Confluence for Marketing Teams - Ideation
Confluence is a great tool, but many folks assume it’s only for Support teams, or only for Engineering teams. While it is true that many support and engineering teams happen to use Confluence, the tool itself can be used by anyone - including marketings teams, specifically during their ideation and planning stages.
Marketing is like any other discipline - it takes planning and preparation to deploy good stuff. Many times this can take the form of the team using multiple different systems (looking at you Powerpoint) to plan. While this can work, it easily results in knowledge being fractured and challenging to find. Personally I don’t feel the work to overcome those challenges is worth using different systems - so instead I just use Confluence.
Confluence is helpful for marketing teams planning their Next Big Thing for a few reasons.
Source of truth - Confluence is a single place everyone can go to get information about upcoming projects, research past ones and create new information to share. Even better, it has a number of features that allow teams to organize their content. There are many ways to organize things (for example, by project or by location or by team), but having everything easily accessible in a single spot is a massive win for marketing teams.
The Jira Connection - Many marketing teams use Jira to plan their projects. This is great news, since both Jira and Confluence are made by Atlassian. This means that Jira and Confluence are tightly integrated right out of the box. Teams won’t have to struggle with installing or managing integrations, or build their own, since it just works.
Content Types - Confluence’s main content type is a page. Pages are really useful for documentation, but make it challenging to structure information or visually display it. Fortunately Confluence has both whiteboards (which are virtual collaborative visual spaces) and databases (a structured set of data within Confluence). These two tools expand what type of information is available in Confluence, further expanding it’s usefulness. Even better, they’re natively available, meaning teams will just have access to them in Confluence, helping further break down silos and other issues.
Confluence and planning
Personally I mainly use Confluence for documenting things. How to articles and product requirements docs are very common examples. Confluence, however, can also support teams in their planning process.
Brainstorming
Whiteboards make an excellent place for marketing teams to being brainstorming. They’re a good fit because they allow real-time collaboration in an endless virtual space. Imagine your team all engaged and adding in their ideas, diagrams and challenges - all in one spot. Even better, if you’ve got access to Atlassian Intelligence (AI) you’ll be able to instantly get summaries of those whiteboards improving how quickly youcan go from “Hey, here’s an idea” to “heres a plan”.
Live Pages (a recent beta feature) offer another way for teams to work together in near real-time on ideas. These pages are instantly available to others (No need to publish!), allowing editors to quickly share what they’re working on. (It is important to note that because these don’t need to be published they’re instantly live - so you may want to be careful what you write in them!).
Planning
Once you’ve got your ideas down in a page or whiteboard, you can use Databases to probvide structure to your planning. I think of databases as the step between a table and a jira project. They offer some more support than just columns and rows, but don’t require me to move our of COnfluence. Personally I use them for project planning as I can quickly spin up a database (which can be as simple as copying the structure of an existing one) and share it.
Database also let teams pull in other Confluence information or Jira work items. THis means you can blend your planning by including informatio nfrom Jira alongside your information from Confluence.Having everything in one spot is a great thing as it helps ensure the team remains focused. Personally I also find databases to be very useful when sharing data with stakehodlers as many times they won’t want to go into Jira.
Research
Having everythign in Confluence als ogives marketing teams a great opportunity for research. Unless things are actively deleted (a multi-step process) content remains available (either directly or via search). This means marketing teams can easily pull up past projects or ideas and see how they went. This makes it easy for teams to learn from past projects, or to see how they can improve on future ones.
Exactly how this is done can differ depending on how you’ve organized things, but many times I know will archive off old Spaces (with one space being a project). This lets teams easily browse through archived content, and perform specific searchs since everything about a given project would be in a single spot.
Wrap up
Confluence offers a number of great features to help marketing teams plan for succes. It all, however, boils down to how the team chooses to operate - so before you get hands on and start pushing buttons make sure you’ve worked with your team to understand their needs!
It’s also very important to understand the tool - check out the links below for some free and some paid resources that will help you get up to speed quickly - and check us out next week as we continue exploring Confluence for marketing teams!
