Moneyball, Sabermetrics & Online Marketing

Can online marketers take a page from Billy Beane's Moneyball approach to baseball?

If you’re tasked with managing your companies marketing activity and haven’t read Michael Lewis’s book Moneyball, I suggest you do. If you aren’t going to read the book, I suggest you watch the movie of the same title starring Brad Pitt. If you have no interest in doing either of these at least pay attention to the next few paragraphs, they might just change your outlook on marketing performance.

Moneyball is the true story of how Oakland Athletics manager Billy Beane turned baseball on its head by building his team using a method known as sabermetrics. Essentially sabermetrics abandoned traditional “gut” measurables regarding how baseball teams were fielded in favor of statistical and quantifiable analysis. For years baseball teams were put together looking at factors such as stolen bases, home runs, and batting percentages. The idea was that you needed players that met a given criteria in each position to compete. Being a small market team the Athletics knew they didn’t have the resources to compete head to head with big money teams like the Yankees and Red Sox. Beane and his staffed devised a method to buy runs rather than buy players. By focusing on a player’s on base percentage the Athletics were able to win 103 games in 2002 and achieve post season success. The proof was in the pudding – sabermetrics worked and the rest is history.

So how do the lessons learned from Moneyball apply to online marketing? The correlation is actually quite clear. For years the online marketing industry has fallen into traps regarding measuring campaign effectiveness. Online marketers have applied the “should” approach to just about every facet of the industry. SEO and PPC campaigns “should” attract more people to your website which “should” give you opportunity for a sale. The problem is that the effectiveness of a campaign has always been focused on buying traffic, not customers. Therefore, anything we can do to maximize traffic has traditionally been seen as a positive, even if it works directly against maximizing your opportunity to convert those leads.

By using statistical data available to us, and focusing on the marketing version of moving runners around the bases (customer behavior patterns on the website) we can effectively determine the best methods for progressing the sale. Analytics tools allow us to not only track, but predict customer behavior online which helps us to revise and model websites based off the data. Bounce rates, keywords, and onsite navigation patterns all factor in to delivering the best marketing experience. All of this data can be leveraged to improve the ultimate measurement of your marketing, the ROI.

Just like small market baseball teams can’t afford to compete with big money in their arena, small businesses can’t afford to compete with big business in the areas of brand awareness and traditional advertising. Enterprise companies simply have the financial edge and as such small businesses need a statistical advantage. By focusing on analytical reporting and building websites and social media campaigns that are consumer driven – small businesses can experience the same postseason success the Oakland Athletics achieved in 2002.

Carewords & Creating Killer Website Content

A few weeks ago I posted about Google’s recent revelation that another algorithm update is in the works – this time targeting overly optimized websites (read it here – Google to Penalize Overdone SEO). I also stated that the key to beating the algorithm change is to make sure your website is chalked full of quality and relevant content.

Creating Killer Content

This week I want to discuss how you can improve the quality and ranking of your website, attract more visitors, and convert more leads by placing killer web content on your site. I have to admit that the term “killer web content” isn’t mine. The phrase was coined by one of my favorite authors and web content expert Gerry McGovern. McGovern has written several books (all full of pertinent information for website owners and marketers) but my personal favorite Killer Web Content. It’s practically the bible around the CookWheelwright offices. I’ve given a copy to every member of our team, and recommended it to practically everyone I’ve worked with.  The bottom line is McGovern gets it and puts crafting user friendly and high quality websites into real world and practical techniques. If you’re reading this blog, I highly recommend you read the book (after you’re done with this post of course!).

At the heart of creating killer content is focusing on the Six Cs.

1. Who Cares?

2. Is it Compelling?

3. Is it Clear?

4. Is it Complete?

5. Is it Concise?

6. Is it Correct?

By asking yourself these questions and honestly evaluating your web content in these terms – you too can deliver engaging and effective web content that dominates the search engines and converts more leads.

In my opinion, perhaps the most important of the six Cs is the first, Who Cares?

The web is full of useless junk, some of it we love (who hasn’t watched the Crazy Honey Badger over and over?), some of it we never want to see. I’m not going to attempt to evaluate the recreational interests or their value to the web. But when it comes to commercial content the internet is full of thin content that offers no real value to the user. Think about it, how many times have you gone to a website looking for an answer and instead got a heaping spoonful of hyperbole? It’s happened to me more than once. The backbone of the internet is built on delivering information on demand, and the goal of major search engines like Google is bring users their desired information faster and better. This search engine desire brings a built in advantage for websites that actually pay attention to the message on their page. Notice.

Nothing ruins a website like a spoonful of hyperbole.

Getting noticed can come in many forms, but the majority of the techniques search marketers employ experience short lived success. The reason SEO fails so often – no one cares. No one cares if your site is the most crawlable site on the net. No one cares if you’ve microtargeted keywords down to the most precise level. No one cares if you’ve bought a billion backlinks pointed to your homepage (a capital offense in Google’s eyes by the way). These activities might all contribute to getting your page listed at the top of the search results, but they won’t help to keep you there. Unless your website contains the information your visitors want and need, you’re constantly swimming upstream.

Instead of focusing on keywords, try focusing on what McGovern calls “carewords”, the words that really matter to your audience. These are the words that make us click, drive action, and produce results.

If your website isn’t optimized for your customers’ needs, it won’t matter how well it’s optimized for your search engine’s. If you’re looking to create killer web content start by focusing on your customers hot buttons and work backwards from there. As always, your website’s top priority should be to deliver high quality and relevant information to your real life customers first and foremost. Capture their carewords and you’ll create a website that naturally builds it way to the top of the search rankings.

While carewords might seem intrinsic, they can be captured and managed by savvy web marketers. The answer is in how we search online. Internet users are hunters. They constantly search and scan for the information they need to complete their task or meet their objective. Google searches rarely end up the same way they start out. Typically speaking – if we enter a search engine query and don’t get the results we wanted we’re going to click the back button and revise our search. By following the trail we can not only determine what’s important to our customers but we can adequately predict their next move. It’s in that ability to understand and respond to what our customers really care about that we can separate ourselves from our competition. By focusing on creating great web content, we can build great websites that command attention and deliver firm results.

 

Learning How To Deal With Difficult Personality Types

“Those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it.” – Sir Winston Churchill

With your permission I’d like to step outside my normal marketing topics today and share with you a recent experience in my life (that I believe a lot of my readers deal with as well) and a subsequent conversation I had with a good friend and mentor of mine, Michael Crain of Smart Business Evolution. I hope you can learn as much from this experience as I did.

As an online marketer I deal with a lot or personality types. My firm handles clients in a dozen different countries and twice as many time zones. We’ve worked on marketing campaigns targeting everything from C level executives with discretionary incomes exceeding the six figure mark, to local salon services for housewives and tattoo conventions. But one of the most difficult experiences I’ve faced in my professional career was dealing with a company whose marketing executive never wanted to relinquish control.

This particular client is a fairly sizable business offering professional services to an upscale demographic. They have a great product and reputation and through years of dedication and a number of traditional marketing activities have developed a strong brand presence in their industry. They understand exactly what their clientele wants when it comes to seminars, print mailers, and other direct marketing pieces. The one area they were struggling to break through was online marketing. They just didn’t understand why their success offline wouldn’t translate to success online.

The executive team asked my company to come in for a consult and after several meetings we laid out our ideas and expectations. They loved it. The entire room of highly educated, high profile partners and executives was ready to commit to a long term strategy with our company. But the second we were directed to the in house marketing team the deal fell apart. In short, the marketing director just didn’t buy into our product and didn’t want to relinquish what they saw as control to an outside firm. We were stonewalled and even though the partners at the firm saw value in our services, they had enough trust in their marketing director, who had little trust in us, to go against their hearts and heads and reject the offer.

Dejected, confused, and a bit angry, I asked Michael Crain of SBE his thoughts on the situation and how he felt we could have altered the outcome. I am a firm believer in top-down selling but I already recognized our biggest mistake was to eliminate trust with the marketing director by working directly with the executive team. My question was more about how to handle a difficult personality type. Michael listened intently and then told me about his Newman theory. Based off the Seinfeld antagonist Michael explained that while the character was fiction the reality is most, if not all of us, have our own Newman’s to deal with in daily life.

Hello Newman

The first suggestion Michael had was to focus on creating a win/win relationship. In my experience we had focused on creating a win/win relationship with the company – but we failed to foster a win/win scenario with the marketing department. If our online marketing campaign was an immediate success the company benefited, but the marketing team that had been trying for months to “figure it out” would have looked incompetent. Furthermore they would have lost control of their budget as the executives displaced dollars they had previously committed to other proven activities and transitioned those budgets to my company. The in house marketing team had as much at stake personally as professionally.

Working with the marketing team to strategize the plan and then present it to the executive board would have been a better solution. It would have allowed them to play an active role in the process and keep a sense of involvement and purpose. Looking back, while working with top executives seems like the right power – it isn’t always.

Crain then told me about how there are four main personality types and strategies for dealing with each of them. I’ll spare you the details here but you can find more information on the Smart Business Evolution website here. In short, I was working against a dominant personality type – one that needed to feel in control and was largely motivated by fear. Instead of providing that person with a sense of control and reassuring them that their input was important, my company fueled their fears by working “over” their head with an executive team that was more extroverted in their personalities.

So what does this have to do with marketing strategy and theory? Simply put, sales is an important part of the marketing game. Understanding our audience’s needs is about more than market analysis and psychographic segmentation. It’s also about developing powerful one-on-one relationships with even the most difficult personality types and turning them from detractors into brand ambassadors. If you can do this, I’m convinced you’ll have the strongest and most loyal fan base on the web.

Have you ever had to deal with a difficult personality during negotiations? How did you fare?

Red Water, Blue Water & Search Marketing

If you’ve been in the small business marketing game long enough, you’re bound to come by the term “red water – blue water.”

The Red Water

At the core of the expression is the idea that everyone wants to catch the most fish and as a result most companies end up all hunting in the same pool of water. After all, these pools are loaded with fish so it only makes sense it’s where you’d spend most your time. You might even land a few meals too. But too many companies fishing out of the same pool causes a feeding frenzy, which results in blood in the water, and that’s when the sharks (big business) come in. Now in order to get to the fish you have to cut your prices, double your ad budgets, and hire more salespeople to put more lines in the water. Even then the sharks seem to chase you off after a couple of quick nibbles. That is why they call it “red water.”

The Blue Water

Swimming with the sharks isn’t a great way to win in business. Small business owners have long understood that in order to succeed they need to distinguish themselves from their competition and offer a unique value their major counterparts can’t. They have to swim where the majority of their competition can’t. And in return these businesses don’t have to work as hard to earn their meal. This is your “blue water.”

What does this have to do with Search Marketing?

Simple – long tail keywords. Search marketers should look at long tail keywords as their map to blue water.

In case you need refreshing, long tail keywords are highly targeted keyword phrases used in search engine queries. An example of a long tail keyword is “Small Business Online Marketing” instead of the short tail (and highly competitive) alternate of “Online Marketing”.

Obviously there are a lot more searches each month for short tail keywords but the increase in searches is just about directly proportionate to the level of competition in regards to ranking for those terms. It’s the age old adage of is it better to have a very small piece of a big pie, or the biggest piece of a small pie? For most my customers, the answer is usually the latter.

Long tail keyword targeting isn’t a new concept. SEOs (both good and bad) have been building campaigns around long tail keywords since the beginning SEO time. But the success rate of these campaigns hasn’t been consistent over the years, which leaves many small business owners perplexed. After numerous failed attempts at long tail keywords they’re ready to give up.

“Hey Jim, we haven’t seen a fish out here in days…
shouldn’t we go back to where all the other boats are?”

No. The problem isn’t with the concept… the problem is that your SEO has driven the boat all the way to what I’m going to call Black Water.

Red, Blue… and now Black?

As I mentioned before SEOs love long tail keywords. A big part of the reason SEOs love long tail keywords is that they are easy to rank for. In fact, the longer and more obscure the keyword phrase the easier it is to achieve page one rankings in a short amount of time. Traditionally this is how SEOs measure their success… “Mr. Client, we got you to page one, position three – our job here is done.”

Unfortunately, rankings do not equal customers. Many times they don’t even equal prospects because the SEO has gone so far outside the box, they’re no longer targeting keywords that your target audience is searching for. This is the black water. Sure, you’re the only boat anywhere to be seen, and yes there’s a lot of ocean beneath you. Only no one is really sure if there are any fish in the black water or if they’re inclined to bite. Fishing in black water is the best way to burn through your marketing budget with nothing to show for it. Letting your SEO run away with keywords that don’t relate to your business, or don’t see any search volume will only end in a long, painful swim back to shore.

So how do we find blue water?

Research is the most important element of any search marketing strategy. It’s also the point where customers should be the most involved. Ideally, your SEO should seek to understand your business, your market, and your competitive advantages before they start to craft a keyword strategy for your SEO campaign. Then they should discuss the strategy with you – in detail. Don’t be afraid to ask your SEO for firm numbers relating to the keywords they are targeting. How many people are searching this phrase per month on Google globally? How many locally? How tough is the competition? How long do you expect it will take us to rank on page 1, 2, 3 for this phrase? What are the alternatives?

Customers should never be afraid to put their SEO on the spot. After all, SEO is as much a part of your overall marketing strategy as are the billboards or radio spots you consider. And while I believe every SEO has a right to protect their trade secrets – never let your SEO hide behind “proprietary information” as an excuse for not having an answer. At the very least your SEO should be able to explain how they came to the figures they did, and why.

Just like you want your fishing guide to be knowledgeable and experienced, you want your search marketing company to have the right combination of real world credentials and proven results.

Have you found your blue water? I’d love to hear your experiences…