How to Build a Marketing Strategy for your Hackathon: Part I
How using a consistent and goal oriented marketing strategy led us to become the largest Local Hack Day in North America
Last summer, I was invited by Major League Hacking to speak about building marketing strategies for hackathons at HackCon VII. I presented a 40 minute workshop (presentation slides) on why marketing is important for hackathons, a 4-question guide on how to build your own marketing strategy, new marketing ideas that worked for us, and tips and tricks to make anyone’s marketing life easier. This article is part I of III and covers my workshop information regarding how to build your marketing strategy. Hackathon marketing ideas and tips and tricks will be covered in parts II and III.
Last year was a milestone year for nwPlus. Celebrating our 5th year of organizing hackathons, we welcomed over 1500 hackers to our events, joined forces with another club to bring 2 more hackathons to Vancouver, and grew our amazing team of hackathon organizers to 33. We knew going in that it was going to be a strong year for us and we wanted our hackers to be a part of it — this created the need for us to implement a new marketing strategy.
This is where I come in. My name is Lauren and I’m a student at the University of British Columbia (Vancouver, Canada) finishing up a Bachelors of Arts degree with a mathematics major, commerce minor, and software engineering stream. I’m pursuing a career in social media analytics and I have worked on marketing, promotions, and brand creation teams including One Girl Can, Jack Daniels, Hollister, and WE Day. I am the outgoing Marketing Director for nwPlus and this article covers the work I’ve done over the past 4 years with the nwPlus marketing team.
Who is nwPlus?
nwPlus is the club behind nwHacks, UBC Local Hack Day, and cmd-f. What started as 6 people organizing a 200 hacker event, has turned into a hackathon empire that organizes inclusive hackathons together and works on creating a hacker community within Vancouver. Going from 1 annual hackathon, to 3 and now to 6, nwPlus has become the hacker hub within UBC and shows no signs of slowing down.
This article walks you through nwPlus’ first well-thought-out marketing strategy and shares what worked for us, what didn’t work, our favorite things from the year, and what marketing aspects helped us reach our hackathon goals. Over the years, I’ve been asked countless questions regarding marketing for hackathons and what I’ve learned is that although we are all hackathons, every team has different resources and manpower. We are all at different stages of building our strategy and have different goals for marketing. No matter what, I hope that by sharing how nwPlus has strategized their marketing this past year, I can give you some ideas and guidance on how to strategize yours. Here is what’s included in this article
+ What does the marketing team do?
+ Why is marketing so important for hackathons?
+ A 4 question guide on how to build a marketing strategy
Let’s start by watching my favorite video of all time to get you hyped up!
What Does the Marketing Team Do?
Let’s start with an easy question, what does the marketing team do? The marketing team’s main goal is to build and execute a marketing strategy for their hackathon. However, that’s just the beginning of it! Depending on your team’s size and resources, the marketing team can take on everything from social media, to media outreach, sponsorship collaborations, and hacker experience events. Last year, our marketing team was made up of 5 members (Marketing Director, Content Writer, and 3 Marketing Coordinators) and this is what our task list looked like for the year:
Why is Marketing so Important for Hackathons?
Here are 4 reasons that you should be marketing your hackathon:
+ More applications— this one is pretty obvious but yes, marketing will get you more applications! Our application numbers increased by 52%.
+ Selling your event to sponsors — One interaction with a sponsor still sticks in my mind from years ago. This was before we had a marketing strategy and I had just been hired to do day-of social media for nwHacks. I went and introduced myself to our title sponsor and the first thing they said was, “You have no online presence. What do you think we’re thinking when we sign these contracts to give you all this money and we go to google you and there’s barely any trace of you.” Sponsors aren’t familiar with hackathons like you and I. In fact, most of the time they don’t even know what they are. Marketing (especially social media) is the perfect way to prove the magnitude and importance of your event and leave an online trail of everything you’ve accomplished over the years. Having an abundance of content, engagement, and online presence will give validation to the success of your hackathon. Think about it, when you’re on social media, do you have more trust in the brands who have more followers? (Yes.) By strengthening our social media presence we were able to add “social media exposure” to our top sponsorship tier, resulting in an increase in high tier sponsors.
+ Attracting your target audience — The content you produce provides the most accurate snapshot of what kind of hackers your event welcomes. Whether your event is beginner hacker friendly, specifically for more advanced hackers, targets a specific industry, or encourages other areas like business and design, marketing is the perfect way to let potential hackers know that this event is for them! This becomes handy if your event is either trying to diversify their hackers or increase the attendance of a specific type of hacker. Our events had up to 40% beginner hackers, surpassing our goal of 20%.
+ To show everyone how fun your event is! — This one is important! We forget that people who have never attended a hackathon don’t know how fun they are! You want to show potential hackers that there is more to your event than just hacking and finding jobs. We’ll get more into this later, but the marketing team actually planned their own mini events at our hackathons to create fun content that wasn’t just hacking. Our organizer applications increased from 12–77 per year, when we asked applicants why they applied the most common answer was “because you’re the fun club on campus.”
A 4-Question Guide on How to Build a Marketing Strategy
As I mentioned above, nwPlus is a student run club that puts on 3 hackathons a year — nwHacks, UBC Local Hack Day, and cmd-f. This strategy was designed for nwHacks, our main event, and then executed at a smaller scale for Local Hack Day and cmd-f.
Alright so here we go! Here are 4 questions that will get you started on building a marketing strategy for your hackathon! I’m going to start by asking you a question and then follow it up with what we did at nwPlus. Keep in mind that I’ve been working on this strategy for the past 4 years, it’s my baby, and it took a lot of work to get to where we are at. No matter how long your hackathon has been doing marketing, these questions will either help you get started on building a marketing strategy or help make your current one a little more consistent and goal oriented.
1. Why do people go to your hackathon?
This is the most important question to ask yourself when building your strategy, what is the main reason that people go to your hackathon? Maybe your hackathon is the biggest in its area, you have a unique theme, you have sponsors that no one else has, or you have activities and mini events that no one else does? Whatever it is, you want people to know that your event is worth attending and that it’s unlike any other hackathon they’ve been to! This is going to be the focal point of your marketing strategy.
Last year, our entire marketing strategy was built around one idea, the “Western Canada hacker experience.” Since our event is similar in participant numbers, sponsors, logistics, and prizes to our competitors, we needed to find a way to differentiate ourselves from them. We realized that one thing we offer that no one else does is the Western Canada hacker experience, and we focused on 3 elements of it.
+ Western Canada Vibe — I’m not going to lie, Vancouver is gorgeous. The campus where our hackathons take place is essentially a forest surrounded by beaches, mountains, and the ocean. This is one of the biggest draws for our out of town hackers as many of them make the trek out here to see the nature and hiking vibes they’ve heard all about. We work hard to bring the “Western Canada vibe” to our hackathons by wearing “Patagonia” organizer fleeces, to a moose ring toss game, to our graphic designs for the year.
One of the things you’ll see a lot in our marketing content is a moose ring toss game that we used to give away energy drinks — if you got a ring on an antler, you got a case of energy drinks. The whole idea behind this was to get valuable content that aligned with our marketing focus and provided nwPlus specific content for our energy drink sponsors. This was hands down one of the most successful things we did that weekend — it made for excellent marketing content, and our energy drink sponsors were extremely happy with how their products were incorporated into the theme. Most importantly, we got valuable “Western Canada hackathon” content to use for our future marketing.
+ Vancouver’s fast-growing tech scene — Vancouver is home to a very small but innovative tech community — with few but powerful tech headquarters in the city, like Slack and Hootsuite, and with Microsoft and Amazon just across the border, the community here is loyal and supportive. We’re always willing to help each other out in a combined effort to put Vancouver on the tech map. A large percentage of our marketing content comes from interacting with our sponsors and mentors over social media and sharing all the cool things they’re contributing to the global tech scene. We also share what it’s like working for these local companies, some projects that Vancouver is working on, and job opportunities available to students and recent grads.
+ The nwPlus Hacker Experience — We have a lot of fun at our events and oh boy, does a lot happen at them! Whether it’s playing “what would you do for a Redbull” at 4am, being surprised by MLH for being the largest LHD, loosing an entire bus of hackers coming up from Washington, or celebrating our fifth anniversary with a giant cake, we make sure that our hackers never forget these moments. My favorite part of our marketing strategy is the opportunity to engage with hackers and share their personal hackathon experience with our audience. We love everything from personal hacker posts and vlogs, counting down our favorite moments over the past 5 years, past hacker testimonials, behind the scene content from our organizers and anything else that reminds us why we love an nwPlus event — trust us, we will never stop sharing it!
2. What is the best way to reach your hackers?
The second question I want to ask is where are your hackers — previous, current and potential — and what is the best way to reach them? I’m talking anything from social media, to email newsletters, to Slack. I recommend you pick 1 platform for contacting your hackers and make sure that all of your call to actions direct hackers to that platform. There’s a couple of things to think about here — where are all your hackers currently, which platform are they most likely to stay on year after year, and what platform is the easiest to grow your hacker network.
This year, we chose to direct all of our hackers, existing and potential to our social media platforms. At the beginning of this year, we were using social media, email and slack to contact them which was not efficient. This included the 9 social media platforms that were still active as we had switched names a couple of times, rebranded, and merged with another club. After realizing that many of our email and Slack members disconnected with us after each year, we made the decision to stick with social media as our main communication platform.
Something that I fought really hard for, and you should to, was to condense all of our social media pages and accounts for each event into one main page for each platform (outlined in the diagram below). This can be scary as you’ll likely be losing a large amount of your existing network, but I promise you, the pros outweigh the cons in this decision and there are lots of things you can do to get your existing network on board with your new platforms. We hosted a Google Home giveaway for any hackers that liked our new pages and posted every once in a while on our old pages reminding them about our new ones. By having the least amount of platforms possible, you will be able to reach more hackers with less work, grow a stronger and more permanent hacker network, and make communication and important announcements much simpler for everyone involved. Think about it, making a post once will gain much more attention and engagement than making the same post multiple times across platforms.
3. What is the main goal of your marketing strategy?
This is what you hope to achieve from your marketing strategy, think about “the 4 reasons why marketing is important” I gave you above. This can be as simple as more applications, increasing hacker diversity, creating an online presence, or just to look fun!
This was our marketing strategy goal for last year.
Before we built this marketing strategy, we had zero online presence — minimal posts, no media coverage, low follower counts, no likes or comments on our content, etc. As I mentioned above, this was hurting us more than we realized. We knew that we had to change that fast for two main reasons: to show that our events welcome all kinds of hackers, and to provide an accurate snapshot of our event to potential sponsors.
One of nwPlus’ main goals last year was to introduce more hackers to the hackathon community — which is why we brought on LHD (beginner friendly) and cmd-f (all-female*). We used our social media to share different hacker experiences, through testimonials and Medium articles, to promote that our events actually do have a lot of diversity in experience levels, gender, and faculties. It is extremely important to target these minority groups as they are the ones that need convincing to apply to your event. We shared content that addressed common concerns they may have when applying and made sure to break any misconceptions about the types of hackers our event welcomed.
Having a strong online presence was even more beneficial when reaching out to potential sponsors. As I mentioned above, the only way for sponsors to learn about your event is through Google — if there’s nothing there for them to see, there’s nothing for them to get excited about. We made sure that our online presence was strong and accurately portrayed our events so when potential sponsors looked us up, they would see all the cool stuff we were doing and all the attention we received. Essentially, the whole point of this was to give us validation as an event — we wanted our online presence to match the success of our hackathons.
4. When will you market your hackathon?
My last question is when are you marketing your hackathon? This one is pretty straight forward, as most of your marketing should be happening during your applications period. This is when your most valuable and convincing content should be going out and you should be closely monitoring your platforms for any questions your potential hackers may have. If you’re able to, I recommend keeping your social media platforms (or whatever you’re using to reach your hackers) going year round to maintain engagement and continue growing your audience for the next year. You can use content from your previous events, engage with past sponsors, share other hackathons and events happening on campus or anything else that keeps your hackers engaged!
Something we added this year was what we called our “second push.” In the past we only marketed our hackathon during applications season, which we called our “push.” This year we added a “second push” during the weeks leading up to our event to convince already accepted hackers to actually show up to our event. This consisted of sharing content from past events, doing a “top 10 nwHacks moments,” “top 10 reasons why you should attend our event this year,” talking a little bit about the origin of nwHacks, what’s in store for our 5th iteration, and overall creating lots of hype for the event. This went really well for us and actually increased our attendance rates from 75%-84%.
TAKEAWAYS
Alright there you have it, everything you need to build your own marketing strategy! The one thing I’d like you to takeaway from this article is that marketing is a Hackathon need, not a want! It is as important as any other organizing team and building a strong online presence will add value to all other organizing aspects of your hackathon. You work hard to put on a successful event and your hackers have fun, make sure people see it!
So the best of luck with your hackathon marketing strategies and feel free to connect with me online, I’m always happy to chat about hackathon marketing! Follow me on Medium too so you don’t miss parts II and III of Building a Marketing Strategy for Hackathons!
