San Diego Startup Week 2023 Marketing Campaign

Overview: San Diego Startup Week 2023 is the biggest startup event in all of San Diego, attracting over 1,500+ attendees. Thi event happens in the span of 5 days with 5 locations pread throughout the SD-Baja region. Attendees attend workshops, panels, keynotes, and networking events all with the goal to learn, grow, and innovate their startup.

Problem: The biggest challenge was making sure all communications and marketing was cohesive and centered around the theme of the year, which was “Growing the Creative Coast.” Each day was unique and therefore had to reflect, the location and the workshops, speakers, and panels for the day. We even had a to organize marketing and logistics for a day in Tijuana, Mexico which was challenging.

Method: We decided to do a mix of marketing from social, video, emails, blogs and created a marketing kit that community partners, sponsors, and community members could easily use to promote San Diego Startup Week. We also developed strategic partnerships for each day to help with marketing and logistics.

Social Media: Created graphics centered around each day, with specific locations, parking information, speakers, workshops, a summary of each day, and video/reel wrap-up. We event created a dedicated marketing kit page for San Diego Startup Week where our sponsors and community partners could easy copy,paste and download marketing materials for SDSW.
Blogs: To increase attendees and avoid confusion, I created individual blogs for each day which information on speakers, sponsors, keynotes. After each event I created a wrap-up blog which contained videos, livestreams and more.
Videos: Each keynote for the day had a dedicated livestream and video. This made it so attendees that missed or could not attend the final keynote could still listen, learn and be inspired. The vidoes can also be used to gain future sponsorship, since many of the keynotes were CEO’s and VPs of big companies like Vuori, Qualcomm, Lenovo, just to name a few.

Result: Just during San Diego Startup Week alone, the site saw a 20% increase in visitors (~6,000 unique visitors), over 100,000+ in social media post impressions, 1,000+ likes, shares, and comments, 4,000+ views on Instagram Live, Youtube Live, LinkedIn Live, and Facebook Live, and 800+ Whova app downloads.