Bracket Unexpected
How Disney Songs changed how we looked at our product
What began as an embeddable interactive bracket for publishers may turn out to be something more. In the last 2 weeks our Brackify product went from a few hundred visitors to being exposed to over 50k unique visitors. The Disney Bracket in question that fueled this went on to accumulate 1.5 million votes, 21k shares on Facebook and finally a bracket completion rate of 90%. What happened? I’m not entirely sure, but I bet it had a lot to do with a few of the following things, all of which could be applied to most products.
Use Your Product to… Market Your Product
In order for publishers to embed a bracket on their site our brackets actually live at their own brackify.com URLs. That got us thinking, rather than just have a landing page with a sample bracket on it, why not start creating our own?
Off we went, creating our own brackets around topics that we were interested in and passionate about. Once the brackets were created we then had to figure out how to drive traffic to those brackets. We did not have any partnerships or deals with large sites so it was up to us to figure out how build traffic from nothing.
The great benefit of actually using your product to market shows that you are proud of what you created and invested in it. It also allows you to come up with use cases (in our case different bracket content) to appeal to a broader audience.
Timing
We initially launched Brackify strong out of the gate with the first game of the NCAA. The reception was very positive with publishers getting on the bracket train during the month of March. Due to this lead in we already had an initial bit of attention on the product.
Now that March Madness was almost over and if there was ever a time to really push to try and raise awareness of our newly created brackets, this was it. People had brackets on the mind, you only had to do a quick Twitter search for the term bracket to see the huge number of people tweeting about them.
If you are going to be do a big push to promote your product, be sure to plan ahead and discover any major events or trends that are occurring. A wave of excitement may already be established, once you find it, you can jump on and ride it.
An Unintended Audience
Our initial attempts at sports and puppy brackets were only getting a small amount of traffic. It was not until I read Adam Peck’s post Bracket Ever After that I knew we had the perfect content topic candidate for a bracket.
There were two things that I loved about Adam’s post. The first was that it was really creating a stir in the comment section The Washington Post’s Express site where Adam’s article was mentioned. The second, I was raised during the golden age of Disney movies. Aladdin, The Lion King, Beauty and the Beast were films that I grew up with and still enjoy watching. Finding all the video clips and images for this bracket brought back an immense feeling of nostalgia. It was a very enjoyable trip down memory lane creating the interactive version of Adam’s Disney Song Bracket. I knew I could run with this.
Not only did I find a use for our product around a topic that people are fiercely passionate and nostalgic about. I grew up with those songs, which made it much easier to create the bracket and a hell of a lot easier to promote and discuss it too. By finding content beyond sports, we discovered an audience we didn’t think of before. There’s really is no harm in trying something different or unconventional with your product, you may be surprised by who actually ends up engaging with it.
Do the Leg Work
With our Disney Song bracket created I had to figure out how to get people to vote on it. Considering the idea and seeding itself was created by the legendary Adam Peck I shot him a tweet which resulted in a gracious retweet.
Then the Washington Post Express Twitter account picked it up and retweeted to their follows.
This was a great first step with a potential audience reach of around 13k. From March 31st to April 2nd we had 395 people complete the bracket in its entirety. However once we headed into the weekend the drop off was significant. From April 3rd to April 6th we only had an addition 49 users complete the bracket. It was clear at this point that the initial push on Twitter had failed to light the biggest fire the north had ever seen and get people voting on our Disney song bracket.
Looking at the data closely the majority of referrals was coming from Facebook (only 10% of people in the above numbers were coming from Twitter). Based on this I made an assumption that although Twitter was great for an initial bit of exposure an alternate strategy was needed. We had to figure out a place to share our Disney bracket where people would discuss and argue about it, ultimately sharing it with their followers on Facebook to continue the discussion.
Not wanting to start creeping Disney fans forums, I headed over to Quora to see if anyone had asked the same question our bracket was asking. Not surprisingly someone had asked “What is your favorite Disney song?”. I joined the discussion and offered my opinion along with a link to my bracket and Adam Peck’s original post.
Because I genuinely am a true Disney fan I felt my response did not come off as a spam attempt. I got a 4 up votes but ultimately this experiment experiment did not yield any direct traffic from Quora.
My next stop was Reddit. Specifically the Disney subreddit that I’ve been known to hang out in from time to time. I had previously thrown up the puppy bracket on the Puppies subreddit with only a slight bit of interest from the community. I took a look at what I posted there and ensured I did something a little different this time around.
Immediately by posing a question, it’s already a more enticing link. Plus this is a community, the whole reason I am here is to ask my fellow Disney fans what they think their favorite Disney song is. The response was immediately positive with the post being up voted enough to remain on the front-page of the Disney subreddit for two days (April 7th & 8th). In those two days the number of people to complete the bracket in its entirety was 1154. April 7th saw the majority of those users come directly from Reddit. On April 8th however the traffic was split between direct referrals, Facebook and Reddit. People were starting to share.
I participated in the comments as much as I could to keep the conversation going but by April 9th the link had dropped off the front page of the Disney subreddit and the Reddit referrals along with it. However the referrals from Facebook had taken off and there was no stopping it.
From April 9th to the end of the bracket on April 27th we had 53k people complete the Disney song bracket. The majority of traffic was driven by Facebook with direct referrals and Google search a far second and third respectively. During this time I manned the Brackify Twitter account and tried to engage with every user who voted by retweeting, favoriting and following anyone who mentioned the words “disney bracket”. I was also an active participant in all the conversations in the Facebook comments throwing out all my own personal opinions and responses whenever I could.
I knocked this up as a humorous response to said criticism, along with the tease of a bigger Disney Song bracket down the line.
Be Prepared
We were completely overwhelmed by the response to this bracket, unfortunately the product as originally conceived was not ready for this unpredictable traffic. The site handled the increased user activity like a pro, however because we had built Brackify as a tool, versus a destination for people to vote on brackets, there wasn’t a smart way for users to move between brackets and connect with the Brackify brand. Key things that were missing that we will be adding in the future:
- There were no immediate hooks to capture a user’s attention once they finished voting to move them between brackets. We did implement a related brackets module at the bottom of the brackets (it was only able to convert about 10% of the total traffic from the Disney Song bracket).
- There was no social / email capture for us to alert a user to come back and see who won once the bracket was complete
- There was no home page that users could browse other bracket’s they might be interested in
- We also needed to improve what gets shared so that users could immediately tweet / share to Facebook their choice along with an image of said choice.
A successful experiment, we learnt a lot about our product and what to do next through this influx of users. I can only attribute this to a perfect storm of timing, using our own product to market itself and being persistent in discovering passionate users in different communities. It also helped having a solid product and brackets that were of a high quality (good images, informative captions).
This by no means is the perfect method to grow your product’s audience. You must be persistent and open to exploring other communities you may not usually post in. Being engaged on Twitter with your users also goes a long way to help boost your following and brand. These steps may not yield immediate results yet is extremely important as it lays the groundwork for getting your product out there.
On Monday April 28th, the winner of The Disney Song Bracket was announced.
Circle of Life from the Lion King beat the competition with a total of 104,076 votes.
