Marketing is Like Sports Because…
J Haselwood
Ampla’s Digital Marketing Strategy Blueprint series is perfect for small and medium sized businesses, nonprofits, and digital marketers seeking a fresh perspective on digital strategy. This is part 6 of 7.
Our Digital Marketing Strategy Blueprint series so far has followed the entire digital marketing process from strategy development to events leading up to a launch. We’ve now reached the important point where the “on” switch is going to be flipped. It’s kick off time and I’ll compare why launching a marketing campaign is similar to opening day of your favorite sports team. Any sport. Any team.
Preparation: Offseason vs. Campaign Planning
During the offseason, coaches, trainers, and athletes have worked hard to get better, stronger, smarter, design plays, create strategies, and polish techniques.
Between campaigns (and often during), marketers are putting on their war paint by researching trends, identifying new technology, analyzing data, and putting strategies together that will create a championship digital marketing campaign.
Kick-off Time: Football Team vs. Digital Marketing Team
In football, the season launches when the kicker kicks the ball at the beginning of the first game. All the players are in formation, coaches are on the sideline guiding the tactics, and the crowd is an audience that will accept or reject your performance through boos or cheers. The season has begun!
In marketing, everything that we’ve discussed in our past blogs is the offseason that gets you ready to kick off your campaigns. It’s the planning, organizing, brainstorming, researching, and more.
An important thing to remember is who owns what tasks. Who are the players and what are their positions? Who will be launching emails? Who will click “Enabled” on your Google AdWords campaigns? Who will be the person responsible for tactical adjustments after the campaigns are live? What time and date will each of these different marketing channels activate? For example, will you start some chatter on your social media channels that lead up to a campaign launch? Will an email, search ad, Facebook ad, Twitter ad, and display ad all begin to run exactly at 10:00am EST? Or will you stagger the roll out by channel? These are things that should be taken care of in the planning process, but you’ll still need to have a person responsible to ensure that each channel launches as planned.
Evaluation: Film Reviews vs. Campaign Review
Let’s fast forward our football game. In days that follow the game, players and coaches will often review video footage from the previous game. They will analyze what they executed well and what was executed poorly. The video will show missed blocks and penalties, but also well thought-out plays that scored. The team learns where there were holes in their strategy and tactics. Then, they regroup later and strive to plug those holes and emerge better than before.
Back in marketing land, campaigns typically last much longer than a football game. Campaigns can last days, weeks, months, or sometimes years. An example of a campaign that lasts a day might be a company offering a “today only” pop-up deal. Even those types of campaigns take planning that feed into a strategy.
Nevertheless, it’s important for marketers to review their campaign performance during and after it concludes. This is where data and analytics provide immense value. You should have some idea how your campaigns are doing, whether it’s on a daily or weekly basis. Waiting until the end of the month may be too long. The “set it and forget it” approach to digital marketing is one that will result in less than optimized campaigns that will minimize return on investment.
This campaign performance review is where your marketing strategy comes full circle. Most likely, campaign performance data will span across different platforms and tools due to the fragmentation of marketing channels. A good idea would be to create a centralized dashboard or scorecard that displays overall KPIs (as we outlined in the first blog) and a few performance metrics from the different marketing channels. Digital strategists will be able to take this data and determine where holes existed in strategy and tactics, discover what worked well, and make better decisions to either correct the course of existing campaigns or strengthen future campaigns.
A post-campaign write-up can be a valuable historical document. This would be a simple, one page document that would be similar to a case study. It would review the goals of the campaign, the approach, the pros and cons, and other insights. Since people change jobs or leave companies, it provides the documented record of campaign successes and failures. This can be used as reference to aid in future decision making, and also a debriefing document for people who assume new roles on the marketing team. It’s worth the extra effort to create this document because it can save a lot of time and money down the road.
The Wrap Up
So it makes sense why marketing is like sports, right? Now it’s time to huddle the players and draw up those game-winning plays!
This blog wraps up the sixth of a seven-part series focused on digital strategy. By now, you have all the information you need to build a solid framework around your digital marketing strategy. If you need help during any or all points in the process, you have a partner in Ampla. Just give us a shout. In the meantime, check back soon for our final blog in this series entitled, “3 Reasons Your Digital Strategy Will #Fail,” as we discuss the traps that will steal your success away before you can even taste it.
What are some tips and tricks you use to implement and report on the success of your marketing programs?
In case you missed the other blogs in this series, here’s a link to each of them:
Part 1: Framework: Digital Strategy vs. Digital Tactics
Part 2: A 30-Point Digital Audit Checklist
Part 3: In a Perfect Digital Marketing World