Sabermetrics in Digital Marketing – Moneyball, Jurgen Klopp and Me
I am not a baseball fan. The only player I know of is Babe Ruth. Some of his records still stand; close to 85 years later.
Somewhere during the summer of 2006, I watched a movie called Moneyball. Apart from Brad Pitt and Jonah Hill, all I understood from the movie was that it was an underdog story.
The movie is based on Michael Lewis’s book – Moneyball, The Art of Winning An Unfair Game. It introduces a term called – Sabermetrics.
Simply put, sabermetrics is the adoption of stats-based scouting of players instead of natural talent. Watch the movie, you will understand this aspect better.
Lately, during the lockdown, I re-watched the movie myself, and thoroughly enjoyed it.
I then began wondering. Can sabermetrics be adopted to digital marketing?
If baseball players are selected based on statistics and metrics, aren’t we doing the same for which email template to choose or social media platform to adopt?
What is Sabermetrics?
Sabermetrics is a portmanteau for SABER (Society for American Baseball Research) and METRICs (similar to Econometrics).
Statistical analysis is added to baseball data. This is then used to measure a player’s in-game performance.
Historically, baseball players were signed based on insights from managers, scouts, and coaches. They recognized a good baseball player when they saw one. Flashy numbers such as home runs, speed of pitches and athleticism all contributed to a player being signed.
The book and movie – Moneyball, is centred around Billy Beane. Beane made use of the meaning of sabermetrics to first identify and then recruit, undervalued baseball players.
While other teams paid big money for baseball players, Beane’s Athletics focused on undervalued talent.
As a digital marketer for the past 4 years, I found several digital marketing tactics undervalued.
One such tactic is Social Bookmarking. It probably finds itself in the ‘others’ tab of any content marketing spreadsheet.
People confuse social bookmarking with web browser bookmarking. For a web browser, we bookmark a webpage so that its easier to get back to it (similar to bookmarking a page in a book).
Social bookmarking as the name suggests allows you to bookmark the webpage and easily share it with friends, peers or clients.
Why is social bookmarking undervalued? According to me, marketers find it cumbersome to add content to numerous social bookmarking websites.
If you do a Google search, you will find numerous lists of high domain authority social bookmarking websites. The most popular ones are obviously,
Medium can also be considered a social media marketing channel. But, what do other business leaders think of undervalued marketing strategies?
Director of Global Digital Marketing at G.E, Linda Boff, considers business storytelling as an underrated tactic.
Courtesy: Marketoonist.com
This is true. Marketing automation and easy templates have diluted the human element within messaging. A consistent and natural tone for your relevant audience can be a gamechanger.
Orion Brown from Kraft Foods also seconds the same opinion.
Brian Maynard of Jean-Air feels search engine marketing is undervalued. Its targeting is second to none. SEM also adopts a shorter funnel from consideration to conversion.
Courtesy: Lyfe Marketing
According to Bob Arnold (Global Strategy at Kellogg), email is the most underrated or undervalued strategy. He feels email has long been shunned. Social media has superseded it.
He is right. Email is a fairly cheaper alternative as compared to paid social media. Larger reach, however, is social media’s forte.
Courtesy: Elegant Themes
Beane’s strategy was simple. Hire undervalued individuals based on their metrics and save on salaries paid to star players. In 1997, Oakland grew from an underperforming team to becoming highly competitive.
They had the same number of wins as the New York Yankees. They. in fact. reached the play-offs for four successive years (2000-2003).
Courtesy: Internet
Courtesy: Internet
Sabermetrics in today’s world
Baseball today has changed. Although I am not a baseball fan and only wrote this article for its sabermetrics connection, I still know that statistical analysis has changed.
Data modelling is done differently. For example, the sabermetrics in Lewis’s book talked about using pitchers (bowlers) performance must not be based on wins or losses.
Also, the batting average is not the best way to measure a hitter’s (batsmen) value for signing.
Bill James called sabermetrics, “the search for objective knowledge about baseball”.
I couldn’t help notice the similarities between Lewis’s sabermetrics and today’s advertising metrics.
Aren’t we all still making use of traditional marketing strategies for generating views, engagement, likes or conversions?
Don’t you simply make use of Google Ad’s custom insights in setting Ad parameters? Do we research on our own?
We rely on last-click measurement, ignoring customer journey or touchpoints. There could be numerous more ways a customer can be influenced by the marketing/sales funnel.
Courtesy: Internet
Do we study the audience better? Do we create user personas first?
Do we jump straight to paid advertising without actually building a strong organic search foundation?
Is Facebook needed as a channel? When it hardly garners any conversions to your brick-and-mortar shop?
Before sabermetrics, coaches looked at ‘batting average’ as a key performance indicator. The batting average is the total number of times a hitter got to the base to bat.
If the number is high, then he is a good hitter. Traditional statistics didn’t try to figure out how many times the hitter won games single-handedly or how many hitters were present on the other bases.
But, the objective of baseball is the number of home runs being scored. Just like our objective for any marketing campaign is conversions.
Likewise, for marketing, if you are blowing thousands of rupees on a poor ad copy, that worked on another campaign for a different audience, who cares?
“Ek conversion to mila”
Who cares if the display ad only generated interest in your product and no conversions?
Who cares if the video marketing strategy was adopted without a voiceover in the video? Are views and reach enough?
No matter how deep your analytics go or how engaging your emailers are, without understanding the human side, any communication is barren.
Consider the touchpoints as a base, with more customers being present at these bases resulting in a win for the campaign. The same way as more hitters at bases ensuring more runs and possibly a win.
Bill James developed the ‘runs created’ stat. This takes the hitter’s contribution further. It relates the hitters’ runs to the team’s total runs.
In a marketing scenario, simply add points or contributions to each base. The bases are touchpoints, as I mentioned earlier. By adding value to these bases/touchpoints you can now measure the success of your campaign.
Each touchpoint tells you where you need to spend more on. Attribute a channel to each touchpoint. Now you know which channel to go after to increase the contribution from that particular touchpoint.
The channel could be a social bookmarking strategy or an ad creative that could work better there. Find what keywords work best at each touchpoint and measure its success there.
By 2003, Bill James was hired as the advisor to the great Boston Red Sox. Boston made use of sabermetrics to go on to win three World Series titles in 2004, 2007 and 2013. This after not winning one since 1918.
Moneyball changed the way major league teams did business. Boston Red Sox, New York Mets, New York Yankees, Arizona Diamondbacks, St. Louis Cardinals, Washington Nationals, Cleveland Indians, Toronto Blue Jays, and San Diego Padres, are teams who adopted full-time sabermetric analysis to scout undervalued players.
Lewis is considering release a sequel book to Moneyball, calling it ‘Underdogs’. Oakland is now again the underdog after losing that initial advantage of being pioneers.
You will be surprised to know that one of Billy Beane’s idol is former Arsenal Football Club manager Arsene Wenger. Beane has had discussions with Wenger, 13-time title-winning former Manchester United F.C manager Sir Alex Ferguson.
Liverpool F.C owner John W. Henry didn’t trust the traditional player scouting methods fully. He wanted a mathematical view of hiring players. Just like Boston Red Sox won the World Series three times, he wanted to break Liverpool’s streak of not winning the English Premier League title for 34 years.
He got a model worked out with Cambridge physicist Ian Graham. That same model helped select current manager Jurgen Klopp. Players were also selected and signed as per this model.
Klopp was trophy-less in his initial years, but he did take Liverpool to the Europa League final, and the League Cup final. They are now the defending Champions League winners, having lost the final of the competition a year prior.
This year they went on a beastly spree, losing just 1 game until the impending closure due to the outbreak of COVID-19.
The Future of Sabermetrics in Marketing
Find effective ways to analyse or measure social marketing campaigns. Understand what is impacting the business. Then jump onto improving that aspect.
Consider a baseball win as a conversion for your business. Is a conversion add-to-cart? Is it newsletter subscriptions? Or is it a product sale?
If these are your wins, focus then on the runs to get them.
Beane found that the more time a player stayed on his base, the more consistent he is. No rocket science in that. So, as per this analogy, a hitter who stays on base and gets singles is considered consistent to someone who smashes home runs at intervals.
Liken the singles hitter to your content. Be consistent with your content. No need to look for that one piece that will go viral. Build an audience for your long-form content.
If social marketing is your forte, like its mine, then focus on conversions-per-share. Each post must strive to garner max conversions-per-post. Target the audience that will get you those high-conversions.
Likewise, select marketing channels that can garner conversions-per-share.
Don’t be after vanity metrics such as follows and likes. Conversion analysis is here to stay. If you or your business don’t adopt it ASAP, you will be chasing the pack.
If your business is small and not funding hundreds of employees under a payroll, do not fret. If Beane could become successful right under powerhouses such as the Yankees or Red Sox, then your business can too.
Be smarter with your ad budgets. Cover all bases first. Start with organic. Start with 1 article per week. Promote it well. Then 2 per week. Re-share that one as an infographic on Pinterest.
Do social bookmarking from the onset. Learn to leverage data. Create user personas and follow them as if it were your Bible.
So, work on touch-point attribution to gain conversions. Cross-channel performance measurement is key. Your ROI will surely increase.
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4 个月NICE