Field marketing includes events, event marketing, sponsorships, and swag production. The role of field marketing is to identify and support critical sales and marketing opportunities through field marketing avenues and to bring the GitLab brand to life.
Events
To find out what upcoming events GitLab and our resellers will be involved in please visit our Events Page. If you have any questions or an event suggestion for us please email events@gitlab.com.
Event Goals
Sales Acceleration
Engaging with existing customers
New growth opportunities
Demand
Education
Market Intelligence
Test out new messaging or positioning
Product Direction
Brand
Awareness
Thought Leadership
Evangelism - Talk to as many people as we can about GitLab to drive awareness. Our presence should be friendly, knowledgeable, and genuine. We are all the brand and we want to bring that bran dot life and be memorable.
Hiring - Always be recruiting. See someone doing a great job of evangelism for another product? Ask that person to grab a coffee.
Partnership - Organizations adding support for GitLab and/or shipping GitLab with their offering.
Event Lifecycle
Evaluating Potential Events
Price/ Budget and what will the ROI be.
Location- tops cities for developers and can we tag on another event or customer meetings?
Attendees- who’s attending? Is it the right audience for us? Enterprise vs Community. Will there be decision makers in attendance?
Size- try to reach a large audience.
What will our presence be? Who can/ can we go, participate, speak, booth?
We want to emphasize enterprise events but also remember our community.
For GitLabbers Attending Events/ Speaking
If there is an event you would like to attend, are attending, speaking, or have proposed a talk and you would like support from GitLab to attend this event the process goes as follows:
Contact your manager for approval to attend/ speak.
After getting approval from your manager, please add your event to the events page and subit merge request to Emily Kyle.
If you would like addtional GitLab materials such as swag please fill out the Event Collateral Request Form and someone from marketing will get back to you to follow up on request.
Suggesting We Sponsor an Event
If there is an event or conference you think would be a perfect fit for us to get involved in or sponsor based on the "evelauating and event" criteria above, the process for submitting that suggestion goes as follows:
Please only request event support/ sponsorship if your engagement fits the following criteria:
The event will further business aims of GitLab (see event goals).
The event has an audience of 250+ people (the exception being meetups- see below for more info on meetups)
The event is a more than a month away.
If your event fits the criteria above and you would like support from marketing, create an issue in the marketing project using the Events template.
Fill out any relevant information you have and tell us what potential growth opportunities can be gained from investing in this event. Someone from Marketing will be in touch about to discuss your request further within one week.
How we decide who attends which events?
Determine how many staffers we need and if the event is more enterprise focused or community. Enterprise- we try to send more marketing/ sales. Regional Sales Managers select staffer sbased on who has most potential contacts in area or going to event. Community- send more developers, subject matter experts, and dev advocates.
See who is in the area who might be a good fit for the audience.
We lean towards those who might be thought leaders, specialists, or more social in that specific sector.
We aim to bring minimal staff to keep costs and disruption to normal workflow low.
Call for papers are posted in the CFP Channel on Slack. Follow channel for updates on speaking opportunities.
If you do not have any GitLab swag and are going to an event, notify the Field Marketing Manager as soon as possible so we can try and get you a GitLab shirt to wear and some stickers to hand out. We generally need about a month of lead time to get anything, even stickers.
Pre-Event
Promoting Events Social
Use social media to post as soon as committed to attending an event.
Possible Trageted Social Ads (media source depends on target audience and attendance goals). Timing depends on call to action.
Schedule tweets one week before event and one to go out at event promioting presences and any relevant content.
Event Outreach
Email signatures- starting 6 to 4 weeks before event for those attending event and XDR team.
Get attendee list and contact customers and prospects before event using talking points from content with goal of setting up meetings/ demos at the event. Invite them to anything specific we have happening at or around event.
If there is not an attendee list do "warm" outreach to prospects in event location or area of interest. Invite them to lunch or coffe or to booth at event.
SDRs/ BDRs will help set up in person meetings to occur at event.
Event Content/ Design
Assess indidual event content needs. Most events will need…
Social copy + design
Sopcial ad or InMail copy + design
Pre and post event talking points for sales outreach
After event wrap up email
Additonal blog or content to support event strategy
Create issue for event in Marketing Project on gitlab.com (use events issue template).
Set up event campiagn in Salesforce.
Set up post event follow up campaigns in Marketo.
After Event Survey created and email template ready to go out first work day back after event. Includes details on lead followup and how to add business card details.
Social media to go out during event scheduled.
Plan for what to do with any remaining swag/ collateral.
At Events
Employee Booth Guidelines
If you see someone standing alone, talk to them.
Do not stand around and talk to other GitLab coworkers. Talk to people you don’t know.
Do not sell; generate interest to learn more. Attendees have a lot of info they are digesting, so get their info and some key info to follow up on.
Give out swag and and documentation we have!
During slow times, don’t be afraid to walk around to other booths and talk to people. Make friends we could partner with, create interesting content with, or just have friendly beers.
The booth should be clean and organized at all times.
Document any product feedback you get.
If press comes to the event feel free to put them in contact with CMO.
Bring your business cards and a plan to take notes on encounters.
Suggested Attire
Wear at least one piece of branded GitLab clothing. If you prefer to wear something dressier than the GitLab branded items available that is also acceptable. Feel free to wear our sticker on your shirt.
If the conference is business casual try some nice jeans (no holes) or dress pants.
Clean, closed-toed shoes please.
A smile.
Networking Tips
Listen.
Ask questions.
Don't interrupt.
Everyone gets shy sometimes, be the brave one and introduce yourself to new people.
Events lap top (for slide show) + charger + dongles
Backup power banks
Gum
One pagers + cheat sheets
Booth Staffing
Ideally booth shifts will be around 3 hours or less.
Staff more people during peak traffic hours.
Avoid shift changes during peak hours.
Aim to staff booth with individuals with a variety of expertise and backgrounds- ideally technical and non-technical people from various departments should be paired.
Send out invites on the Events & Sponsorship calendar to booth staff with the following information:
Time and date of event, booth, and shift
Suggested attire
How he/she can find his/her ticket
Any instructions on using or locating lead scanner
Let them know of any contests happening
How to get a hold of you
Link to events handbook
Any relevant event set up or clean up
Post Event
Fill out after event survey.
Add event debrief to event issue in marketing project. The debrief should include the following if applicable:
Was the event valuable?
Would you go again/ should we go again?
Did we get good leads/ contacts?
Best questions asked and conversations
Was our sponsorship/ involvement successful?
How was the booth set up?
How was the booth staffing?
Did the booth get enough traffic?
Booth location and size
How did our swag go over?
Did we have enough/ too much?
Contests
Did the contest(s) effectively build our brand and connecting with our target audience?
Send all leads and contacts with any relevant notes on interaction to emily@gitlab.com to be added to salesforce campiagn. All leads gathered from event are categorized under specific event campaign.
Marketing will send out one email to new contacts met at event (ideally 3 business days within event close)
SDR team will pick up leads from uploaded list and beging outreach within first week of event close.
If you invited someone specific to an event and you own that contact, you will be expected to follow up with them. The SDR team will not touch this contact.
Meetups
We love and support Meetups. If you would like someone from the GitLab team to stop by your event or might be interested in having GitLab as a sponsor please email community@gitlab.com. Please note, we will be much more able to assist if given sufficient lead time (at least a month) to evaluate request, process payment, and produce and swag.
GitLab Meetups: Ideally, the first couple meetups should be run by GitLab employees, but once someone manages to have qa couple successive events, the meetup itself will live on. It is much harder to start new meetups versus maintaining existing ones. So we make an effort to support and keep existing events going.
Speaker Portal
Catalogue of talks and speaker briefs we have done or can do and their run times. Contact community@gitlab.com for access.
Swag
We aim to have our swag delight and/ or be useful.
We aim to make limited edition and themed swag for the community to collect. Bigger events will have custom tanuki stickers in small runs, only available at their specific event.
We aim to do swag in a way that doesn't take a lot of time to execute => self serve => web shop
We get a lot of requests to send swag, and we try to respond to them all. If you would like to get some GitLab swag for your team or happening, please see below for more info on submitting a swag.
Community requests: Email your request to sponsorships@gitlab.com. In your request please include the expected number of guests, the best shipping address, and phone number along with what kind of swag you are hoping for. The swag we have available can be found on our online store.
Internal GitLab swag ordering:
If you would like addtional GitLab materials for an event, such as swag, please fill out the Event Collateral Request Form and someone from marketing will get back to you to follow up on request.
For customer/ prospect swag anyone with access to Salesforce can send swag through Salesforce directly. Instructions on how to do so below:
Step 1: Create general task for whichever contact you want to send swag to. You need to create a task and save it before the "order swag" button will show up as an option in the task menu.
Step 2: Go into created and saved task and click the button that says "order swag".
Step 3: Previous step will bring up a printfrection page where you can order desired swag. (please note not all swag is listed in sfdc, for more options email emily@gitlab.com).
For orders of stickers in a quantity of 100 or greater, do not go through the swag store but rather use our Stickermule account or ping emily@gitlab.com. You will need the same information (address and order quantity). After placing the order, add the amount to the marketing budget spreadsheet.
