Remarkable Content with Ian Faison White Lotus: B2B Marketing Lessons from Season 2 with Head of Brand Content at Atlassian, Natalie Mendes
Is your brand strong enough that you can release logo-less content and people still know it's from your company?
Are the visuals, the font, the tone and voice so clearly yours? Brand is so nuanced. But when done well, your name will be the first in the buyer’s mind when they’re ready to make a purchase.
In this episode, we’re taking tips from a show that has super strong branding: White Lotus. We’re discussing Season 2 with Atlassian’s Head of Brand Content, Natalie Mendes. Together, we’re talking about how to cultivate a brand that will take you from season to season, investing in the heroes of your brand, and much more. Now, you can put on your bathing suit, but we wouldn’t recommend getting in the water for this episode of Remarkable.
About our guest, Natalie Mendes
Natalie Mendes is Head of Brand Content at Atlassian. She is an award-winning marketing leader with a wealth of experience in content marketing spanning over a decade. At Atlassian, she started and grew the brand content team, with a track record of building successful content strategies that drive traffic, engagement, and conversion. She has won several awards, including Best B2B Content Site from Digiday and Best Digital Publication from Content Marketing Institute. She has experience in SEO strategy and content development, paid and organic social media, email marketing, website development, and PR.
At Atlassian, she leads strategy and execution of content on their website, blog, podcasts, video, and social media. She has grown a team of skilled and motivated content marketers that serve and support their brand and product marketing strategies, as well as managing external agencies for social media and web development. They have grown organic monthly pageviews by 1000% in the past 3 years and proved out paths for sales. She has grown a thriving and engaged following for Atlassian brand and won multiple excellence awards in B2B Content Strategy and Podcasting.
About Atlassian
Atlassian is a portfolio of products that enable teams, increase collaboration and communication, and help businesses obtain their desired business goals. They connect teams to share work and drive higher productivity and outcomes. The teams they support include software, IT, business, marketing and more. Their team of 7000+ Atlassians supports an international group of 250,000+ customers. They build tools like Jira, Confluence, Bitbucket, and Trello to help teams across the world become more nimble, creative, and aligned.
About White Lotus
White Lotus is about the guests and employees of a fictional resort chain of the same name, White Lotus. While initially everything is beautiful and picture-perfect on the surface, there’s a darkness underneath that reveals itself more and more as time goes on. The second season is set in Sicily and stars Jennifer Coolidge as Tanya McQuoid-Hunt, F. Murray Abraham as Bert Di Grasso, Michael Imperioli as Dominic Di Grasso, Adam DiMarco as Albie Di Grasso, Aubrey Plaza as Harper Spiller, and her husband, Ethan Spiller is played by Will Sharpe. It starts off with the death of a guest at the White Lotus resort and revolves around the sex lives of the characters from cheating to addiction. This is different from the first season, which focused on money and privilege. The series was created by Mike White for HBO and premiered in 2021. There are now two seasons and a third in production, which will reportedly be filmed in Thailand. Each season is set at a different White Lotus resort. The first season was set in Hawaii. It has won ten Primetime Emmy Awards and two Golden Globes.
What B2B Companies Can Learn From White Lotus:
- Cultivate a brand that can carry you from season to season. And piece of content to piece of content. You should be able to use your brand voice across channels. The key is that your content has to be of high value to your audience. They learn to look forward to your content and trust the quality of it. Natalie says, “It's so much easier and efficient in a lot of ways to build on something that's working than to try to change up your story every single year and try new marketing formats just for the sake of it. When you can build on something over time, that's where you see the benefit and the growth, even from an organic SEO standpoint, we still see lots of great traffic coming to our old content. It's not all about the new stuff every time.” It’s like how we know that each season of White Lotus takes place in a different luxury resort. And it sets the stage for drama to unfold. So the audience learns to trust the quality of the storytelling and looks forward to a dark, complex plot that is undeniably White Lotus.
- Highlight the “heroes” of your brand. Whether it’s a character in your marketing or a fan favorite product, give your audience more. Natalie says, “Find your darlings and really invest in them.” She says, “Whether that's something that starts in your digital world and becomes an event in the real world, or your customers rally around one of your products or a new feature, letting that take off and knowing that that is gonna be good for your brand and good for your customers, while still having the regular cast of characters in the mix.” In White Lotus, it was Jennifer Coolidge’s character, Tanya, who became very popular. And references to her, including memes, are all over the internet. At Atlassian, they unleashed evangelists with resources and messaging to consult with customers. These evangelists, or heroes, strengthen their brand and accelerate the business.
Quotes
*”It's a show where there is no hero. Nobody really wins. And I think that's sort of what I like about it too, is it's more of a character study in these people and what's driving them to do things and what's holding them back and what are their secrets.” - Natalie Mendes
*”Once I started watching White Lotus, I just got immediately hooked on the story and the intrigue. So it's a show where you know the ending but then the whole show is about figuring out how it happened. And so I love how that storytelling device hooks you immediately and then you become part of the show.” - Natalie Mendes
Time Stamps
[0:53] Meet Natalie Mendes, Head of Brand Content at Atlassian
[2:40] What is Natalie responsible for in her role at Atlassian?
[4:31] What is White Lotus about?
[8:11] Why is White Lotus remarkable?
[23:02] How does Natalie think about brand?
[25:54] What B2B marketing lessons can we learn from White Lotus?
[34:59] What’s Natalie’s content strategy?
Links
Connect with Natalie on LinkedIn
About Remarkable!
Remarkable! is created by the team at Caspian Studios, the premier B2B Podcast-as-a-Service company. Caspian creates both non-fiction and fiction series for B2B companies. If you want a fiction series check out our new offering - The Business Thriller - Hollywood style storytelling for B2B. Learn more at CaspianStudios.com.
In today’s episode, you heard from Ian Faison (CEO of Caspian Studios) and Meredith Gooderham (Senior Producer). Remarkable was produced this week by Jess Avellino, mixed by Scott Goodrich, and our theme song is “Solomon” by FALAK.
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