The saying “less is more” doesn’t apply when it comes to marketing your hackathon. Don’t be shy about promoting your competition and leveraging your organization’s network to do so.
Formulate a well-thought out marketing and promotion strategy for your competition. While we’ll do our part to promote your hackathon (promoting in our weekly network newsletter, social media announcements, etc.), it’s absolutely essentially that you promote the competition on your end. Plan on continued outreach until the last few weeks of the submission period - when you should focus on reminding registrants to submit. It’s a marathon – not a sprint!
Potential channels for promotion:
- Social media (e.g. Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, blog, etc.)
- For Twitter, come up with a relevant hashtag to include on all promotional material. Consider tweeting at influencers.
- Videos and shareable content: creating shareable content for social media, etc can also help to broaden your online hackathon reach - and give those promotional partners something they're excited to promote.
- Email lists and/or distributed physical collateral (e.g. flyers)
- Tap into your existing network; send an email blast to existing developers, customers, and any relevant users.
- Partners: informal partners or sponsors and judges
- Ask supporters or partners to spread the word to their networks.
- Media: press releases
- Conduct strategic outreach to tech journalists or bloggers who may have covered you in the past. Or reach out to journalists who have covered your competitors recently. If you have a press team, ask for their guidance here.
- In-person events, such as relevant meetups, conferences, and other developer events
- Attend, network, and speak (if possible) at as many events as you can.
- Virtual office hours or webinars
- Where developers can ask questions and get real-time support. YouTube Live allows you to do this for free via their QA tool. Plus you can distribute the video later so everyone can learn. We’ve also found success in recurring office hours in the competition Slack channel.
If this all seems like too much to handle and you’d prefer to bring on Devpost to help, please let us know. We do offer marketing services at an extra rate.