Why March Madness Should Be Marketing Madness, Too

The 2017 March Mad­ness col­lege bas­ket­ball tour­na­ment kicks off March 14 and, accord­ing to Yahoo, this is a huge moment for mar­keters. Here’s a look at how brands and mar­keters can get in on the action this year.

Lisa Lacy By Lisa Lacy. Join the discussion » 0 comments

The 2017 March Mad­ness col­lege bas­ket­ball tour­na­ment kicks off March 14 and, accord­ing to Yahoo, this is a huge moment for mar­keters. Indeed, con­ven­tion­al mar­ket­ing wis­dom dic­tates live sports may very well be the last place adver­tis­ers can find view­ers con­sum­ing live con­tent.

Here’s a look at how brands and mar­keters can get in on the action this year.


Yahoo said the #1 relat­ed search the week pri­or to the 2016 tour­na­ment was “March Mad­ness 2016 Brack­et.”

That, in turn, means savvy adver­tis­ers can cap­i­tal­ize on inter­est with both dis­play adver­tis­ing and relat­ed con­tent that pro­vides use­ful infor­ma­tion.

But it is CPG, QSR and retail brands, in par­tic­u­lar, that stand to ben­e­fit the most as fans search for snack ideas and do their shop­ping in the days lead­ing up to the tour­na­ment, Yahoo said.

Be there ear­ly when gro­cery shop­pers are mak­ing their choic­es by find­ing cre­ative ways to inte­grate your brand with­in the game expe­ri­ence and make your brand top of mind for the big shop­ping days,” Yahoo said.

chickenwings

For what it’s worth, Yahoo data shows food-order­ing bas­ket­ball fans pre­fer wings over piz­za: Dur­ing the tour­na­ment, wing orders were 24% high­er than dur­ing the same num­ber of days pri­or while piz­za orders were 17% high­er, Yahoo said.

And, notably, rather than search­ing for spe­cif­ic brands, Yahoo said the top two queries for piz­za on the day of the tour­na­ment were “order piz­za” and “order piz­za online.”

This marks a big oppor­tu­ni­ty for brands to increase search adver­tis­ing and dri­ve high­er online orders, Yahoo added.

What’s more, search­es for spon­sor brands increased 33% on the first day of the tour­na­ment ver­sus the week pri­or, Yahoo said. And retail­ers can dri­ve fur­ther aware­ness – and even pur­chas­es – by retar­get­ing fans with search ads while they look for gear from their favorite teams.

What’s more, a sig­nif­i­cant num­ber of fans are con­sum­ing tour­na­ment con­tent on mobile devices – and these con­sumers, in par­tic­u­lar, are high­ly engaged. In fact, Yahoo said tour­na­ment dates rep­re­sent­ed the high­est vol­ume of app ses­sions for both Yahoo Fan­ta­sy Sports and Yahoo Sports dur­ing the first half of the year. As such, Yahoo rec­om­mend­ed adver­tis­ers extend their cam­paign mes­sag­ing across apps with tar­get­ed native and native video ads to max­i­mize brand engage­ment.

Lisa Lacy

Written by Lisa Lacy

Lisa is a senior features writer for Inked. She also previously covered digital marketing for Incisive Media. Her background includes editorial positions at Dow Jones, the Financial Times, the Huffington Post, AOL, Amazon, Hearst, Martha Stewart Living and the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund.

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