Atlassian

Marketing your Add-On

Luis Ortiz

— 6 min read
Marketing your Add-On

A talk by Katrina Morales. Product Marketing Manager. Atlassian Ecosystem.

One of the talks that the SoftwareDevTools team was looking forward during Atlassian’s Connect Week, was Katrina’s talk about Marketing your add-on. The talk was very informative, and the audience was well engaged as we were all teams that are working on products for the Marketplace.

Markerting your Atlassian Add-on
Just as we’ve done with every Atlassian event we assist (Check out more posts about Austin here, we've also been to Summits, we've wrote about Agile roadmaps, and our famed interview to Bentley Cook from Trello, all in our blog, we like to share our experience. For this edition of #ConnectWeek, we have already shared about Product Documentation. This talk was obviously about Marketing Add-ons in Atlassian’s Marketplace, but we are sure the general pointers can be applied in any other Marketplace, so it’ll be helpful. We are going to skip any part that’s exclusively for Atlassian and share what we learned with the aim of using it in whatever your product is and whatever Marketplace you have it listed on. We certainly hope this is helpful.

This talk covered 3 stages you need to understand and further develop into smaller steps.
The point of having a great product is basically understanding who and why would use your product, make sure they can find you and listen to them. Let’s put it like this:

-Understand The Customer’s Journey

-Making a great Marketplace listing

-Engaging your users

Understand The Customer’s Journey

Why do people look for us?

First of all, we need to understand who is our customer. When building add-ons this is somewhat easier because you already know that your customer is necessarily a person using the platform you are on, and they visit the platform’s Marketplace. But, ‘Who visits the Marketplace?’ in our case, Atlassian identifies 3 type of visitors:

-People evaluating Atlassian Products

-Existing Users of products

-Administrators of Atlassian products

This information is very helpful, as it already lays the groundwork for defining our target personas.
The next thing you need to know is ‘How are they using the Marketplace?’. For mostly any marketplace the case would be as follows:

-To get ideas

-To try/buy products

We now know who visits the marketplace we are listed on, we know how are they using it, the only thing left is to know why: ‘Why are they on the marketplace?’. As far as I can tell, Atlassian’s products are for work, not leisure or personal use. Unlike some other marketplace’s where you should identify if they are looking for leisure, or discover new products, in the case of Atlassian’s marketplace, we already know that whoever is looking in the marketplace is looking for:

-To solve a problem

Customer Journey: How do they get to us?

We now understand who, how and why is looking for us. With that we can build our persona, and where can we better leverage our budget. Now we can build our customer’s journey. Understanding the customer’s journey is key for us to know what are the key events that we can influence in that journey. The customer’s journey is very different for every industry, but for most online marketplaces the customer journey is the same:

Search the internet: Most of us won’t go to the marketplace to look for a product unless you already know about it. What we’ll do is to run a Google search looking for a solution to our problem.

Review listings: Once we find something interesting on Google, we’ll click on it and read the description of the product in the Marketplace.

Try the add-on: If the add-on is of our interest before we purchase it, we’d like to have a free trial to really see if it fits our needs.

This is a typical Customer Journey for any Marketplace. Think about it, either you realize it as steps or not, this is basically what we all do when looking for a product.

Once we know this, we need to make sure that the potential user can find us: A) When searching the internet and B) when comparing listings in the marketplace. So, how can we make sure this happens? Well, turns out that we can ‘kill two birds with one stone’. We need to make sure that we have a great marketplace listing, as the listing will work as our landing page and it is perfectly findable from any browser.

Making a great Marketplace listing: How do they make a decision?

-Organic search: For Atlassian, organic searches are the #1 source of traffic. Just as your landing page, there are some SEO details that you need to recognize and attend.
The add-on title is your < h1 >, so it should be easily recognizable and explicitly say what it does. Remember that headers are most important for search engines’ crawlers and indexing. And it should be relevant to the search terms you expect your clients to use when looking for the service you provide.
You can and should also add a tagline, the highlights of your product (highlights are h2), media and details. Most major marketplaces already have this sections clearly defined, although sometimes they are called differently and can get us confused. Make sure you look into it and use them properly.

Once the potential user found you on the Marketplace that does not make a sale. You still need to influence the person who is making a purchase decision. Most of us won’t even consider spending a dollar if we haven’t tried the product first. Comes the next step:

Try/Buy decision factors: Why does he buy?

The potential customer evaluates several aspects of the marketplace:

-Reviews: Aim for 3 stars or higher (4 possible stars).

-Price: Consider the value that the add-on brings to the product.

-Support: Atlassian programs, support details, documentation.

-Freshness: Make sure updates are well documented in the version history.

Having all of these aspects in mind while working on your product listing will not necessarily make you an instant hit, let’s remember that a killer product will most likely beat amazing marketing, but it’ll surely make your product stand out.

You also most likely need to spend some money on putting yourself in front of potential customers. So, really taking in consideration your users profile, you can make the decision about where to spend your dollars:

Ads:

-Paid google ads.

-Paid FB Ads.

-Paid Twitter ads.

Email:

-Universal and effective.

-Affordable and easy.

-Consumers prefer e-mail as a communication channel.

Make sure you engage with your users that decide to give your product a try. Try an E-mail Drip campaign. You can either do it manually while you have a manageable amount of users or give an email platform a try. Make sure that you engage in key dates:

Day 0: Welcome/Thanks
Day 15: Support/Educate
Day 29: Close the deal

Remember that the best part of these platforms is that they are peer reviewed and transparent, so the community very much engages in reviews and other users take them for strong consideration. So you’ll constantly need to:

-Engage with the community: Provide support and feature request feedback.

-Respond to reviews: Let customers and prospects know you care.

This will let the potential user know that you are always available for any problem that they might have and this will reinforce their decision.

So there you have it! This is what Katrina talked about. It is in Atlassian’s best interest to have the best listings in their marketplace, as it helps them grow and also the best add-ons add value to their core product.
We know the crowd at #ConnectWeek was eager to learn more about this topic. We at SoftwareDevTools.com sure where. We took the time to take notes and review our own listings to start making the pertinent changes.

We are certain that you’re going to find these pointers very helpful to market your add-on on any marketplace.

Let us know how it goes! And if you have experience in add-on marketing and find something missing or that can be improved, please let us know in the comments.

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