Moneyballin’

Wins over replacement (WAR). On-base plus slugging (OPS). Player efficiency rating (PER). Catch radius. Usage percentage. Whatever happened to sports statistics like batting average, fielding percentage, rushing yards and rebounds? All of the “important” stats fit on the back of a baseball or football card when I was a kid. Today, there isn’t enough room on the back of a baseball card anymore to include the traditional stats with all the new, advanced statistics.

If Sabermetrics, as it is known in baseball, was popular when I was a kid, I would have never learned that Ozzie Smith has been recognized as one of the ten best casually dressed men in America”. It’s easy to point to the Oakland Athletics General Manager Billy Beane of Moneyball fame (if you’re a real stat head, it may be Bill James) and give him the credit or blame for the explosion of sports statistics.

ManMany front office execs across all leagues have been turning to advanced analytics over recent years in their never ending quest to evaluate player performance and gain an edge over the competition. You can debate the validity of many statistics, but the ability to evaluate how a player contributes to their team’s success (wins and losses) and how to compensate the player appropriately, drives all the madness and ensures stats aren’t going away.

How are you measuring the success of your marketing activities? Are you consistently measuring them at all? Like professional sports teams, successful marketers apply a disciplined analytical approach to measure and guide their strategy. Every marketing tool provides data and sometimes incredibly detailed data. You probably capture metrics from your website with Google Analytics. Your social channels (Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram) have more metrics. Don’t forget all the data you get from email and press releases. If you’re really on top of things, you measure what you are doing with retargeting ads, trade shows, events, etc.

Lack of data is not the problem. The problem is that your data is likely siloed within a variety of tools. Basic analytics can provide a singular measure of a channel’s success or failure. But are all these individual pieces of data providing the insight needed to truly understand the bigger game of wins and losses. To do that, you need to be able to understand how your marketing tactics fit together and influence each other.

I bet you likely see a boost in website traffic every time you release a new email, but are Thursday emails more impactful than emails sent on Tuesdays? What type of messages resonate with your audience best and on which channel? You likely have the data. You just have to unlock it, analyze it and act on it. It just requires the discipline and know how. Sounds like one more thing to focus on in your free time. 

So let’s play ball!!!