Adam Marquardt
The truth is, Moneyball strategies are real. And they’re not going away. Data-driven decision making has grown exponentially in recent years and gut instinct has become less of a driving factor in all industries from professional baseball to retail shopping to yes, marketing.
Moneyball, the bestselling novel by Michael Lewis and popular film exposes how the general manager of the Oakland A’s ascended his low budget and unproven team to success by adapting popular data and analytics in new ways to player drafting and game time decision making, something the traditionalists frowned upon repeatedly.
Individual player performance terms like Earned Run Average (ERA) and On Base Percentage (OBP) were used to develop a team that effectively competed and out performed teams with salaries many times above that of the Oakland A’s.
Examples like this, where data based decisions outperform gut instinct are becoming more frequent. And is why big data has become an $11.59 billion industry in 2012 and projected to exceed $47 billion by 2017.
Inbound marketers can find use of data-driven decisions, most prominently in consumer behavior.
Consumer Behavior Moneyball Strategies
Finding success with Moneyball strategies and using big data analytics to your advantage goes beyond the surface of simply what’s creating engagement, email opens, ebook downloads or Facebook likes. It’s about looking deeper into the data of not only what created the engagement, but of those activities, what lead to the best possible customers for your business. These are the repeat customers or the long-term contract based customers. And the customers that you actually enjoy doing business with.
Break down marketing activities or campaigns to look at the following three metrics:
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visit to contact conversion rate
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contact to customer conversion rate
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average lifetime customer value
Keep in mind, you need to track these metrics based on a particular campaign or marketing activity. For instance, if you are running an advertisement in a major national newspaper, track that particular campaign from start to finish using the above three metrics and a tracking URL/phone number. Then, group these contacts into lists to track how they engage and develop over time based on other, supportive marketing activities such as follow up emails, sales calls, or Twitter interaction with your company.
You just may find out that $70,000 media buy only produced $30,000 in sales and one-time shoppers only looking to catch a deal vs valuable, repeat customers.
Consumers demand a seamless brand experience. The problem for marketers and executives really isn’t the lack of data access. It’s easily attainable through tools like HubSpot. But there seems to be a disconnect with brands marketing across multiple channels. Not only does the data become disconnected, but marketing messaging, brand consistency, and a whole slew of other issues that could fill up multiple blog articles are also affected.
But if consumers are demanding the 360 degree consistency from brands, then why aren’t brands profiling and interpreting customer data to improve the customer experience across every channel? Marketing encompasses every touch point with a customer. Your product, customer service, advertisements, email automation and more.
Making sense of these closed loop analytics will help increase your business performance, and potentially beat your competition by simply playing a little bit of Moneyball. But at the end of the day, numbers are just numbers without the right mechanisms in place to turn data-driven information into a moving force for marketing success.
Image Credit: Big West Conference