The Seattle Storm are leveraging the WNBA draft for a marketing blitz

On Monday night, the Seattle Storm will have the No. 2 pick in this year’s WNBA draft as the result of a major multi-team trade that went down earlier this year during the WNBA’s free-agency period.

While fans reeled from the shocking news that the Storm were trading longtime favorite and Olympic gold medalist Jewell Loyd to the Las Vegas Aces, the Storm’s marketing team was already thinking months ahead to Monday’s draft.

The draft comes on the heels of March Madness and right around the time senior athletes don their caps and gowns, so the timing presents teams with an opportunity to capitalize on heightened excitement around women’s basketball. Since the Storm have the second pick, it’s all but guaranteed that they’ll draft a player with some name recognition.

Whoever she might be, the team’s marketers have big plans for her.

“These players are starting to make noise,” Storm CMO Will Gulley told Marketing Brew. “We don’t know who we’re going to get…but we can definitely take advantage of March Madness and the connections there that people are having and build it into what we’re doing next.”

Draft day: Since news of the three-team trade broke, the Storm have been posting content having to do with their draft pick with the intention of “drumming up some conversation,” Gulley said. The cadence of those posts picked up leading up to the day of the draft in New York City, where the Storm sent a group of staffers including a content producer, their VP of PR, and Kayce Kirihara, a Seattle-based influencer who’s previously worked with the team.

Once the Storm make their pick, that group will focus on generating content highlighting the player and introducing her to Seattle fans, Gulley said. Ideally, she’ll film a video greeting fans and talking about any connections she might have to the city.

Back home, the Storm is hosting a draft watch party at Queen Anne Beerhall complete with a DJ, giveaways, and appearances from assistant coach Pokey Chatman and from the Storm’s mascot, Doppler. The team expects about 500 fans to attend, according to Gulley.

Welcome wagon: Given the breakneck pace of March Madness, the draft, training camp, and, in some cases, graduation, rookies’ schedules tend to be unpredictable. Still, Gulley said he’s aiming to get the new recruit out west for a visit as soon as April 15. The plan is still tentative, but the trip could include tours of some Seattle landmarks, activations on signage around Climate Pledge Arena and the Seattle Center featuring the draftee, and content shoots with the Storm, he said.

“It’s all about making sure that they feel the love, and then introducing them into the Seattle marketplace and strategic areas in the city,” Gulley said.

The Nika Mühl effect: Last year, the Storm drafted guard Nika Mühl out of UConn, who made a name for herself during March Madness defending Caitlin Clark. Mühl saw limited playing time in her rookie season, perhaps unsurprisingly given the Storm’s lineup of veterans like Nneka Ogwumike and Skylar Diggins-Smith, but the built-in fan base she brought to the team had an undeniable impact.

“Every time we posted something, engagement went through the roof,” Gulley said. “It was remarkable the amount of attention that we got, and whenever we posted something that did not include Nika, fans were like, ‘Where’s Nika?’”

Gulley said he’s looking to replicate that kind of engagement around this year’s No. 2 pick, which he wants to use to further grow the Storm’s following and sell single-game tickets to fans from March Madness. The team already hit its annual ticket sales goals before single-game tickets went on sale, he said, but the plan is to keep up the pace as women’s basketball fandom grows.

“We’re living in this moment right now where these firsts are happening,” Gulley said. “We have an opportunity to continue to build upon what has been a really strong legacy of the WNBA and really strong basketball history of the WNBA, and our opportunity is to grow it.”