in the podcast. It’s just been. Honestly fun to explore so many different mediums for brand content and see a lot of great response coming in from that.

[00:08:53] Donny Dvorin: just recently got promoted, right? Yeah.

[00:08:55] Natalie Mendes: Yeah. I did.

[00:08:56] Donny Dvorin: So tell us about that.

[00:08:57] Natalie Mendes: Yeah. joined the company as an individual [00:09:00] contributor to work on the blog. And then as I explored these opportunities and launched a newly re-imagined content strategy we’ve been able to grow the team in alignment with that new mission.

[00:09:13] when I took this initiative I made this kind of brave move into a new type of content strategy to see my company support me and also bring on a team of really talented people who can make that vision come to life. And in many ways, much better than I could.

[00:09:31] If I were still the one writing all the blog posts and doing all of the editing and assigning of writers. It’s been great. good. So, you know,

[00:09:39] Donny Dvorin: outside of your company, what do you think is the biggest threat or the most pressing challenges facing the marketing advertising industry?

[00:09:46] Natalie Mendes: Yeah it’s gotta be our audience’s attention,

[00:09:49] people are very sensitive to advertising and marketing when they know when they’re being sold at. And they’re just getting so many messages flown in their face all the time. [00:10:00] So that is our biggest threat is losing our audience’s attention or not even gaining it in the first place because.

[00:10:06] We can’t demonstrate value to them in the content that we’re creating.

[00:10:11] Donny Dvorin: Yeah. there’s a lot of content out there. A lot of ads, a lot of everything. So everyone is screaming for those same, consumer’s attention. You’re absolutely right. And how about the biggest opportunity? What do you see as the biggest one?

[00:10:23] Natalie Mendes: Well, it would be the flip side of that, It would be knowing our audiences so well that we can create. Advertising campaigns or content campaigns that really meet their need. when we marketers are jaded and talk about how, it’s hard to get people’s attention.

[00:10:39] people have real needs, they want the products that we are selling or the services that we are selling. and when you can make that connection, the sales come in But the medium and the message is just so important.

[00:10:53] And I’ll give you an interesting example. during this year like most homeowners I’ve been working a lot on my [00:11:00] house and I’ve been building out my home office. And so I Googled something real quick. It was about this certain type of office installation I wanted at my home. And I came up with two results.

[00:11:12] they were both local. They were both specialized in what I wanted. And so I reached out and the first one made me sit through an hour long presentation about why choose them, why they are the highest quality, what the process would be, which was very long, by the way, because of pandemic timelines.

[00:11:33] And I was so frustrated because I already knew I wanted to hire them. I was highly motivated to make this office build-out happen, but I had to sit through an hour long presentation that I didn’t really need. And then by contrast the second company that I reached out to, they hopped on the phone with me and they said, Hey, what do you want to do?

[00:11:56] Let’s design it right here together. Let’s build it out. And [00:12:00] I walked away from that meeting with a design that I knew I could implement in my office. And guess which one I chose?

[00:12:06] Donny Dvorin: Yes, definitely the second one,

[00:12:08] Natalie Mendes: right? It’s that company approached it from how can I prove value to this new customer? And I think they’re smart and knowing that, Hey, if I came through on a Google search, I’m already highly motivated to do this project.

[00:12:21] Like I don’t need to be convinced. I just need to see what I’m going to get. And so I think a lot of other companies can take that approach. Their users and their target buyers are highly motivated. They just need to be able to see what are you going to do for me? Like, how is your software going to help me work with my teams better instead of walking me through a five point value system for why this software is the best.

[00:12:48] Donny Dvorin: Yeah. I couldn’t agree more, you know, it’s funny, like it’s all these companies tried to automate and so press one for this two, for this three, for this. You get into dare that’s press another button, enter in all your [00:13:00] information or whatever. You finally get somebody live on the call.

[00:13:04] And they’re like a generalist and you got to give all your information again, it was like, what was the point of all pressing all of those numbers?

[00:13:11] Natalie Mendes: It’s so true. And I think there’s a huge mismatch actually right now in marketing between. kind of the marketing technologies that we are getting so excited about and funding and budgeting, and then actually that the user experience, right? So in marketing, one of the biggest threats to is just this siloed thinking of okay, my job as a marketer is to bring people into the funnel and get them to sign up for our product or give us our email.

[00:13:41] And then a lot of times that experience gets handed off to a different team. And sometimes as you say you start the clock again. And the user is oh my gosh I’ve already gone through these steps. So one of the cool things I’ve seen us do at Atlassian is integrateour marketing.

[00:13:58] Into our product [00:14:00] teams a little bit better. So that, that handoff isn’t so clunky and that experience is cared for beyond just the signup.

[00:14:08] Donny Dvorin: So how about you as far as you and be where you are today, if you hadn’t started or hadn’t done X?

[00:14:15] Natalie Mendes: I wouldn’t be where I am today. If I had just . Done what I was told.

[00:14:21] Of course we are all conditioned to do a good job for our employers. and we should, no one was asking me. About what we should be doing differently. nobody told me to start this new brand focused blog in alignment with our company vision. I had to go out there and declare it and say, Hey, I think we should do this.

[00:14:42] and so of course we tested it. We spent about six months testing the messages, testing different content types before we felt confident enough to do it. I think a lot of the big career opportunities for marketers are in places [00:15:00] where there is a gap, That people haven’t identified yet.

[00:15:03] And if you can identify it and build it and get people to join you, then there’s a lot. Great value that can come from that.

[00:15:10] Donny Dvorin: Natalie, why don’t we talk about emerging marketers, maybe marketers working for a smaller, medium sized companies or, even a marketer that’s coming up through the ranks.

[00:15:19] what advice would you have for them?

[00:15:21] Natalie Mendes: Yeah, great question. I think. Two things that I would advise people to do. one is to kind of know what sort of value you can bring to the marketing team. Like what skills you have, what passions you have that are not totally represented that you can own and really carve out a space for yourself.

[00:15:41] The other thing I would recommend is to make sure you’ve bring people with you on that journey, right? To develop internal stakeholders or team members that can catch your vision and want to join you in whatever you’re. one mistake that I made was I focused more [00:16:00] on the first part of that, which was what was I was passionate about.

[00:16:03] What did I feel like we should be doing as a marketing team. and I had to learn how to bring people along for the ride with me. there’s a lot of. Internal communication that comes with that aligning people with your goals So it’s definitely a learning curve, but you know, you’re not going to accomplish these things alone in a vacuum.

[00:16:22] Donny Dvorin: And as far as the content goes, you’ve won some awards. can you share with our audience about that?

[00:16:29] Natalie Mendes: I’m super proud of that work. So we have won an award from content marketing. Worlds for the best corporate blog. And that means a lot to us because we’re in the world of B2B marketing, which is not necessarily known for being super flashy or exciting, but to have That recommendation from the content marketing association has made us feel like, okay, we’re really going in the right direction.

[00:16:55] And then we’ve also won for best content marketing [00:17:00] from Digi day, which is an, a traditional. Ad and media agency awards.

[00:17:04] Donny Dvorin: And last question for you, is there a brave marketer that you want to nominate that we should have on the show for season two?

[00:17:11] Oh yeah. think you should talk to someone from Trello, especially since you like the product so much.

[00:17:16] Natalie Mendes: Leah writer is the brand lead at Trello and she’s just an amazing person. And in the last year has done a huge. Brand redesign that I think would be really interesting to hear about and took a lot of bravery to do.

[00:17:30] Donny Dvorin: Amazing. Well, Natalie, thank you so much for coming on the show. any last words for our listeners?

[00:17:37] Natalie Mendes: No, just keep it up and. Bring in value to your audiences and everything will work out fine.

[00:17:45] Donny Dvorin: Hopefully you enjoyed this episode with Natalie and you picked up some key insights. if you’re doing marketing and you have a blog that is really important to listen to the insights of how to get your content out, how to [00:18:00] track the funnel, the ROI.

[00:18:02] We got all into the details there. And if you liked what you heard today and found it valuable, we really super helpful. If you took two minutes to leave us a short review on apple podcasts, not a final note. If you have a brand or product or service that you’d like to get in front of Braves, 30 million users, please email them.

[00:18:17] Ad sales@brave.com and let us know, you’re a podcast listener to unlock one of two perks. If your budget is under $10,000, we’ll bump you up to the top of our self-serve waiting list. And if your budget is under $10,000 a month, you’ll qualify for a 25% podcast listener discount.

[00:18:33] And finally, I want to give music credits to my brother Arielle. that music that you heard in the beginning and the outro is his original work, and you can find them online. And of course, Sam and shares every week helped us with the production of this podcast. So till next week, thank you so much for joining and listening.