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Corporate Marketing at GitLab

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Welcome to the Corporate Marketing Handbook

The Corporate Marketing team includes Corporate Events, Corporate Communications (PR, Executive Communications and Social Media), All-Remote Marketing, and the Community Team. Corporate Marketing is ultimately responsible for creating awareness and driving top-of-funnel interest in GitLab. We do this by driving conversations in the communications channels that accelerate our objectives and by developing an integrated communication strategy that is executed globally.

How We Work

Project Management

There is an initiative underway to simplify Project Management across all of Marketing.

In the meantime, we have implemented a few practices to help us get organized:

OKRs

Each quarter, we create cascading OKRs from:

Most recent OKRs

GitLab brand

GitLab empowers everyone through knowledge access, job access, and the DevOps platform. This is captured in our GitLab brand.

Brand personality

GitLab's brand has a personality that is reflected in everything we do. It doesn't matter if we are hosting a fancy dinner with fortune 500 CIOs, at a hackathon, or telling our story on about.gitlab.com…across all our communication methods, and all our audiences, GitLab has a personality that shows up in how we communicate.

Our personality is built around four main characteristics.

  1. Human: We write like we talk. We avoid buzzwords and jargon, and instead communicate simply, clearly, and sincerely. We treat people with kindness.
  2. Competent: We are highly accomplished, and we communicate with conviction. We are efficient at everything we do.
  3. Quirky: We embrace diversity of opinion. We embrace new ideas based on their merit, even if they defy commonly held norms.
  4. Humble: We care about helping those around us achieve great things more than we care about our personal accomplishments.

These four characteristics work together to form a personality that is authentic to GitLab team-members, community, and relatable to our audience. If we were quirky without being human we could come across as eccentric. If we were competent without being humble we could come across as arrogant.

GitLab has a higher purpose to make it so that everyone can contribute. We want to inspire a sense of adventure in those around us so that they join us in contributing to making that mission a reality.

Tone of Voice

See Brand Guidelines.

Design

Read more about our Brand Guidelines in the Brand Activation handbook.

About

GitLab the community

GitLab is an open source project with a large community of contributors.

GitLab the company

GitLab Inc. is a company based on the GitLab open source project. GitLab Inc. is an active participant in our community (see our stewardship of GitLab CE for more information), as well as offering GitLab, a product (see below).

GitLab the product

GitLab is a complete DevOps platform, delivered as a single application. See the product elevator pitch for additional messaging.

Speakers

For resources for GitLab team members who are planning on attending events or speaking at conferences, see Speaker Resources. To join the GitLab Speakers Bureau, see the Developer Evangelist page on the Speakers Bureau.

Corporate Events

Mission Statement

To learn more about the Corporate Events team, its purview, and how we work, please see the Corporate Event Marketing at GitLab handbook page.

See our handbook page for more details.

Sponsored Event Tiers

Sponsored Events are categorized into (3) Tiers at GitLab. The Tier of the show is determined by the sponsorship level, thought leadership opportunities, size of the booth, stakeholders attending and if the audience is our key demographic. Depending on the booths size they are staffed accordingly:

1. Tier 1: Typically uses our 20 x 20 Tier 1 booth structure, which has (4) demo stations, lightning talk area, meeting area, host counter, activation (example: VR experience), & coding challenge desk. Ideally 20-30 staff members will be asked to work at the booth in order to adequately staff all the shifts and ensure coverage in all the zones. 
For Tier 1 shows, we may add-on an additional Activation Zone space that will feature other activities. Some examples GitLab has done in that past include: a caricature artist, code challenge, charging stations, or tabletop games. 
2. Tier 2: Will either be a smaller version of our Tier 1 booth or a turnkey booth 10 x 10 - 10 x 20 foot print. Around 6 - 10 staff members will be requested to staff the demo stations, activation, host counter & assist with other onsite activities such as sessions, photography or an ancillary event.
3. Tier 3: This size sponsorship does not require a big lift from Corporate Events and only 4-6 staff members will be needed onsite to manage two shifts that are properly staffed and can handle 1 or 2 demo stations and a host counter. These shows have no other activities going on such as sessions, meetings or an ancillary event.

Staff Process

  1. **Create the Staffing Issue when the epic is created with the show overview & GitLab policy to attend with checklist for staff members to complete & get manager approval. **
  2. Consider the audience of the show as well as the show theme/focus before reaching out to departments to ask for staffing help.
    1. Example: if it’s a Security focused show like Black Hat, maybe a Security team member from Product or a TMM with Security expertise should attend.

  3. Once you have taken into consideration the audience and focus of the show, you can start reaching out to managers and VPs via group slack channels to staff the show. Try to be specific in your request with travel dates,details of the show, and how many team members from the group that you're needing.

    1. Example: we’re looking for 2 TMMs to help with Security demos at Black Hat in Las Vegas on August 10-11. Can you see who is available on your team?

  4. Once you have built a list, start tagging in the team members to complete the staff checklist in the comments and ask them to tag in their manager for approval.

  5. Once the team member completes their checklist, slack DM them their registration code to register for the show with additional information for booking hotels and flights.

  6. After you have a full staff list and all those who are expected to attend fully registered, you can start building out the staff schedule to assign booth shifts. Booth shifts typically last 4 hours and are split between AM and PM shifts.

  7. Once the staff list is full, make sure to send out invites for:

    1. Kick Off call (ideally 6-8 weeks out)
    2. Recurring staff sync meetings every other week for show updates & weekly once 4 weeks out for Tier 1 & 2 shows
    3. Know Before You Go (KBYG) 2-3 business days prior to travel
  8. Once the staff schedule is finalized, send out calendar invites to the actual booth shifts about 1 week before day 1 of the show.

Swag/ Merchandise Handling

See more details on handling and fulfillment specific on the merchandise handling page. All swag requests, creation and vendor selection is handled by the Brand Strategy team.

FAQ Writing Process

FAQ Examples:

Virtual Event FAQ Example - 2022 Virtual SKO

In-Person FAQ - 2022 Contribute

External Facing FAQ Example - 2022 Commit

The purpose of a FAQ is to provide answers to questions that event attendees might have and to provide a SSoT (Single Source of Truth) for people to look to for answers.

We would highly recommend referencing previous event FAQs for a template and clear concise precedent that was set.

  1. Start with identifying your audience.
    1. Are they internal team members?
    2. Are they customers?
    3. Are they first time attendees?
    4. Are they mostly GitLab users/customers?
    5. Does this include speakers?
    6. Do you need to have internal FAQs and an external facing one as well?
  2. Once you consider your audience, this will dictate the level of contributors and review you’ll need for the FAQs before publishing. Certain events will require more contributors and reviews than others. As an example, Contribute will need legal and People Group review for team member travel
  3. Outline your FAQs into digestible categories of information. Suggested categories include Registration, Travel, Who to contact with questions, CFP/speaker information, Health and Safety. These are some of the essential categories you will likely need.
  4. Decide where the FAQs will live, for example in an issue or a GoogleDoc or maybe on a public Website. Confirm SSoT so that only one place needs to be updated. This will likely be determined based on your audience.
  5. Keep your FAQ iterable. Once posted, this is a living document. As questions are asked, make sure to add relevant items to the FAQ so it's updated.
  6. Don’t assume that people will understand the information. People from various cultures, ages, and be understanding. Lowest common denominator - will a kindergartener be able to figure out the directions? Assume someone knows nothing! Is the information incomplete? What else is missing?

All-Remote Marketing

Please consult the All-Remote Marketing Handbook.

Corporate Communications (Public Relations, Social Media, Executive Communications and Internal Communications)

Please consult the Corporate Communications Handbook.

Social Marketing and Social Media

Please consult the Social Marketing Handbook.

OKR Archive

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Return to the main GitLab Marketing Handbook.

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