Marketing is also like any game - you plan the best strategies, execute them the best way you can and keep your goal focused on success. For you to win in any game, you should know your opponents and learn their strengths and weaknesses - as much as you know your own capabilities and liabilities. It’s the same way with marketing.
Scott Batchelor, a manager of field marketing at SAS, came up with an interesting analogy comparing marketing with the World Series. He believes that when you test, measure and adjust your marketing campaigns to respond to a constantly changing environment, you can confidently make the changes needed to increase effectiveness. Scott devised three marketing tips inspired by the fall classic.
- Build a heat map of your marketing campaigns to analyze where you're hot and where you're not. Focus on the hot! A marketing heat map can help analyze the success of campaign ingredients. Start by listing all the different activities in your marketing lineup, and then establish the criteria for three categories: hot, warm, and cold. Building these criteria, (this can change from industry to industry and category to category), will give you the opportunity to tailor your definition of success.
- Don't be predictable. Mix up your campaigns to stay fresh and interesting. Think of your audience as you construct a marketing campaign. Build toward the end goal—a registration, a click through or a personal contact. Instead of starting from scratch each time you plan something, use one campaign to build on the next. If you zig when they think you'll zag, you'll gain their attention - and you'll be more effective.
- Use historical campaign data along with your gut instinct to make decisions. You'll have a lot less indigestion when you use data to back your gut. Marketers tend to create campaigns that are inspired by other campaigns. But determining how effective those new campaigns will be is sometimes akin to throwing darts at a dartboard. We just don't know what the click-through rate, conversion percentage, or registration numbers will be. Sometimes we have to go with our gut because we feel it's the right thing to do.
You can learn more about these tips from his article, “Three Valuable Lessons Marketers Can Learn from the World Series”
Use these tips to make your marketing campaigns better for your company. As with this article, it’s a good idea to take ideas from all different areas of “real life”. The savvy entrepreneur will look at various elements of society, entertainment and other events in their world – and see how they could apply to their business.
When you test, measure and adjust your marketing campaigns to respond to a constantly changing environment, you can confidently make the changes needed to increase effectiveness.
