The GitLab Marketing team includes multiple functional groups: Revenue Marketing, Community Relations, Corporate Marketing, Marketing Operations and Strategic Marketing.
GitLab's vision is to become the complete platform for the entire DevOps lifecycle, delivered as a single application. To accomplish this, GitLab needs to be the most desired organization to work with for understanding and solving DevOps challenges.
The GitLab Marketing team aspires to:
At GitLab, we are committed to making data informed decisions. To that end, we publish our monthly metrics reports on GitLab's public YouTube Unfiltered channel.
We are customer centered in our messaging and go to market approach. Value Drivers define the overarching business goals and objectives that customers are trying to achieve. Through the value drivers we are able to understand the reasons why a customer is transforming part of their software delivery toolchain. Customer Use Cases define what specific activity or process they will be using GitLab to transform their delivery process. The customer use cases help us define and organize specific collateral and go to market efforts along the buyer's journey.
Value drivers = why they are changing Customer use cases = what they are changing
We will develop collateral, content, and integrated campaigns leveraging the Value drivers and customer use cases based on strategic priorities and input from the field and product teams.
Marketing functional groups collaborate to produce Integrated Campaigns. An Integrated Campaign is a communication effort that includes several campaign tactics such as blog posts, emails, events, advertisements, content on about.gitlab.com, videos, case studies, whitepapers, surveys, social outreach, and webcasts. An Integrated Campaign will have a campaign theme that summarizes the message we are communicating to our market.
Marketing uses GitLab for agile project management including groups, projects, epics, roadmaps, issues, labels, and boards. Read through the documentation on each of these GitLab features if you are unfamiliar.
/promote slack command.)
CMO label. (Don't apply the CMO label to other epics.)status:: and one of four statuses. Status labels should be used on all issues within the Marketing group:
status::plan - work that is proposed, in an exploratory state.
status::plan to status::wip and creating an merge request (MR), if appropriate. The plan status is optional, as issues that don't require formal planning can be opened and labeled status::wip.status::wip - work in progress that has been accepted and assigned to a DRI.
WIP:. At GitLab we allow reviewers to start reviewing right away before work is complete.status::review and WIP: should be removed from the title.status::review - work has been completed enough that it is ready for formal review and approval.
status::scheduled - work that is complete but should be scheduled for a future date.
closed - when work is delivered the issue should be closed.Each functional team within Marketing can have "additive" labels - meaning they are used to enhance the tracking and workflows for that respective team. These "additive" labels are used in conjunction with the broader Marketing labels. The functional team label usage is documented on each of the respective handbook pages:
All of the projects within the Marketing subgroup include default issue text to ensure the functional team labels are applied consistently and broader adoption of the global Marketing labels.
When a new issue is opened in any project, the issue description will contain a small snippet of text applying that teams' label & Marketing scoped status::plan label.
Apply Template and continue as normal
The default text is minimal and generic. Any team can make the collective decision to update the text. Access to modify the text may be limited based on group/project permission level, if you do not have access to the General settings section, please reach out to @mktg-ops via slack.
Please note this is not an issue bot there is no dynamic functionality. The default issue text applies to all issues opened within that project and the text should be broad enough to encompass a roles within that functional group.
GeneralExpand next to Default Issue Templatestatus::plan label in that sectionSave changes. The changes be applied immediately to any new issue opened.
If you have any issues &/or questions, please reach out to the MktgOps team (@mktg-ops) via slack.
GitLab makes use of campaign tags throughout our systems in order to better track associated costs. For consistency, we use the naming convention of ISODate_Campaign_ShortName. More details on the ISO Date:
ISO 8601 provides a standard cross-national approach that says:
- A general-to-specific approach, forming a date that is easier to process - thus, the year first, followed by month, then day
- Numbers less than 10 preceded by a leading zero
- Years expressed as "0" prior to year 1 and as "-1" for the year prior to year 0 (and so forth)
- Thus, March 30, 1998 would be: 19980330.
Please see more about this process on the Marketing Ops page.
Figuring out how where and how to create a board, epic, label can be confusing. The following diagram is a very high level example of how it all fits together. If there are questions please ask in the #mktgops slack channel (*must be GitLab team member for active link).
There are times when a rapid response is needed to address M&A in the industry, competitive moves, news about the company, and other opportunities to newsjack. In order to effectively respond, GitLab marketing needs to monitor, create and publish quickly. Additionally, GitLab marketing needs to support GitLab executives with content, data and soundbytes for interviews, blog-posts, etc.
If a rapid response opportunity arises, please alert the head of corporate marketing (or CMO if head of corporate marketing is unavailable) via slack or text message. Rapid response collaboration will happen in either the #competition channel (if it is competitive) or in the #external-comms channel (if it is about other news). The head of corporate marketing will propose a recommendation on how to best proceed with an external company message and recruit the resources to accomplish the plan (this becomes the #1 priority for each resource, unless physically impossible or their manager provides a replacement). A template for a rapid response can be found here.
The head of corporate marketing will assess the rapid response request within 1 HOUR (9amEST-6pmPST). Urgency will be assessed and will be determined to be 3 HOURS (ASAP) or 24 HOURS turnaround, and the action plan will be scoped accordingly - with a bias towards releasing an MVC as soon as possible, and iterating as more news becomes available. Any disagreements on urgency or action will be escalated immediately to the CMO for a final decision.
While each response will be a custom plan, the rapid response team will leverage appropriate resources to execute on the agreed upon plan:
Sales Development Representatives (SDRs) focus on serving the needs of prospective customers' during the beginning of their buying process. When prospective customers have questions about GitLab, the SDRs assist them or connect them to a technical team member as needed. During the initial exploration if the prospective customer is interested in continuing their exploration of GitLab, SDRs will connect them to an Account Executive (AE) or Strategic Account Leader (SAL).
SDRs also contact people who work at large organizations to uncover or create early stage sales opportunities for GitLab SALs. SDRs team will plan with their paired Sales counterpart to target interesting accounts and develop plan for prospecting including contact discovery, understanding enterprise-wide initiatives that GitLab could assist with, and ensuring accurate data quality of accounts and contact in salesforce.com.
Field marketers focus on understanding the specific needs of the geographic regions where GitLab operates. They manage marketing activities, such as events and sponsorships, tailored to the needs of the region where the activity takes place.
Marketing operations focuses on enabling the GitLab marketing organization with marketing technology, process, enablement and insights. They are responsible for evaluating, deploying and administering marketing systems, documenting and improving administrative processes, and analyzing our marketing data to ensure marketers are held accountable to continuously improving their work. Marketing Operations owns the tech stack used by Marketing.
Corporate Marketing is responsible for PR/communications, the stewardship of the GitLab brand, corporate events and the company-level messaging/positioning. The team is the owner of about.gitlab.com and oversees the website strategy. Corporate Marketing creates global marketing materials and communications and supports the field marketing teams so they can execute regionally while staying true to the GitLab brand.
Content marketers focus on understanding our audience of developers, IT ops practitioners, and IT leadership. They create useful content for GitLab's audiences, and ensure that the content is delivered to the right audience, at the right time, and in the right way.
Digital Marketing Programs focuses on executing integrated campaigns, with a digital-first mindset. They are responsible for executing, deploying, and tracking emails and supporting both sales and marketing in outbound mass communications.
Digital Marketing Programs includes online marketing, focused on managing online advertising, website experiments, and search engine optimization (SEO). Online advertising is aimed at increasing the volume of relevant traffic to GitLab's marketing site, website experiments are focused on improving web traffic-to-form submission conversion, and SEO is aimed at ensuring our marketing site ranks for the search engine keywords our audiences care about.
Marketing Program Managers are responsible for creating and managing business to business marketing programs, supporting Field events, driving TOFU/MOFU traffic and continued engagement with both prospects and customers.
Community Relations includes community advocacy, code contributor program and evangelist program functions. The team is focused on answering the following questions:
Strategic marketing is GitLab's interface to the market. The market is made up of customers, analysts, press, thought leaders, competitors, etc. Strategic marketing enables other GitLab groups such as Sales, Marketing, and Channel with narrative, positioning, messaging, and go-to-market strategy to go outbound to the market. Strategic marketing does market research to gather customer knowledge, analyst views, market landscapes, and competitor intelligence providing marketing insights inbound to the rest of GitLab.
These are just the required meetings for team members and managers. Of course, meetings are encouraged when it expedites a project or problem solving among members, so the team and company. Don't be afraid to say "Hey, can we hangout?" if you need help with something.
Meeting goal: This is the main meeting where marketing strategy and tactics are discussed. Everyone in marketing is invited, but attendance is optional.
Run time: 50 minutes
The Marketing team meets weekly to review announcements, strategy developments, company updates, OKRs, and KPIs. This is the primary meeting for discussing strategy and tactics, resolving conflicts and communicating information.
The meeting should run as follows:
Meeting goal: For managers to work with direct reports on personnel issues, PeopleOps requirements, performance reviews and hiring.
Run time: 25 minutes
Strategy and tactics should be discussed in the weekly Marketing Strategy and Tactics meeting. Weekly direct reports meetings should be held to discuss tactical people management issues. These meetings should be short and tactical - save strategy discussions for the all-marketing weekly call.
The meeting should run as follows:
When working remotely in a fast-paced organization, it is important for a team to agree on a few basic service level agreements on how we would like to work together. With any of these, things can come up that make it not possible to meet the SLAs, but we all agree to use best effort when possible.
Anything that is a process in marketing should be documented in the Marketing Handbook.
#marketing Slack channel for questions that don't seem appropriate to use the issue tracker or the internal email address for.Everyone posts their own social updates, to the extent possible. If you want to request that something in one of these categories be posted, reach out to the point person below. They reserve the right to say no to your request, and copy in all of these categories may be adjusted by a marketing team member to ensure consistency in our brand voice.
CEO statements/updates: CMO
Marketing Newsletter
Marketing sends out a bi-weekly newsletter to our newsletter subscribers on the 10th and 25th of each month.
To add a content suggestion please find the Newsletter issue in the Marketing project and add your suggestion(s) as comment(s) to the issue in the format outlined on the issue description ( See example ). The title of the Newsletter issue will be formatted as follows: Newsletter MM/DD.
Content suggestions can be submitted up to 5 business days before the send date to ensure there is enough time for Content and Marketing Programs Manager's (MPM) review and set up workflow.
Anyone in the company can add suggestions, but the Marketing Program Manager in charge of the newsletter program (see division of MPM duties) will determine the final content of the newsletter. As a rule, we try to have a good balance of content, with a variety of blog posts, webcast landing pages, and product/company updates. The newsletter on the 25th will always lead with the release post for that month.
Other Newsletter
To request a newsletter to be sent to an audience outside the newsletter subscribers , please create an issue in the Digital Marketing Programs project, using the Newsletter issue template.
Newsletter requests should be submitted no less than 5 business days before the intended send date to ensure there is enough time for Content and Marketing Programs Manager's (MPM) review and set up workflow.
We are happy to sponsor events and meet-ups where a marketing benefit exists, subject to approval by Field Marketing Managers. These sponsorships may be in cash or in kind, depending on individual circumstances.
Organizational or project sponsorships may also be considered where a marketing benefit exists. Typically, these sponsorships will be in kind - e.g., developer time commitments, or subsidized / free GitLab licenses.
Cash sponsorship of projects or organizations may be considered only in exceptional cases - for example, if a project or organization that GitLab depends on is struggling to survive financially.
We use Slack internally as a communication tool. The Marketing channels are as follows:
#marketing: General marketing channel. Don't know where to ask a question? Start here.#community-advocates: Community Advocate channel when other people are covering#cfp: All call for speakers will be posted here.#content: Questions about blog posts, webcasts, the newsletter or other marketing content? This is the place to ask.#community-relations: A channel for the developer relations team to collaborate.#digital-marketing: Channel for all advertising, website analytic and general digital programs.#docs: Technical writing and documentation questions? This is your room.#events: Everything you want to know about events.#fieldmarketing: Discuss, ask questions, stay up-to-date on events that are being organized by Field Marketing#gitlab-pages: Where we discuss everything related to GitLab Pages.#lead-questions: If there is a question regarding lead routing, scoring, etc.#marketing-design: Discuss, feedback, and share ideas on Marketing Design here.#marketing_programs: Discuss, ask questions, stay up-to-date on campaigns and events that are being organized by the Marketing Program Managers#mktgops: Marketing Ops communication channel for questions and project updates#outreach: Having issues with Outreach? Ask here first.#product-marketing: Discuss, feedback related to product news, features and vision#sdr_amer: Americas team (North, Latin and South) all segnents#sdr_amer_commercial: Americas team (North, Latin and South) Commercial segment only#sdr_apac: Asia Pacific SDR channel - all segments#sdr_emea: Europe, Middle East and Africa all segments#sdr_emea_commercial: Europe, Middle East and Africa Commercial segment only#sdr_global: Worldwide SDR team channel#sdr_global_commercial: Worldwide SDR Commercial team channel#sdr_enablement: Training channel for Enablement managers to post updates and discuss best practices#sdr_amer_east: Enterprise SDRs for Americas East (formerly NORAM - US East)#sdr_amer_central: Enterprise SDRs for Americas Central (formerly NORAM - US Central)#sdr_amer_west: Enterprise SDRs for Americas West (formerly NORAM - US West)#sdr-conversations: place for SDR team brainstorm & sharing of ideas#social: Twitter, Facebook, and other social media questions?#support: Ask any and all technical questions here for a quick response.#sfdc-users: Having issues with SFDC? Ask here first.#swag: Request or question regarding swag.#twitter: Use this channel to suggest we tweet about something.#website: Discuss topics related to website redesign project