I enjoy sports. I also run a marketing company. This time of year, I get really excited because the NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament is happening and we can all take a lesson from why this tournament may be the greatest sports marketing event of all time. With all due respect to the NFL, I believe the NCAA Tournament pulls in a more diverse demographic than professional football does, with the possible exception of the Super Bowl. Let me explain.

Brackets

The NCAA Tournament selects the 68 best college basketball teams in the country to play a single elimination tournament. Teams are seeded and placed on a bracketed grid to show who is playing whom. Somewhere along its 80-year history, someone got ahold of a bracket and took a guess at who would actually win each game. This caught on and people created pools to compete with each other in filling out the best bracket. Today, people fill out brackets who do not follow college basketball until it gets to this time of the year. For three weeks, these people are glued to four TV channels, numerous radio stations, and countless online sources that will give them the scores of games so they can check their brackets. The bracket is an ingenious way to keep people engaged. Who would care about a measly sixteenth seeded team if you did not fill out a bracket and were pulling for them to upset a high and mighty number one seed (which happened this year for the first time in tournament history!) People love pulling for the little guy, even when they had never heard of the little guy prior to this tournament.

Here is the marketing lesson: keeping your customer engaged with you is paramount to your marketing success. If you can do something to keep your customer engaged with you, you will create excitement around your products and services.

Branding works

The official name of this event is the NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament. I don’t know anyone who calls it by its official name. They call it by its brand name: March Madness. In fact, every step of this tournament is branded with a name that is easy to remember and repeat. The pool of teams playing is announced on Selection Sunday. The victors coming out of the first week of play are called the Sweet Sixteen. The next weekend’s winners are the Elite Eight and then the Final Four. Do you see the common denominator in all of these names? They all use alliteration. They all use two words. They are short words that make them easy to say while broadcasting a game (there are no more than five syllables used in any of them) and easy to commit to memory. On top of that, each step is a milestone that is celebrated. If you are a good team, you can prove it by making the Sweet Sixteen. If you are a great team, you can prove it by making the Final Four.

There are two marketing lessons here. First, branding works when you make it memorable and define what it means. Second, celebrating steps with your customers is really effective in keeping them. When was the last time you gave some sort of reward to your customers for achieving a level of sales with your company? Believe it or not, people like to be recognized for working with you. Keep this in mind.

Integrated marketing

Another aspect of the NCAA Tournament is the integration of marketing mediums. Not only can you see the games on four TV networks, there are also live streaming options and numerous ways to get updates via sports apps. It all works very nicely for an engaged audience who has the desire to know something as soon as it happens… and in a basketball tournament of this size, it is happening all at once and very quickly. Do you see how, through the integration of all these mediums, the NCAA has created a giant marketing space for themselves? Anywhere you have the attention of so many people using so many different devices, you have a marketing opportunity.

The marketing lesson here is this: there is power in integrating your marketing efforts. Don’t think that just one medium will suffice. People are connected in a multitude of ways these days. You need to make sure you are working all angles, but you also need to make sure you are pushing the same marketing message in all of them. If you are talking about marketing your brand, this is where a single-minded campaign will help you. Create a slogan that gets your marketing differentiator across to your audience. Make it memorable. Make it edgy enough that it sticks with them. Sell the message across all your marketing mediums. Create links from one to the other. This integration will help you be much more successful in getting your marketing message out and remembered by your target audience.