Marketing ops as code: Automating events from planning to follow-up on GitHub

Marketing events within GitHub have been a vital component, including recurring webinars, community meetups, and executive sessions. Determining what developers truly require and which topics are worth their time is a key consideration. The process of executing an event involves a well-defined series of steps, including creating a landing page, generating UTM-tagged links, drafting invitation emails, and updating project boards daily. Post-event tasks consist of exporting attendee data, uploading it to a CRM, and writing a report.

The author, who previously worked as an engineer, recognized the repetitive nature of these tasks and the potential for errors. Seeking a solution, they leveraged GitHub Copilot, an AI-powered coding assistant. By writing down their runbooks and providing them to GitHub Copilot, they were able to automate the event setup process.

A GitHub Issue serves as the foundation for the event planning, housing the plan, discussions, and status. Three key GitHub elements facilitate the automation: Issue forms, which present structured fields; labels, which act as triggers for GitHub Actions workflows; and GitHub Actions workflows themselves, which execute tasks based on label triggers. The event management platform and CRM expose APIs or CLIs, allowing for scriptable interactions.

While marketing automation platforms exist, the author found that a customized solution built using existing tools proved more effective, as it allowed for region-specific variations and faster adaptation to changes. The automation process begins with a conversation initiated through GitHub Copilot, which uses a runbook to guide the creation of campaign names, invitation emails, and subsequent tasks.

This approach ensures accurate data input, flexibility for minor adjustments, and a streamlined workflow similar to the developers' own review process.