My Hackathon Marketing Tools
Content is key. If you’re in marketing, you hear that phrase an annoyingly often amount. But it’s true. You need great content, and you need the tools to help spread that content.
I wanted to share the tools I use to spread the word about AngelHack and our awesome hackathons to our community of almost 100,000 amazing developers around the world, and more.
Mailchimp
Surprise, surprise. Email marketing has blown up these past few years, and I’ve found Mailchimp handles our lists fantastically, plus creating a campaign is as easy as dragging and dropping (well, mostly).
Our community primarily stays up to date with our hackathons from our newsletter, so this is a huge tool.
Canva
I took Photoshop and Illustrator courses in college, and rocked them. Then promptly forgot everything once I graduated and spent a year working in corporate marketing. About 3 months into starting at AngelHack, @KristenScheven told about this thing called Canva.
It is, excuse my french, THE SHIT. I love it. Essentially it’s graphic design for dummies. They’ve preloaded templates for everything from Facebook cover photos to infographics, and it’s all drag-n-drop.
Now instead of relying on our designer to create every single piece of graphic content, most of the team can now create anything they need.
Unsplash
This one’s pretty simple. When we need city images to add to our event pages, we go to Unsplash.
“Free (do whatever you want) high-resolution photos.”
Hootsuite & Buffer
Why both? AngelHack uses Hootsuite to schedule all of our Twitter content (follow us!), and I use the Buffer app for my personal Twitter.
We create the content in a Google Doc, and then transfer into the scheduler.
Ryan Solutions Social Media Share Link Generator
This is a new discovery. But it’s handy when I want to include a pre-populated share link in a newsletter.
Postreach
Another newer discovery, one I’m loving so far. Essentially, you connect your blog or a specific blog post, and Postreach will give you a simple report with the shares and potential reach. My pal Ashley Read from Buffer is the brain behind this one.
Analytics is not my strength, so having a tool like this helps me get an instant idea of how far our content is reaching.
In addition to the above tools, we of course use Google Docs for EVERYTHING, Google Analytics, Wordpress, and many of the other startup marketing staples.
I also constantly check Product Hunt with the hopes of finding my new favorite marketing tool!
Let me know, am I missing one of your favorite tools? Let’s help each other out!
