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Tips for Selling the Perfect College Basketball Tournament

The Men’s 2012 College Basketball Tournament starts March 13. This popular tournament is the perfect opportunity to engage your players in an exciting bracket contest. Running a basketball bracket drives sponsorship and ad revenue, grows audience, builds user database for email marketing and powers your social and mobile strategy.

I recently hosted a webinar on how local media companies can successfully sell the college basketball bracket. After reviewing several case studies, I gathered the best tips to help you make the most of this year’s bracket contest.

- Have multiple sponsors. Having multiple sponsors will generate revenue and create a successful contest. Also, encourage your sponsors to offer weekly prizes for winners of each round.

- Sell integrated promotions. Offer sponsors the option of buying traditional and non-traditional media. Running both online and offline advertising helps spread the word about the contest and gives the sponsor more exposure to your audience.

- Send eblasts throughout the tournament. Eblasts should include special offers from the sponsors. If the sponsor is offering a weekly prize, send an eblast to all the players about the weekly winner and include the sponsors logo in the email.

- Have station personalities participate. Let station personalities talk about the contest on-air. This is a more organic promotion and increases excitement in players to participate.

-Let sponsors be VIPs. After each round ends, include your sponsors’ pictures and bracket results in print and online. This will generate hype around the contest and please your sponsors.

-Identify promotional partners. Talk with other local media outlets to see if the are willing to partner up to promote the contest.

-Extend bracket mania. Benefit from the passion of the college basketball tournament by creating a fun, unique bracket contest. You could do a bracket contest that pits local restaurants or bars against each other. Browse our resource center for bracket contest ideas.

Don’t miss out on the college basketball tournament madness – run a contest for your audience! For more helpful tips, watch the full webinar, “How to Sell College Basketball.”

WFNI partners with Jim Beam for their UPICKEM College Basketball Contest

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BACKGROUND:
WFNI and 1070thefan.com took part in the annual national college basketball contest from Second Street. WFNI is owned by Emmis Communications. Its Digital team understands the importance of integrated campaigns, using not only online ads to promote this contest, but also on-air talent across all three of its stations in the Indianapolis area.

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CHALLENGE:
Indianapolis has several media companies that run their own version of the College Baskeball contest. WFNI needed to present an idea to their sponsors that helped them stand out from the rest.

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SOLUTION:
WFNI’s Bracket Challenge combined their listeners’ passion for the station and its personalities with the excitement of the year’s biggest college sports event to leverage a powerful interactive marketing opportunity for their sponsors. WFNI took advantage of the Second Street national prize of $1,000,000 to the player with a perfect bracket. Players also competed for round by round national & local prizes. Rather than being tied to their original picks, players picked each round progressively which kept them “in the game”, thus increasing exposure to the sponsor’s message.

The promotion for their College Basketball Contest included on-air ads, online banner ads and email reminders before each round. The presenting sponsor was Jim Beam Whiskey. The online component, beyond ROS ads, included additional online banner and radio spots promoting the contest. A larger display at the top of the contest page featured the sponsor’s logo and video commercial.

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RESULTS:
UPICKEM College Basketball Bracket Contest brought WFNI $7,000 in revenue from three sponsors and had over 1,000 player participants coming back each week for 5 weeks to play.

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Why the WFNI Auto Racing contest was successful:
Integrated station support. The Bracket Challenge was promoted heavily with all WFNI products including on-air talent mentions, on-air promos, online ads, VIP pickers from the station and an email campaign. Plus, all ads were sold for the full 5-week campaign.

On January 17th at 2PM EST, we will be hosting our “How to Sell a College Basketball Contest” webinar. Join us to learn strategies and tips on how to be successful in securing sponsorships for the tournament this March. A few reasons you should consider running a College Basketball Contest are:

- You control 100% of the ad space and keep 100% of the revenue.
- Ability to run your contest on your Facebook page.
- Mobile version for tablets and smartphones.

Don’t miss this informative webinar – reserve your spot today!

We recently hosted one of our partner’s favorite webinars (okay, it’s one of our favorites, too) – 30 Contest Ideas in 30 Minutes. During this webinar, Julie Foley, our Director of Affiliate Success & Matt Coen, our President, reveals the top 30 contest categories run on UPICKEM in the past year. Each category comes complete with several examples for you to get your contest-building creative juices flowing to help build out your year-long contest calendar.

If you weren’t able to attend the live session, watch a recording in our resource center.

Be sure to check out all the contests mentioned in our webinar.

This year, more than ever, we’ve seen many great sharp looking college basketball brackets. Here’s just a peek at a few brands that really hit a slam dunk with their aesthetics:
1. P.C. Richard & Son, an electronic superstore, showcased their bracket on their homepage slider.

2. Famous Dave’s, a popular bar-be-que restaurant, boasts a “Million Dollar Madness” image that links to the contest.

3. Fathead (see Fathead Announces One Million Dollar Bracket Contests) posted both upfront and round-by-round bracket on their site for visitors.

College basketball fans across the country are gearing up for their absolute favorite time of the year – the March playoff tournament. If you are one of these folks, ask yourself, “what could be better than watching the game from my 60-inch tv?” The answer? Attending the tournament! Well, the Big Ten Network gives fans a chance to do just that with this oh, so, clever video contest. To enter, fans submit a video of their best Gus Johnson-esque announcer bit and top 3 attend the tournament and compete for the grand prize. A very engaging, unique idea for a custom sports contest – great work!