Would you say your marketing strategy is more focused on pitching or catching?
Grab a cup of coffee and your favorite donut, scone or muffin and let’s talk about baseball as a metaphor for marketing. Or, you know, since it’s baseball talk, feel free to grab a beer and a brat and even your foam finger if it rounds out the experience for you.
Many marketers focus almost exclusively on pitching: the content distribution, the clever Instagram contest, the funny video that captures 
the brand’s personality with perfection.
But what many marketers miss is the catching end of the ballgame. Maybe you’re running a social media promotion, but your landing page doesn’t look anything like your posts so you’re losing people who aren’t sure if they’ve arrived at the right place.
Or maybe you recently went through a lengthy website design, but you realized later that your website doesn’t do much to move visitors along in their journey to a purchase. You might be great at sharing information through blogs, how-to videos and podcasts, but you forget to create a really specific call to action that tells your audience what you want them to do with the information you’ve shared.
None of this is intended to knock the importance of pitching. Pitching builds brand awareness and engagement and is a critical part of your marketing strategy. But without great catching talent, your pitch is flying wildly out into the crowd.
Let’s not get too tangled up in the analogy. There’s more to it than just tossing and catching balls, and it’s not always clear what the ball is … customers? Marketing content? You have to figure that out; it’s your ball game.
The point is, it’s also about great management. And sometimes running your business (somebody’s got to sell the hot dogs) gets in the way of figuring out the right strategy to win a pennant. You want to improve lead generation, capture more of those leads for conversion and invest in brand awareness, but you’re also trying to juggle things like hiring the right players, designing the merchandise and talking with business partners.
That’s why the owner of the ball team isn’t the one calling the pitches. The owner of any ball team leaves the pitching and catching technique to the experts.
We may not be baseball experts (well, a couple of our team SJC members might say they are), but we know a thing or two about marketing. Contact us to get your team on its way to a history-making win.