We can apply many of the principles of Moneyball, advancing digital marketing to new levels.
I’ve watched the movie religiously over the years because of my interest in baseball, numbers and all things analysis. I’m watching it again this month with baseball starting back up.
In my world, when I’m not coaching our Flower Mound youth baseball team in the evenings and weekends and when I’m not watching Texas Rangers baseball, I spend my days working digital strategy. It’s not a day gig to me, but rather is a passion that only grows by the day.
With all that said, the reason is simple: digital marketing can do a few things for any business or organization. It can level the playing field for everyone, or it can drive further separation of those with big budgets and those with smaller, more selective budgets. Funny, in baseball talk, it’s the A’s vs the Yankees.
This is counterintuitive to most approaches.
When I was developing a productivity app earlier in my career when I was a partner at a tech startup, the question was around the audience we should target. It was all arbitrary at most levels until we had some users and could see some trends. We then built out a product for a specific industry, notaries, and we gained more traction despite it not being a well-known industry. But because we were specific, we hit the top for organic rankings and saw some success.
Driving personas up front is necessary at some level. When I was running eCommerce for just about every brand in pantries across the states, we had to delineate higher-end products vs budget-conscious products. But what we didn’t know is the exact data points of those shoppers. We had to learn that over time.
In the digital world, everyone has heard about Facebook and Instagram and how to market through those channels. Everyone has heard about LinkedIn sponsored content if driving B2B leads. And everyone certainly knows Google ads. Even my seven year old knows the idea of bidding, clicks, and conversions. He’s sure to be the next digital phenom.
Except, he doesn’t know the depth of what it takes to drive success. Every channel has a certain score for you and it’s up to you to develop that ultimate score. Clicks and impressions don’t tell the story well. Page visits don’t do anything justice. And just revenue attribution can tell the takeaway of a story like me saying “Moneyball was a great movie.”
In our world, knowing volume of clicks per campaign and page visits is an introductory level and knowing which campaigns drive the most revenue is a second level. And ultimately knowing which campaigns drive the most revenue per transaction is the level we need most. Then, understanding what those users look like and how they interacted every step of the way is where you’ll win. Similar to this:
It might be that the page that looks like a tertiary page on your site is actually one of the most critical pieces on the path through the user decision tree. Ensuring that page is integrated more often is crucial. Passing it over could mean you’re losing out on incredible lost revenue, despite an overall story of “digital seems to be going well.”
You might be first in search results for 4-5 queries and driving clicks and volume, but the path might take much longer. In baseball talk, you win by making sure you buy the most frequent path to runs. Progression rates, the rate of which any content page leads one to an action page, is the piece that is lost in translation most often. It’s the equivalent of a baseball hitter who is excellent with runners in scoring position. He brings in runs, which hopefully leads to a win.
There’s far more around this subject of Moneyball and its takeaways for digital marketers. One can bring that takeaway to Account-Based Marketing strategies, to integration of digital with physical events and much more. But the principle remains the same. It’s time to stop dissecting an audience up front and rather dissect once they convert, analyze their persona, their path and their channels and drive more players like them.
You might spend 2X the cost per click for that best performing path, but your reallocation of your budget to those specific clicks nets you a higher return. That higher return then nets you more budget to increase your level of effort and scale to the next size. Unlike Moneyball, your budget then grows from an A’s level budget to that of feeling more like my Rangers or Giants. You might never be a Yankee budget, but if you do attain that and you mix these best practices, your program is truly running on all cylinders.
You might never have the full ecosystem in place to bring people in from every channel, append every piece of data on them, hit their colleagues, alert sales teams when a strategic site experience takes place for accounts and remarketing in place. But sticking to the basics can drive significant returns, all while making digital marketing one of the most energizing career paths one could pick.