"Moneyball Marketing" comes from the book by Michael Lewis called "Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game". It's the story of Major League Baseball franchises that succeed even though they have smaller budgets and supposedly inferior players. Stephen Demarco from MediaPost gels that theory down in his article "Winning the Game" into 3 points that we can take to any client and help them win...
"1) Start with quantifiable outcomes; 2) use new metrics based on new data; and 3) execute agile game plans. Companies that combine these three skills -- ING Direct and Hyundai come to mind -- can outpace rivals continually, despite relatively smaller budgets and a punishing marketing environment."
So what does he have to say about each discipline? It makes for a good read and even one to send to your clients as a seeding article but here are the highlights...
"Start with quantifiable outcomes. I continue to be amazed by how many agency personnel think that achieving a large number of impressions is the primary measure of a campaign's success (a fact I have been exposed to when judging industry awards). In my view impressions, as well as reach and frequency, are a simple input into the marketing equation. Outcomes matter more, and if you can't quantify them, then they don't count. What are some good examples of outcomes? How about "grow 10% each quarter" or "increase customer retention five percentage points by the end of the year?" Defining great outcome statements upfront is the critical first step in marketing planning -- and when they are quantifiable, they establish clear success criteria for your agency and media partners. Point: Don't invest resources in a marketing program until the desired outcome is identified and you can connect the dots from program execution through to success. "
"Use new metrics based on new data. Data can be a blessing and a curse; in the end, the determining factor is knowing what to measure. In baseball, sabermetrics has emerged as the new math, complete with new data and metrics. "Run production" is the number one performance measure, and old school metrics like batting average don't predict run production as well as innovative new metrics like on-base percentage and range factor. Similarly, conventional marketing metrics like purchase intent (collected via surveys) are no longer adequate when we can use consumers' actual online shopping behavior to better calculate the brand and sales impact of a particular campaign.
Like sabermetrics, clickstream-based marketing measurement has proven to be a better measure of consumer purchase behavior than the conventional techniques it is now replacing. The best example of this may be in the auto industry, where consumers' online shopping activities have been translated into a whole new class of demand, conversion and shopper quality metrics like cost per shopper, shopper conversion rate, and reverse cross shop. As a result of these new metrics, auto makers now have a better understanding of how their marketing is performing, and precisely what they need to adjust in order to hit their monthly and annual sales goals. Point: Discard old-school data and metrics in favor of rich, new clickstream-based analytics."
"Execute an agile game plan. Even with quantifiable outcomes and statistics-driven measurement in place, consistently winning the game depends on deft marketing execution. Optimizing marketing programs is certainly a scientific process, but it also involves a major dose of human interpretation. And the key to agile marketing is scenario planning, where managers have pre-defined what marketing levers they will pull, based on what their marketing dashboards tell them. In the automotive example, overcoming a shortfall in sales before the end of the month could mean one of two things: increasing advertising to create more shoppers, or increasing incentives to convert existing shoppers. Being able to pull the right lever with enough time to achieve the desired sales outcome is the difference between a smart investment (and millions of dollars) and lost sales. Point: Maintain agility in your marketing plans so that you can take the right action on the steady stream of data that comes in."
I think this article is full of great advice for our clients and can help you help them achieve the outcomes they are really looking for. Even if the campaign you are working with them on is not online, have you taken the time to do a strategic marketing plan with them, knowing what profit centers they want to focus on and when and how you are going to track the outcomes? Have you gathered information necessary to show them the return on investment through the EFS Generator? When the first campaign is over will you craft a written report to show them what the campaign has produced? It's not just new media that can benefit from the need to be accountable for marketing dollars, you can do the same thing with traditional broadcast media but you have to teach your clients and walk them through the process of what data they will use to evaluate it and how they can remain flexible with the gameplan depending on the circumstances.