The Full-Funnel Marketing Playbook for Atlassian Marketplace Vendors

A brief note on the author

Why listen to me? Because I've been there, done that, and got the swag for both vendor and partner.

As Director of Content, Comms and Brand Strategy at Tempo Software, I ran content and brand for a business that grew from $100M to $250M ARR, with some seismic changes along the way. The mechanics this guide walks through, web and AMP best practice, leader-led LinkedIn, the AEO citation patterns, aren't theory to me, I built content strategy around them directly. Before that, as Marketing Lead at Eficode (Clearvision before its 2022 acquisition), I saw the same ecosystem from the partner and consultancy side, where the buyer conversation, the events calendar, and the referral relationships between vendors and partners look different again.

Most marketing advice about this ecosystem is generic or comes from one side of the table or the other. This one's built from having sat in both seats.

Who the playbook is for

I hope that everyone who needs to try and land more prospective users of their app in the Atlassian ecosystem, but it'll likely be especially useful to smaller vendors that have limited or no marketing resources. It covers the fundamentals of a wide range of channels and tactics.

At a glance

Reading this as a shape, not a route

This guide maps marketing tactics to an extended AIDA funnel (attention, interest, desire, action, onboard, advocate) as a directional shape rather than a route any one buyer will actually follow.

No real buyer moves through six stages in order. Someone finds your case study on Google before they've ever heard your name. Someone installs the trial off the back of a stray Reddit thread and never sees an ad. Someone leaves a five-star review a week after installing and never visits your website at all. That's normal.

Treating the funnel as a strict sequence a real person has to follow leads to overbuilt automation nobody actually experiences in order. What has to hold constant, regardless of which door someone walks through, is quality, tone and message. If your LinkedIn voice, your website's technical depth, and your onboarding email all sound like different companies, a buyer who touches two of them notices immediately and trusts you less for it.

A funnel shape here exists for one reason: to make sure that wherever someone enters, the next thing they see moves them forward, deeper into understanding what you do and readier to trust you, rather than sideways or backward. A prospect who reads your onboarding webinar recording before they've ever seen an ad is still moving in the right direction.

Attention

Attention is the moment someone who doesn't know your app exists sees it for the first time, whether that's a LinkedIn post, a search ad, or a stand at a conference.

If you don’t have much budget, your biggest challenge is always going to be discoverability. Amongst a sea of apps, many built by companies with bigger budgets, how do you stand out? It’s not impossible, but you do need to get creative and scrappy, and you do need to spend your time and money in the right places.

Paid ads

Free tactics are great (and we’ll get into a few in a second) but if you want to guarantee your ideal customer profile sees your message; you need to pay.

A search ad against a specific, high-intent term, a competitor's name, or a migration phrase like "quip to confluence," reaches someone already close to a decision. A LinkedIn campaign targeted at job titles like Jira Administrator, Confluence Admin or IT Manager does the same, on a platform your buyer already checks daily.

You don’t need ads on tiktok or a billboard in the bay area. You need to ensure the buyer (or at least someone who can influence the buyer) sees your ad and acts on it.

LinkedIn

Sure, it feels cringe but I highly suspect a lot of your target audience spends time on LinkedIn so you need to show up there, and you can’t hide behind the company page. Personal LinkedIn presence outperforms a company page here for the same reason it does everywhere else in B2B. Metricool's 2026 study of over 670,000 LinkedIn posts found personal profiles averaging a 2.6% engagement rate against 1.6% for company pages.

Get the basics right:

• Post 2-3 times a week at the right time for engagement (e.g. 9am EST).

• Keep it human and authentic (AI slop might get flagged).

• Include a photo of yourself (increases the chances of showing up in newsfeeds and shows effort).

• Share links in the comments, rather than in the main post.

• Reply and engage with all comments; start a conversation. Long comments from others improve visibility.

• Comment on other posts; especially after posting your own.

LinkedIn will push your post out to a small audience to test if it’s valuable, before increasing its reach, so spend time crafting something interesting.

It’ll feel like a slog at first, but you’ll get into a rhythm and the effort compounds over time. The aim should be to become the person your specific niche actually turns to.

Online communities

The Atlassian Developer Community forum and the product threads on r/jira and r/atlassian are where admins actually go to solve a problem, not to be sold to. Answering a genuine question well, with no pitch attached, does more for your name recognition over six months than a dozen ads, and it's exactly the kind of specific, first-person contribution large language models later cite when a buyer asks an AI answer engine the same question, the AEO thread from Interest starts here, not just on your own site. 

Events

A stand at Atlassian's flagship conference, Team, held annually across the US and Europe, isn't out of reach for smaller vendors the way the word "sponsorship" might suggest. A modest booth runs to several thousand dollars once travel and staffing are counted, real money for a small team, but nowhere near the scale that word usually implies. Even a minimal presence buys direct time with prospective buyers (or the Jira admins that influence them), solution partners, and fellow vendors who drive referrals the rest of the year, something a pure-digital strategy can't replicate.

Local, volunteer-run Atlassian User Groups offer a free version of the same first-contact opportunity. No booth fee, just a room full of the exact practitioners who might install your app next month.

Full list of groups and communities on the Atlassian site here.

What tells you this is working

• Website visitors arriving specifically from LinkedIn and paid ads, not just total traffic

• LinkedIn post impressions and engagement rate on the founder's profile

• Marketplace listing page views, a separate number from installs, worth tracking on its own

• Ad click-through rate, a low number here usually points to targeting or ad copy, not budget

Interest

Interest is what happens once someone has heard of you and starts actually reading, whether that's your website answering a technical question or an AI answer engine citing you when a prompt asks for options.

Once someone's heard of you, where do they actually go to find out more? Two places, increasingly: a search engine, or a prompt typed straight into ChatGPT, Claude, or another LLM. Both are answering the same underlying question for the buyer (does this actually solve my specific problem?), but they rank content on slightly different rules, so it’s important to know the difference and optimise your content as needed.

Search (SEO)

Search still matters, and for a technical buyer it might matter more than you'd expect. A Jira admin googling their actual problem, a specific error, a workflow gap, a migration term, is further down the path to installing than someone scrolling LinkedIn, because they already know exactly what they need. 

Get the basics right:

• Target the specific, long-tail phrases your buyer actually types, not the broad category term a bigger vendor with a bigger budget already owns.

• Answer the actual question directly, near the top of the page. Search engines reward this, and so do buyers with no patience for throat-clearing.

• Basic technical hygiene, a clean sitemap, fast load times, one clear heading structure per page, matters more than most vendors assume, and costs nothing but attention.

• A handful of real backlinks, a mention on Atlassian Community, a guest post with a partner, a listing on a marketplace aggregator, does more here than a higher volume of thin blog posts.

LLMs (AEO)

The newer surface, and the one many ignore entirely, is the AI answer engine. A growing share of buyers now research inside tools like ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini or Copilot before they ever open a search bar, describing their actual problem in plain language rather than searching for a product by name.

These engines don't return a list of links, they synthesise a single answer from whichever sources they judge most current and specific to the question, which rewards a different set of signals than traditional search does. Self-authored, first-person content tends to carry real weight here: a 2026 study across 40 B2B SaaS categories found vendor-owned and independent content behind the large majority of what ChatGPT cited when recommending software, while G2 and Capterra were cited precisely zero times (source: DerivateX).

Get the basics right here too:

• A direct, 40 to 60 word answer placed under every question-shaped heading, so the engine has something clean to lift (you saw mine at the top of this page).

• Comparison tables where you're weighing options, rather than paragraphs of prose.

• FAQs are a great way to answer your audience directly and give LLMs what they want too.

• Explicit statements of who your app is not for. Answer engines treat an honest trade-off as more trustworthy than a pitch.

• Any proprietary data or unique take that no one else has makes you a valuable reference.

• Fresh, dated content. As a rule of thumb, search engines and LLMs favour anything updated within the last 30 days, citing it more, which makes Atlassian's own announcement cycle, roadmap shifts, Cloud migration deadlines, a content calendar you don't have to build yourself.

Search and AEO share more DNA than most people assume. The same page that answers a buyer's question directly, clearly and honestly tends to satisfy both a search engine and an AI answer engine at once.

What tells you this is working

• Organic search traffic and rankings for the specific, long-tail terms covered in Search (SEO)

• Time on page and scroll depth on comparison and technical content

• Manual prompt testing, periodically asking ChatGPT or Perplexity the questions a buyer would ask, and checking whether you show up

Desire

Desire is the point where someone believes your app is genuinely the right fit, not just an option, and that's built through proof rather than persuasion.

By this point your buyer usually has more than one tab open, weighing your app against a competitor's, or against just building the workaround themselves in native Jira or Confluence. Hype doesn't move a technical buyer here, proof does. The job is removing every reasonable doubt before they've had to ask.

Comparison content

A features page tells a buyer what your app does. A comparison guide tells them why it's the right choice over the alternative they're actually weighing up, which is a completely different conversation, and a much more persuasive one.

Comparison content earns more trust than a features page ever will, especially when it's honest about where a competitor or Atlassian's own native functionality is actually the better fit for a specific use case. That honesty is what makes the comparison worth reading in the first place, a buyer can tell within a paragraph whether you're being straight with them.

Show, don't tell

A technical buyer doesn't take a features list at face value. They want to see the actual interface before they trust it does what you say. Screenshots and a short demo video do real work here, not as decoration but as evidence, the same instinct that makes someone read a comparison table before a paragraph of prose.

And, naturally, they’ll likely take a free trial of your app as well. We’ll cover that more in the ‘Onboard’ section of this guide.

Reviews

Reviews do a specific job here that your own copy can't: they're proof from someone who isn't you. Review counts function the same way on the Marketplace itself, as third-party confirmation that lowers the risk of trying something new.

Surface a handful of the best reviews directly on your website, not just leaving them buried in the listing, and pick ones that speak to a specific use case rather than generic praise, "solved our migration headache in a weekend" does more work than "great app." How to actually get more reviews belongs later, in ‘Advocate’, but showing the ones you already have closes the trust gap before someone ever clicks through to install.

What tells you this is working

• Views on comparison and proof pages specifically, not just the site total

• Click-through rate from your website to the Marketplace listing, the actual handoff point into Action

• Engagement with the reviews surfaced on your site, whether people are reading them before they leave the page

Action

Action is the install, and on the Atlassian Marketplace that's a genuinely separate discovery mechanism from your website, ranked by different rules entirely.

Some vendors get this backwards, treating the website as the thing that has to close the sale when its real job is getting someone to the listing. The Marketplace itself is a closed system you don't control, run by the same company whose product you're building on top of, and the only things that move your position inside it sit directly on the page.

Marketplace ranking

Atlassian's OpenSearch engine ranks listings on two things: text relevance (keywords in your app name, tagline and description, plus semantic matching of search intent) and engagement signals (install volume, review count, average rating, and whether your support documentation is fully filled in) (Atlassian developer documentation). None of that responds to backlinks, blog posts or social reach, so effort spent on your listing itself is what actually moves it.

Get the basics right:

• A tighter, keyword-matched tagline and description, since these feed text relevance directly.

• Reviews actively solicited, not left to chance.

• Current screenshots that reflect the actual product, not last year's UI.

• An up-to-date demo video.

• Support documentation fully filled in (it's a ranking signal, not just a nice-to-have).

• Security documentation, where relevant (anything to reduce friction will help).

Website to listing

Treat your website as the thing that earns the click, and the listing as the thing that has to close it once someone arrives. A polished comparison guide that ends without a clear route to install has done half the job. A listing with an accurate tagline and real reviews but nothing bringing buyers to it in the first place has the same problem in reverse.

What tells you this is working

• Listing conversion rate, views to installs, matters more than views alone

• Marketplace search ranking position for your target keywords

• Install volume, review count and average rating, all three feed directly back into ranking

Onboard

Onboard is the gap between install and the moment someone actually understands what your app does for them, and it matters here more than in most B2B categories because it feeds directly back into Action.

Most vendors treat install as the finish line, but someone can install your app and abandon it within the hour if nothing guides them to the moment it actually solves their problem. What happens in the days right after install decides whether you get a review, a quiet churn, or someone who's forgotten you exist by Friday.

The aim here is what product folks call the ‘a ha’ moment. The action the user takes that proves they’re getting real value from your app (e.g. publishing a dashboard, sending some data, etc).

Welcome email

A short sequence beats a single email, one message on install, one a few days later pointing at the feature people actually use, one checking in if nothing's happened yet. Each one has a single job: get the reader to do the next specific thing, not just tell them what's possible.

In-app checklist

Three or four things, no more, for a new user to do in their first session. Pick the ones that lead fastest to the moment the app actually earns its place, not every feature you're proud of. You can add these with Atlassian’s built in tools, or off-the-shelf solutions like appcues or userpilot.

Orient the checklist to drive the ‘a ha’ moment mentioned above.

Webinars

A live onboarding webinar works well early, while you can host it yourself and learn directly what confuses new users. Recording it and turning that into an on-demand resource, once the format is proven, means the same content keeps doing the work without your time attached to every session.

All three tools do the same job: shrinking the distance between install and the first moment of real value. The shorter that gap, the higher the odds someone leaves a review while they're still genuinely pleased with your app, rather than having quietly lost interest. Review count and rating feed straight back into where you rank on the Marketplace, which makes good onboarding a ranking lever as much as a retention one.

What tells you this is working

• Activation rate, the share of installs that complete the first meaningful action, however you define it for your app

• Time to first value

• Onboarding email open and click rates

• Reviews received in the first two weeks after install, a leading indicator onboarding is landing

Advocate

Advocate is what happens after someone's gotten real value, and it's the stage many vendors skip because it doesn't feel urgent, even though it's the cheapest content you'll ever produce.

Nobody's chasing you for a review, no deadline forces a case study out of you, and it's easy to let a happy customer stay quietly happy. That's the mistake. This stage feeds every other one above it: reviews move your Marketplace ranking, case studies reduce friction and improve conversion, and a founder who shows up consistently earns the referral trust a booth never buys on its own.

Reviews

A review only happens if you ask, close to the moment someone's had a genuine win with the app, not months later when the memory's faded. A short, specific ask, three questions, five minutes, gets a far better response than an open-ended one.

Case studies

A case study works the same way at a slightly bigger scale. With a handful of customers rather than hundreds, the honest approach is picking your two or three most enthusiastic users, offering to write the first draft yourself from a short call, and asking them to correct rather than compose.

One approach that I like is to ask the user for a ‘quick product feedback call’ or similar. Ask them about their experience with your app, to drive the product roadmap, but slip in some marketing questions. Then, at the end of the call, ask if you can use some of this excellent feedback for a case study.

If they agree, offer to write it up and promise to run it by them before publishing. If it’s a large org then you might need to involve marketing or legal (always fun).

Joining in the community

The same four channels covered in Attention, social, online communities, Atlassian User Groups, Team, carry more weight once you're not starting from zero.

Showing up consistently at your local AUG after you've got customers, not just when you're new and trying to get noticed, is what actually builds the reputation-driven trust this ecosystem runs on. A founder who's been in the room for a year is trusted in a way a booth never earns on its own.

The posts get easier too. A LinkedIn update about a specific customer win reads completely differently once you have one to point to, and a comment on an Atlassian Community thread carries more weight when your name's already attached to a few genuine, helpful answers. Team stops being a cold sponsorship and starts being the place existing customers and fellow vendors actively look for you.

This builds directly on the groundwork from Attention, same channels, carrying more proof behind them the second time around.

What tells you this is working 

• Review velocity, new reviews per month, and the trend in average rating, not just the current number

• Referrals or case studies generated per quarter

• Renewal or retention rate, if you're on a subscription rather than a one-time purchase

What do you focus on with limited resources?

If it’s not your day job, or you only have a small team, prioritise:

1. Fix the Marketplace listing first, tagline, screenshots, requesting reviews. It's a few hours' work, and it's the one channel here with traffic that exists whether or not you've done anything else yet, someone already searching the Marketplace for a fix to a problem they have right now. Leaving it stale costs you conversions from day one.

2. Start founder LinkedIn and AEO-shaped website content in parallel, not after. Both take months to properly compound, so the earlier the clock starts the better, and neither competes for the hours the listing fix above needs.

3. Add onboarding next. It's the one lever that improves your Marketplace ranking without you touching the listing again.

4. Bring in paid ads and a Team booth once the free channels have proven what messaging actually lands.

5. Keep advocacy running continuously once it starts, reviews, case studies, ongoing AUG presence, since it's the cheapest, highest-trust content this category has, and it only grows the more customers you have to ask.

Where's your gap?

To be honest, every section above could be its own hour-long conversation; the actual tagline that gets your listing found, the one comparison guide that changes a buyer's mind, a review flow that doesn't feel like nagging.

If there's an obvious gap that you're not sure how to fill, then get in touch. No pitch, no deck, just a conversation about how I might help. Drop me an email or connect on LinkedIn.