Marketing Strategy and Analytics supports the entire Marketing team to develop and execute a Global Marketing Strategy working with Marketing Leadership and GTM teams, as well as owning the overall measurement strategy for GitLab marketing working with the data team.
We are a small team with a leader and data analysts.
Slack channels
We can be reached via our own #mktg-strat-perf channel, although we also monitor the general #marketing channel and #mktgops. We attempt to avoid direct messages where possible as it discourages collaboration.
Office Hours
Every 2 weeks MS&A holds office hours where all are welcome to ask questions on any marketing reporting questions. We use an agenda to track questions and will be present even if the agenda is blank.
If you have a question related to marketing reporting, this is a great informal place to ask.
We use milestones to create 2 week sprints. Below are links to our project within GitLab.com and our a view of our current and upcoming milestones.
The team works from issues and issue boards. If you are needing our assistance with any project, please open an issue and use the ~MktgSandP::0 - To Be Triaged label anywhere within the GitLab repo. Prior to opening a new issue, feel free to reach out to one of us to see if there is already a related issue that you can add your comments to.
With Agile Delivery being one of the solutions that GitLab (as a product) addresses, the Marketing Strategy team aims to follow many of the agile methodologies. To help us in that effort, please create any Marketing Strategy issues in the following format.
Note: This format is the Agile user story format and helps the issue-requester (you) and the Strategy team by clearly stating what as well as why for each request and concern.
Format: As a _____ (role in marketing), I would like to ____________(need), so that ________________(reason).
Mktg Strategy uses a local issue board within the Marketing project.
Mktg Strategy uses the Fibonnacci sequence when creating issue weights. We start with a weight of 2, smaller is too simple for an issue. Similarly, we break any issue larger than 13 into an epic.
In order to categorize various related issues, we make use of epics to help each team member organize their work, especially when it crosses multiple milestones. If it is a Mktg Strategy epic, we will add the In Epic label to it, so that we can easily see that it is part of an epic on our kanban board.
We use labels for two purposes:
The Mktg Strategy team works in two week sprints/iterations which are tracked as Milestones at the GitLab.com level. We use the same interval dates used by Mktg Ops, Sales Ops and Sales Systems. Each individual contributor (IC) is responsible for adding issues to the milestone that will be completed in the two week time frame. If needed, the IC will separate the main issue into smaller pieces that are workable segments of the larger request.
The Mktg Strategy team generally creates just one milestone beyond the current iteration, so at any given time there will be the current milestone and upcoming milestone. Any other issue that is not included will be added into future milestones &/or added as work is completed in the current milestone.
If there are handbook updates that need to be made as a result of work done in a given milestone, a separate MR should be included in that milestone.
The Marketing Strategy team has continued our experiment with MOps on 2020-04-20 to commit to no internal meetings one day of the week. Now the entire Marketing team has moved to Focus Fridays. Please try not to schedule meetings for team members on Fridays, so they can devote time for deep work in milestone-related issues.
Periodically Marketing Strategy and Analytics becomes aware of significant changes that affect overall data and reporting. To capture these, we have a shared Operational timeline of events with the MktgOps team. They primarily add any process changes to this document as they occur. It has been a great communication tool, especially as we look back at metrics in the past and can track the changes that were made.
For information regarding the tech stack at GitLab, please visit the Tech Stack Applications page of the Business Operations handbook where we maintain a comprehensive table of the tools used across the company. Below are tools that are currently owned and managed by Marketing Strategy and Analytics.
To request access to Bizible or Allocadia, please follow the access request process as outlined in the business operations handbook.
If you are working with a contractor or consultant that requires access to one of these tools, please follow the professional services access request process as outlined in the procurement handbook.
| GL Code | Account Name | Purpose |
|---|---|---|
| 6060 | Software Subscriptions | All software subscriptions |
| 6100 | Marketing | Reserved for Marketing GL accounts |
| 6110 | Marketing Site | All agency fees and contract work intended to improve the marketing site |
| 6120 | Advertising | All media buying costs as well as agency fees and software subscriptions related to media buying |
| 6130 | Events | All event sponsorships, booth shipping, event travel, booth design, event production as well as agency fees and software costs related to events |
| 6135 | Swag | Any swag related expense |
| 6140 | All 3rd party email sponsorships as well as agency fees and software costs related to mass email communications and marketing automation | |
| 6150 | Brand | All PR, AR, content, swag and branding costs |
| 6160 | Prospecting | Not used - All costs related to prospecting efforts |
As is typical of any marketing organization, we often look at our Campaigns to see how they are doing. The Campaigns and Programs Page shows all of the campaign types, their progression statuses and cost tracking.
Similarly, we are interested in theInitial Source of a given prospect. It is the first "known" touch attribution or when a website visitor becomes a known name in our database. The list of currently supported values for initial source can be found on the Mktg Ops page.
The Lead & Contact objects in Salesforce have unified statuses with set definitions.
We use Bizible for tracking times when there is engagement with our prospects. Lots of details about how that works is on the Bizible page itself.
Google Analytics data is used to gain insights about the visitors and their behavior on our websites. The web traffic analysis data catalog provides details about how to leverage GitLab specific web data (key terms, definitions, KPIs, caveats, data structure)
