See How Bracket Marketing Works, Why It Kicks Butt, & How to Handle It

As February 2018 draws to close, we’re tuned into the Olympics and eagerly anticipating the NCAA basketball tournament, which is right around the corner. Now more than ever, competition is circulating through the air.

With sports, gaming, and competition on our minds, many consumers are in the spirit to battle each other. So, how can marketers capitalize on this? Enter bracket marketing. A large percentage of people enjoy bracket battles – betting money, pride, clairvoyance, or simply bragging rights against fellow competitors. In fact, it’s estimated that more than 60 millions Americans fill out brackets each year, with a potential $1 billion spent on off-book gambling on the tournament alone, according to Smithsonian Magazine.

How Do Brackets Work?

Brackets work like this:

• There are two sides (left and right) to a bracket, and each participant goes head to head.
• One winner advances to the next round, while the other is eliminated.
• Each match winner advances again and again until there is only one winner left.

Why Do Brackets Matter?

So, what’s the allure if brackets? Well, there are a lot of things… Bracket functionality offers a non-traditional path of creating higher engagement and community satisfaction when applied thoughtfully to a brand’s audience. In fact, there are many reasons why brackets are enticing to people, like:

• Competition: Multiple studies show that we, as humans, constantly measure ourselves against our peers – and enjoy a healthy dose of competition among family, friends, and even random people.
• Entertainment: Brackets allow for us to participate in an activity and fill our day with joy.
• Escapism: While we may not be directly competing in the bracket, brackets allow us to escape to feel as though we’re active participants.
• Social interaction: You can compete and converse with people you may never otherwise connect with. Humans crave connection – and bracket marketing appeals to that.
• Satisfaction: Brands who gamify or incorporate interactivity can make an emotional connection with the audience, forging stronger and longer relationships. Push marketing doesn’t work as well these days – consumers prefer to interact with brand content. In fact, interactive "gamification" strategies like brackets can lead to a 100% to 150% increase in engagement metrics.

Many brands are seeing the benefit to create a dynamic multi-layered content experience through an interactive experience such as bracketing. With brackets, you can create better customer engagement (as mentioned above), longer customer lifecycles, capture important customer information, and even, potentially, convert users into customers and brand advocates. Additionally, bracketing is not limited to a specific time of year… While brands could capitalize on it during sports high times, they can actually run at any time of year.

What’s the Difference Between Predictive Brackets and Voting Brackets? 

With bracket marketing, there are actually two options a brand can pursue – predictive or voting brackets. While each bracket format is the same, they are a bit different in nature:

Voting Brackets

With voting brackets, each level is completed as a separate voting round where the winners advance. Here, users choose a single winner in each bracket match-ups within rounds set with a predetermined format or schedule. The competitors with the most votes move to next round until a winner is determined.

Predictive Brackets

Leave it to users to predict the outcome… Users can earn points as they select predictions for head-to-head battles.

How Do You Apply Brackets to Marketing? 

From sports and entertainment to technology and hospitality, brackets can be applied to all types and sizes of organizations and industries. Here are a few examples of how you could put brackets to practice:

1. Are you a restaurant owner or operator looking to revamp your menu in 2018? If so, you could create a voting bracket to decide on a new menu item.
2. Are you a video game company looking for user input for your next product? If so, you could use a voting bracket to decide on the next game feature update or content release.
3. Are you a cruise ship operator, hotel business, or luxury resort? If so, you could run a bracket allowing your social followers to choose the most popular vacation destination, and then give away a weekend stay to a random winner.
4. Are you a bridal shop looking to engage social followers on the up-and-coming wedding dress trends of 2018? Let your users predict what the most popular dresses will be in 2018 -- and reward those who selected the right choice at the end of the year. This activity will create year-round brand engagement.
5. Are you a television network marketer? Brand marketers could engage avid Game of Thrones fans, for example, by predicting who will end up alive at the end of the series. Or, along the same lines, if you are a marketer for a reality television show, you could create a bracket to let viewers select who they think will win in the end!
6. Are you a marketer for a local chamber of commerce or tourist bureau? If so, create a voting bracket campaign for the “Best of the Best” in town… Think best pizza, taco, or fine-dining joint, or best local business!

No matter the application, try to take your campaign a step further by running promotions or offers for participating in or winning the brackets.

How to Create a Woobox Bracket

At Woobox, we’ve taken the concept of brackets voting and contests and designed them to be applied to any brand or topic. Here is the process you would go about to set up a Woobox bracket:

1. Visit https://woobox.com/bracket.
2. Read the information listed on the page, along with the examples.
3. Once you’re ready to create a custom bracket, navigate here.
4. Follow the prompts listed in the Facebook interface.
5. Test, test, test! You can build any promotion they like while using a free account, and only require a paid subscription to publish and run a campaign.

We know you have a few options when it comes to creating an interactive marketing campaign, such as brackets. But not every product stands up to ours… In fact, here are some of the key features of our bracket tool: Bracket Functionality: Woobox allows you to select single or multiple-round brackets – up to 64, in fact. In addition, participation is easy with personalized sharing, custom scoring, and participant leaderboards. Plus, you have the choice between predictive or voting bracket setup. Creative Control: As a marketer, time is of the essence. Woobox’s bracket tool allows you easily edit templates, CSS Styling, Javascript, or HTML files. Language control is made easy with the powerful and easy design interface as well. Participation Limits: If you want to cater your brackets to a specific audience demographic, you can set age and geographic requirements, and add Captcha protection, password entries, additional form elements, and a provision where users must accept a rules requirement or one-person limit. Form Customization: Choose from a fully customizable display, by personalizing form fields, social follow or sharing requirements or social logins. In addition, our tool allows you to upload additional files, if necessary and customize form widgets to make sure you capture important customer information and set up the Easy Access: Access the brackets via mobile or desktop device. In addition, you can make brackets readily available via Facebook tabs, in popups, and as landing pages. Promotion: Bracket promotion is equally as important as campaign setup. With Woobox, you can post to social media sites, email campaigns, mobile apps, websites, Facebook Ads, and more Performance Tracking & Integrations: View and monitor key performance indicators like visitor metrics and social actions by channel. Woobox brackets are also compatible with Facebook Pixels, Google Analytics, Constant Contact, MailChimp, Zapier, and 500+ other tools. At Woobox, we have experts that can walk you through how to accomplish your idea using Woobox’s bracket tool or other interactive ways to engage your audiences like giveaways, quizzes, and Facebook page apps. Get started now.