Digital Campaigns
Welcome to digital marketing at Sourcegraph! We’re thrilled you’ve stumbled upon our humble corner of the handbook. Let us show you around…
Digital campaigns all start with a project brief to ensure campaign strategy aligns with our overall marketing strategy and company strategy. We have two kinds of campaign brief templates:
All campaign briefs live in the Digital campaign project briefs folder. If you’re creating a new project brief, check to make sure it ends up in the correct spot!
Strategy
Paid digital programs at Sourcegraph generate demand through awareness and acquisition strategies:
- Awareness – get the message out about Sourcegraph and our products to developers worldwide
- Acquisition – deliver value through product sign-ups, demos, and other high-impact offers
For a full campaign calendar see the Digital Campaigns Calendar in Asana [internal-only]
Offers
We use a variety of CTAs, including:
- Gated content Continuous Developer Onboarding – designed to educate, move buyers through the buyer journey, and get new users into the Sourcegraph marketing universe
- Product trials Search Code, Deploy Locally, Sign-up for Sourcegraph – these are designed to increase product use, especially among new users, for both the local install and Cloud product
- Blog content – these campaigns offer educational content from the Sourcegraph blog to enable developers to increase their skills and think of Sourcegraph as a developer resource
- Testimonial content & case studies – testimonial quotes from customers and case study offers provide third-party credibility for both individual developers and their managers
Audiences
Audiences are heavily informed by personas and target account research, and campaign briefs ensure we don’t lose the plot along the way. We’re continually evolving how we segment and message audiences, testing and learning from microexperiments, particularly around use cases messaging. Want to know more about audiences, segmentation, or targeting? Ask the demand gen team!
For developer-focused campaigns, we speak directly to individual practitioners who are trying to solve specific problems that Sourcegraph can address (better code search, better code reviews, finding & fixing bugs faster, etc.)
For manager-focused campaigns, we speak to engineering leads and managers who may have larger organizational challenges, such as onboarding new team members, finding security vulnerabilities, moving from monolith to microservices, etc.
Goals
- Gated content campaigns seek to solve an identified problem for our audience while positioning Sourcegraph as a thought leader. They’re a key component of a give-get strategy, where we first offer something of value (knowledge about a problem, an exclusive peek into what successful peer companies are doing, etc.) and then ask for something small in return like an email and the opportunity to add someone to our nurture campaigns.
- Web-based awareness programs – when clickthrough ads are being served on developer-facing websites or networks, our goals are to see Sourcegraph website visitors (traffic) from those ads and multiple page visits/actions (engagements) taken by those visitors, which shows interest in learning more about Sourcegraph
- Podcast sponsorships and other sponsorships that don’t provide clickthrough opportunities – we consider these awareness campaigns only, as part of our overall demand creation efforts
- Acquisition campaigns designed to generate leads are measured by the number of leads created as a result of the campaign. A lead is created when a person does a high-intent action such as submitting a Contact Us / Request for Demo form, downloading the free/open-source version of Sourcegraph, or signing up for a Sourcegraph.com Account to save searches on our web-based Cloud product.
Channels
We run (or have run) ads/sponsorships on a number of channels in order to raise awareness of Sourcegraph in the developer community, and the list is continually evolving. Have a suggestion? We’re all ears! Send it our way in the #digital-campaigns channel.
A sampling of the types of channels we advertise on:
- Developer-Facing Ad Networks
- Developer-Facing Blogs/Websites/Newsletters
- Developer-Facing Podcasts
- Coming soon: a podcast sponsorship landing page to maximize our sponsorship investment! WIP, Asana card
Paid Search and Display Campaigns
We run search ads (text and display) on both Google and Bing. Our display ads run as part of Intent campaigns (serving ads to those who have searched on our core keywords) and Remarketing campaigns (serving ads to those who have visited our website).
Paid Social Campaigns
LinkedIn lead gen forms are our most successful paid social campaign type to-date, and are 4x more likely to convert than typical gated content. Our focus centered around developer onbording, with planned follow-up content for both developer onboarding and fixing vulnerabilities use cases.
We have run multiple Sponsored Content campaigns on LinkedIn, using the following content offers, among others:
- Better onboarding (blog post - served to individual developers at Target Accounts)
- Ex-Googler’s Guide to Dev Tools (blog post - served to ex-Googler individual developers)
- Big Code Survey (PDF download - served to individual developers/managers at Target Accounts)
Additionally, we have an ongoing LinkedIn campaign promoting Sourcegraph (using testimonial quotes and case study content) that is served to engineers/managers at companies in Salesforce deal stages 0–3.
What makes for good paid social content/campaigns?
- We can develop some clear audience targeting parameters based on the content piece, and they map back to our key accounts or target personas (for example, we know we can target on LinkedIn by profiles of former Google employees, as well as those with interests in adjacent topics)
- It’s something written in a way that puts our audience/key personas and their problems first, and lead with their problems. But, it’s capable of looping back to our business goals with a product tie or demo request!
- Sometimes: depending on the campaign and what else is going on, we might put paid spend behind less “newsworthy” posts that topically support broader initiatives to prime an audience or are one in a series of smaller posts that lead up to something bigger like an upcoming event, research report, feature release, etc.
- A bonus: We know a similar, ungated piece generated a ton of engagement, so we’ve got confirmation there’s a large, active audience We capture/measure the results of our paid campaigns using tags in Google Tag Manager that fire events when certain actions are conducted on our site. See more details on tracking ad conversions.
Understanding LinkedIn Ad Formats
- Single image: Promote your message directly in the LinkedIn feed. Single Image Ads can be targeted to a specific audience across desktop and mobile.
- Carousel image: Tell an interactive story with a swipeable series of cards in the LinkedIn feed. You can customize the content and landing URL for each card.
- Video ad: Engage your audience with interactive content directly in their LinkedIn feed, across desktop and mobile.
- Text ad: Add a compelling headline, brief description, and even an optional image. Text Ads appear at the top of the page or in the right column of desktop view.
- Dynamic ad: Boost conversion rates with these ads automatically personalized to each member based on LinkedIn profile data. Dynamic Ads appear in the right column of desktop view.
- Sponsored messaging: available in two formats: Message Ad and Conversation Ad. Ads are delivered in LinkedIn messenger only when members are active to ensure higher conversion.
- Message ad: Send direct messages to spark immediate action. Deliver a targeted message with a single call-to-action.
- Conversation ad: Start quality conversations with your audience through a choose-your-own-path experience.
The unique strengths of each & matching intent behind each ad type
| Objective | Marketing Goal | Supporting Ad Formats |
|---|---|---|
| Brand awareness | “I want more people to learn about my business” | |
| Website visits | “I want people to visit a website destination off LinkedIn” | |
| Video views | “I want more people to watch my videos” | |
| Lead generation | “I want more quality leads on LinkedIn” | |
| Website conversions | “I want more purchases, downloads, or registrations” | |
| Job seekers | “I want to promote job opportunities at my company” |
Insertion Order Process
- We negotiate insertion orders/contracts for our advertising placements with our media partners
- Electronic copies of the insertion orders are sent to sales leadership for electronic signature
- Copies of signed insertion orders are loaded to the Google drive (internal link only).
Billing Process
- For ad networks, podcasts, newsletters, or any other advertising partner that doesn’t auto-bill monthly: Invoices are received via email from our advertising partners.
- We send invoices to finance@sourcegraph.com, and include a copy of the signed insertion order as backup for the invoice.
- Google Ads and Microsoft Advertising are both on monthly auto-billing. Demand generation uploads receipts to Airbase.
Reporting
While we work on a consolidated dashboard, you can find monthly search and social reports in this Google drive and contribution to pipeline in this Salesforce report