GitLab Weekly Inbound Marketing Recap, 18 Feb 2021

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From YouTube: Inbound Marketing Weekly Recap 2021-02-18

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Learn more about the Inbound Marketing team in the GitLab handbook https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/marketing/inbound-marketing/

A

Hey welcome to the inbound marketing team, weekly recap and demo day. uh It is thursday yeah it's thursday february, 18th of 2021 uh and we're going to get started with moments of insight. So this is something where we're sharing something. We were surprised to learn this week that might benefit others. It could be about life, work, customers, product leadership, coding, anything, and I think I am actually first up here. So um I wrote this in the agenda um last week.

A

I was just thinking or feeling I think feeling is more accurate about like what handbook first really feels like for me. um You know uh as I've been joining and onboarding and soon that will be less true and I will just no longer be like fresh, fresh and new, um but like as I was uh you know a month or two ago I was like really excited about handbook.

A

First, it was like, like super engaging to me, I like to write I like to read- um and I spend a lot of time like in markdown files for documentation as it is so I was like cool. This is gonna, be a great way to work, and then um I think I hit some um some road bumps as speed bumps as I like started to sift through all of the stuff like being handbook.

A

First means that, like everything is there and curation is hard and navigation can be challenging um by the nature of the volume, and so I was like okay like here are some harder parts about it, and I was like. I don't know what to do with this um and then last week I was finishing up. I was reading one of the book recommendations from the handbook, high output management, and they were talking about matrix organizations and they like the book, which I know inspired. A lot of the gitlab organizational philosophy was like matrix.

A

Organizations are good and I was like wait, hold up heal up, so they weren't, like. I wonder where this divergence came from and then I was like okay cool I'll, just like control f through the markdown files and look for matrix organizations and, like I found it and like I found not only the handbook entry, but I found a video recording, and this was something about handbook first, that specifically um I'd been struggling with about. Like all the video recordings like, I don't, learn super well by like watching a video.

A

It's like not my first thing to do, and so I've been like. Oh there's all these videos that I feel like I'm never gonna watch, but then I had a very specific application where I was like. I really do want to hear sid talk about this, because I know that it's like a divergence from what I would expect, and so I think just like the thing that I learned here um very specifically was you know.

A

I got this resolution on how handbook first plays out and and it's sure, there's a flood of information- there's a lot of it, but it's like there when you need it um and it's very useful when you've got like a specific question. In mind, right, like I got this answer, I didn't have to stop anyone's day. I didn't have to like start a whole conversation in slack. I certainly could have if I wanted to but like there was a video of people talking about it right, and so I got like it was 15 minutes answered.

A

My own question learned some more stuff um and- and that's all you know also moments of insights- learned a whole bunch about gitlab's approach to matrix organizations or avoiding them, and why um but yeah this was just like really. It was very salient for me um getting a practical exercise and how this how this plays out- uh and I think it's really um it hits home for me because of the technical documentation that I spend so much time in is like you, wouldn't read technical documentation from cover to cover.

A

I mean you could um and but like it's better. If you've got a goal in mind right, it's you get more out of it. So um yeah just learning and feeling that so um someone has a bullet point under me brand gap. But I don't.

B

Know who it is that's my I forgot to put my initials but hello. um I have something to share about the brand gap. um I have some slides there if you don't want to buy the book, but it's essentially like trying to figure out how to connect like business decision making to like design and strategy.

B

It's really really interesting, um especially if you work either as a business person or as a creative, but like the big takeaway for me, is what a brand is and trying to like define what that is, and it's like, I, like their classification of figuring out that it's a person's gut feeling about something, and it's like it makes the clear differentiation that a brand lives with the people's like in the customer's head.

B

More so than like what you say a brand is um I find that very insightful um there's a lot of like little things that you can do to figure out what that is, but I just find that way of thinking about it very tangible, and I like that, a lot. It also, I think, helps elevate, creative thinkers to think more with a business mindset and it helps kind of align those two, those two things together. I recommend reading that book. Reading the slides, I link them in our agenda, but yeah.

B

That's it for me off to danielle.

C

Thanks abby, that looks like a great one. I want to read that, but remember everyone. You can expense books as uh for work, so please do continue to learn. It's awesome um great. I have the metric section today. So it's the beginning of the quarter. I'm going to go ahead and share my screen, so we can just make sure. We've all seen the same info so first of all, I've linked to the parent, epic I'll make sure to link to this every week.

C

But this is the parent, epic we're using to organize all the marketing okrs, and I want to shout out to becky and michael who are both not on the call today for various reasons, but they worked really hard to help us get a good structure here. That would work across team, and I think we know we're still iterating on this.

C

But one of the things we really wanted to do was move away from having key results and metrics kind of at the top level and instead having themes because for other people in other teams, when they read this, it's a little hard to understand why we would care about inquiries or website traffic. If you don't understand what our objectives are, so this is organized in a way. That's meant to be more user-friendly across the company and if you haven't read it, it did get reorganized right at the beginning of the quarter.

C

um Take a moment to check this out. This will help you understand the context when you get requests from other team members. We've also done a little bit of a revamp for the metrics, so we have two key results. One is around inquiries and the other one is around traffic. So this is a refresher inquiries are email addresses that are unique, they're different from mqls, because it is possible that an inquiry wouldn't qualify like you know.

C

We use lead scoring here, and so it's possible that we wouldn't want to say that an inquiry is marketing qualified and this team doesn't have quite as much control over that. So demand gen currently owns the qualification criteria, which is great um so so far we are just absolutely crushing it. Our goal for this month was 9183 inbound inquiries, we're already at 7 399 with over a week left in the month, so we're on pace for 137 attainment, which rocks love to see that trend continue because the goals are going to go up.

C

So we want to get that momentum new trials, I'm going to break this out, because this is a screenshot from a bigger dashboard and they're all linked here. But this is a company level visible metric now. So, in addition to us caring about inquiries, the company wants to make sure we're healthy on trials, and anyone here, who's been part of hunting down. Brokenness in trials knows that like when this breaks for a few days everybody kind of freaks out. So we want to have a lot of attention on it.

C

This links to a beautiful dashboard- I'm just going to take a moment to highlight todd, also highlighted this in his presentation just before, but if you hit the back button and you go to the dashboard, this is coming from.

C

This is quite a labor of love, because every single one of these has to be charted and it has to be tested against all our different data sources, but even more importantly, you can break this out by the part of the business, so each part of the business has its own metrics, so you could say I want to understand just pubsec or you know any of these filters.

C

I probably shouldn't spend a ton of time on this, but I could say I want to understand just growth in pubsec and then I can see a completely new view.

C

Anyone who's built these dashboards before knows this is just really challenging to get right, and also this gives all of you the ability to really deeply understand our business through metrics. So just want to make sure you know this is here and available to you. um We are also on track um this little blue dot is a little hard to see here, but it is the pace, the target to date, and we are just right there at that which is awesome and then down to web traffic. I've got two different screenshots for you.

C

The first one is around overall website traffic, so our goal is still to increase overall traffic 20 year over year, not just inbound, and so, if we look at overall, we are a little bit behind pace and this needs attention. Unfortunately, we don't have quite as much control over the non-inbound channels, so that's more of a partnership with other teams in a conversation that we can have with duncan with the man gen.

C

But I do want to point out that inbound traffic, we are very much on track at plus, 19.4 year-over-year, um and I think you know we're seeing we're matching and exceeding more months than we had in the past with the blue line is the current year and the orange line is the past year. So we'll see if that continues. um I think the seo changes that we've seen the improvements there are hugely impactful and that's probably the biggest driver.

C

And lastly, I just want to highlight there is a beautiful blog, metrics dashboard that vicky and rebecca- and I think some others have been working on and it has a very cool new metric available inside of it. So, in addition to knowing top blog posts and overall blog performance, we can see the trial submissions that are associated to each one of these posts. So we can understand, you know which posts are actually driving inquiries and helping us understand.

C

You know things we might want to double down on. So, for example, it looks like this is a product announcement and generated a lot of trials, and so we might start thinking like. Oh each time we have a product announcement post, that's a juicy opportunity to help us hit our goal.

C

So all of these are linked in the agenda docs, so you can check them out at any time and going forward. I probably won't always be the one giving the metrics update, but those are the metrics that will update throughout the quarter and with that I will hand it over to siri to lead, show and tell.

D

Hello, everyone welcome to your favorite portion of this call the show-and-tell section. Today you will be hearing from val first val all you.

E

Hey and I thought it was going to be all you- sorry wait a minute, um so this is siri and I have a little partnership going and wanted to let you all know to get ready for something fun that we really haven't done before in content marketing, which is, um we are doing 60.

E

Second, videos that answer the burning questions of the day like what is a devops platform, because you all know that you stay up what nights wondering yourself, what the hell is it, so we have the fabulous surrey as our on-screen presence and she is going to be answering questions like what is sassed. What is dast, um what is gitops? What is the devops platform in these 60-second videos that we will be sharing on social you'll, find them on the topics pages?

E

They just will be popping up everywhere, so this is kind of a val surrey sort of off the books project. But um siri we've come up with a great phrase. This is bree's favorite thing 60 seconds with siri, so anyway get excited because we're excited and um can't wait to show you guys this. We just at this point are in the script writing phase. I think siri linked the scripts there, so you can take a peek at our fabulousness, our screenwriting fabulousness, because you guys didn't know that we all have like a secret.

E

You know other career where we're like famous and writing screens like that kind of thing. So anyway, moving on I'm done, who I don't know who's next. Sorry back to you.

D

Thank you uh so just really quickly. This is all val's brainchild, so the idea of doing 60 second videos, um it's all hurt. So thank you so much val for having this new idea for the content team jess. Please tell us about tree testing user research.

F

Yeah, let me just share my screen, so we're planning on doing some updates to the navigation uh design wise and I figured it'd be a good time to actually see if the information in our navigation makes sense to our customers the way that it's formatted right now. So it did something called tree testing, and this is it right here.

F

Basically, they have a task, it's something really simple! uh So if you want to test drive to get that product before purchasing it, where would you find that and they start the task and they can kind of go through our um our navigation and kind of find it, um and so this is what I linked into the doc, and this is the results of the first round of uh navigation testing, and basically, these are all the the 12 questions we asked you can see. The red ones are ones that didn't go over very well.

F

People weren't able to find those things. The ones with more green were easier to find, and so what we can do with that information um you can actually drop down and analyze them even more so like this first one people were really struggling to find gitlab professional services, um and if you open this pie tree here, it'll show you something like this. So we can see you know.

F

The happy path is the screen path, but only one person got there and people are really struggling to find uh that specific thing and what you can do with that is, you can say, like you, can see like where the first thing that clicked was so there's ways to say like okay, everyone seems to think this thing belongs in resources, but when they get there, it's not there. So maybe that's where we should move it or if it is in resources, they might click there, but they still can't find it.

F

Then, maybe it's not worded correctly. Maybe we need to rethink about how it's worded. um So I took all the analysis from the first round and developed another navigation just to test it out ran it last night. Some things went better.

F

Some things don't work so we'll still kind of iterate on this, but just as an example um in the first round of uh testing um what we asked like people, if you're working from home, where did you find information on working from home and uh we wanted them to find the all remote section and a lot of people uh said some people were able to find it, but a lot of people were like. I wish this was just said like working from home or something similar to that.

F

So in the second iteration I called it working remotely and it went from 40 findability to 90 findability, so, just like, like small tweak, was able to uh find a lot more information just check the chat, real, quick yeah anyway. So uh that's it for me and I'll have more information as we go down the week and kind of get it all sorted out.

D

Thanks jess that was so interesting tyler. Let's look at your demo.

A

Cool that was so cool. I just I'm going to take some of my time to say that that is awesome. I'm also going to uh so here's what I got.

A

I've been working on this, um so I am working on the blog template uh that we're putting together that um tina designed and um the big thing that I'm doing the thing I wanna show is like how I'm building this out, I'm going to do high level overview, but I'm going to do a more detailed, deep dive for developers to show like how I'm conceptualizing, using like using slippers to build our design system in storybook and like in an isolated space and what the integration looks like.

A

um So what you can see here is the figma file. Thank you for all of this excellent documentation and in figma you can see. There's these different. You know pressure tests, different blocks, different viewport sizes and variations right.

B

Are you supposed to be sharing your screen? Oh.

A

B

You're, not okay,.

A

Thank you, oh you know um it like there. It is okay, it like highlighted, uh and then I like, didn't confirm it. So here we are, I'm sharing the screen now um this is the figma file um and, as you can see, there's like a bunch of different variations which are super useful right. um One of the challenges with building out these variations, especially if you're like building it into the live site, is that you have to contend with all the stuff going on the live site. It takes a long time to live.

A

Reload and deployments can be a little bit. There's like other stuff going on right and like we really want to look at all this in isolation, so we can use storybook um and we've previewed this before. But this is a branch I have with some additional stuff, so um I'll zoom in on sort of the top part here where you can see like these svgs and the breadcrumbs and the header, and so as I've been working this I said: okay, like let's split them out, those are their own components, and so I have these.

A

um I call it decoration right and I can define different stories, so here's the default, here's background to background three breadcrumbs with different. This is for the pressure test two. This would split into two rows on mobile, which we can play around with here right, uh which is pretty cool, and then so. All of this is like fully defined by us, and it gives us these the nice thing.

A

Is it spits out this html, which is portable, so what's going to end up happening, is we can port this over into whatever templating makes sense to use on about.getlab.com, eventually we'll be able to just directly integrate it? So all the work that happens here will also end up in the marketing site directly.

A

For now, as an intermediary step, we get the components that we need in a way that is consumable by the marketing site in an easy way. It uh sort of forces us to think in like good software engineering practices. It forces us to isolate these things, to make them do one specific thing and I'll show you where it comes together. So we'll have these templates and you can see I've got this decoration here.

A

I've got the breadcrumbs and then I've got sort of the start of the title block that you would see there and then we're looking at the right side is just the code for this template and you can kind of see what you see in this html matches a little bit here. These are the components um the nice thing is so like this.

A

This svg is like a bunch of stuff in the markup, but it's a one-liner in the template, and so if I wanted to drop another decoration here, but I wanted to make it say, like decoration number three, it shows up right there, so we can do a lot of like playing around a lot of demonstration.

A

We get the ability to access these in controls as well, so you won't have to necessarily edit code so designers like what I'll end up being able to do is I can you know, come back to tina and say: hey, let's compare these, we can like tweak the settings in the storybook, and this is all live on. The mr and the view app uh and there's so much more. I am like the mayor of stokes lahoma on this.

A

It is so exciting to me, so I will stop and give back the time uh to the next folks, which is tina.

D

Thanks tyler, I'm super excited to see this come to life, um so I'm gonna share my screen. Yes, I'm sharing my screen, um so this is a new page design for a solutions landing page um template for continuous integration.

D

um You can take a look at the figma file, which is linked so you'll see a few new design components here. Some improvements on our cards and this page will be replacing this page, so um a huge refresh um in terms of design and in content and speaking of content. I just wanted to give a shout out to ash.

D

She did a lot of the content work on this, the structure, the wireframes um and shout out to brand also for giving us all these assets uh to work with, because it really helps put the the page together.

D

um I'm gonna stop my share. That was it um I'm leaving shout outs, there's no one after me, no um so on to shout outs. So this is um an opportunity to express gratitude within our team and across the company to people who were highlights of your week. um Who's first uh tyler.

A

Hello, um so my shout outs go to both uh brandon and becky um brandon, specifically put together some really great sprint board kanban boards for digital experience, team, which is making it so much easier to use issues and use boards and dog food. The products like uh we ought to be doing, and I've already learned so much more about the product and it's been it's been great.

A

um I've also like I'm no longer using my other task management software like I am like basically ready to go like all in on gitlab for my day-to-day task management stuff with this. So thank you brandon for doing that. Work um and uh extra. Thank you to becky for all the education on like how to get that together, um really really appreciate it. I dropped a link to the process, video that, like made a lot of things, click for me um and that just like yeah awesome, transformative up next is danielle.

C

Awesome yeah. I just want to shout out to two folks who aren't here because they're being awesome as ceo shadows, lauren and shane, you are doing a great job. We see all of your work and the ceo and ceo of shadow slack rooms, we miss you and you represent us so well. Next up is.

B

Javi wanted to quickly shout out tyler. I link a lot of things in slack a lot of content.

B

He actually goes out and does the things that I talk about um that I'm too early in my career to actually like implement all the things all the way. So it's it's awesome to have like someone to talk through those things which has been very, very rewarding for me and I think rewarding for the whole team in general. So we're happy to have you.

C

All right, well that takes us to the end of the agenda. Thank you. Everyone have a wonderful rest of your week and we'll see you all next week, bye.