Whether you’re basking in your recent NBL season or gearing up for a replay of your football victory last year, fantasy teams give everyone the chance to stay in the game long after dreams of a professional career have been finally put to rest.
Maybe you heard talk of greatness when you were in Little League. Maybe it was all in your head. Either way, you’ve landed far from even having a spot on the bench. That doesn’t mean the fun is over. The nerdy side of you that kept you from the weight room has turned out to be a major advantage in fantasy sports. Spreadsheets, baby.
If you love poring over stats, if making a good trade brings you a bit of a rush or if you lose track of time while tracking your highest performers, then marketing might be fun for you, too.
Why? Because, it turns out, marketing has a few things in common with fantasy sports. And if you’re good at building a strong team and strategizing for a winning season, you’re going to apply these same skills to your marketing strategy for growth.
Let’s take a look at a few of the most striking similarities.
Balance Delivers Wins. Even if you’ve never spent a solid minute on a sports field, you still know that stacking your football fantasy team with quarterbacks or your hockey team with all left wings is a disastrous strategy. You’ll never win that way.
In marketing, this concept is applied in a couple of different ways. To begin, don’t build a strategy on a single channel or technique. You don’t want to put all of your resources into social media or rely too heavily on brand awareness activities. You need a variety of channels where you use a few different techniques to drive engagement, website traffic, sales growth and awareness.
Balance is also important when mixing long-term and short-term activities. For instance, you may invest in search engine optimization (SEO) strategies for months before you start to see positive results, but countering SEO with some investment in paid ads allows you to experience a few short-term wins. Both are important in marketing.
Know What’s Driving Performance. If you’ve drafted a good team, you are able to see which positions are most essential to your success in the season. Maybe you’ve got a defensive player on your fantasy football team who is on a wild streak of sacks this year. Any other year, it may be a non-entity, but it’s serving you well this season.
Get familiar with your drivers for marketing success. You may have debuted a new service that is doing better than you expected, and it’s time to start amplifying its growth even more with an email campaign.
Part of understanding your strategy’s key drivers is getting familiar with analytics and applying their insights. From the analytical tools provided by sites like Facebook and Instagram to using Google Analytics to understand your website visitor behaviors, digging into these details helps you better understand your audience and what they might want or need from you.
Make Adjustments for Better Results. Have you ever drafted your fantasy team and then ignored it all season? Of course not. Or, if you did, you only made that mistake once.
Keeping up with your fantasy team allows you to make a few advantageous trades and improve your standing throughout the season. It also makes fantasy play a lot more fun, and negotiating a trade gives fantasy leagues a rewarding social aspect.
It’s easy to see why a laissez-faire approach to fantasy sports wouldn’t pay off too well, but companies do it all the time with their marketing strategies. They spend months developing values, brand messages and voice and designating objectives for their team. Then, the marketing strategy gets tabled, and everyone moves on to the next project.
Crazy, right? Take the additional step of identifying metrics connected to your marketing objectives. Then track them so that you can adjust for better results. Not only will you improve your results, but like a fantasy team with a series of beneficial trades, it will be a whole lot more fun.
Pay Attention to Trends or…Just Pay. Along the same lines, simply paying attention helps you run a better fantasy team. From reading a few articles each week on ESPN to catching a game or two on Sunday, your fantasy football team benefits from a little awareness.
You don’t have to dig into a ton of details unless you love an excuse to make a spreadsheet. A few stats here and there or a bit of sports radio will probably tell you what you need to know.
Ignoring trends in sports is likely to cost you a victory. You’ve paid to be part of the league; why not invest a little time and get the win?
Marketing isn’t just a hobby. It’s the pipeline that keeps your business growing. So, neglecting to pay attention to marketing trends can be devastating to your company. From wasted money on paid ads to a lackluster product launch, there are many ways to pay that don’t drive growth.
Being aware of marketing trends requires you to listen on social media, track what’s working for your competitors, and watch how your audience engages with email campaigns, mailers, and paid ads.
Like monitoring your fantasy league trends, it’s not a full-time job that requires you to place uninterrupted, focused attention on what’s happening in marketing. But if you’re not paying attention at all, it’s going to hurt your strategy.
Football season is just around the corner, and you’re probably all set to launch your best fantasy team yet. Why not invest a bit in your marketing strategy while you’re at it? Contact SJC Marketing, where we can help you design a strategy that combines your best fantasy skills and our marketing expertise to create an unstoppable team.