Moneyball is a buzzword we’ve heard all about. Coming out of Billy Beane’s famous Oakland A’s baseball team and their use of “sabermetrics”. The idea is to find aspects of the market deemed “undervalued” and invest in these as a competitive advantage. Billy did this with baseball, but it’s no different to how investors have always looked at committing money to projects.
How does this work in marketing?
Dr. Grace Kite recently created a fascinating post about ‘moneyball marketing channels’ essentially, channels that marketers are undervaluing the effectiveness of. The gist is, as more money has run into trackable and attributable online channels such as Google Ads, traditional channels such as TV, Print and Radio continue to provide the best long-term value for brands.
But, these can be expensive channels. Whilst they might provide more bang for your buck, there is a higher entry fee. Small businesses may struggle to afford effective placements on them, nevermind afford the production of adverts that are engaging and belong on the platforms. Added to this, these are channels which are harder to attribute, giving small business owners less confidence in their effectiveness.
1. Understand Your Customer
So, how can we combine the learnings from the “moneyball marketing channels” with other marketing methods to create an accessible “moneyball” blueprint for small businesses?
It’s critical as a small business to understand who your customer is. This helps you identify the channels and messaging that provide your business with the best return in investment. Byron Sharp from the Ehrenberg-Bass institute of marketing advocates for “sophisticated mass marketing”. This essentially means, the widest possible audience that can buy your goods or services.
For smaller businesses, this isn’t always an option. It works if you serve a defined local area, but if you sell online or perhaps offer a niche service nationwide you may struggle.
What I would recommend is to understand your customer and meet them where they are. To be clear, your customers as individuals, will all look very different. However, having an idea of who your average or target customer is, will guide you.
For example, if you are a fashion brand focusing on men in their 20’s, they will appear in very different places, both physically and digitally than a make up brand focused at women in their 40’s. By understanding where your customer is, you can select the channels which provide you the best way of reaching them.
Creating customer personas.
Customer personas get a bad rap in my opinion. Like a lot of marketing tools, they’ve been used and explained poorly, which has led to ineffective personas and the belief from other departments in business that it is a bunch of (and i quote a former colleague) “marketing wankery”.
Bad personas are terrible. “Teri is 34, owns a dog and loves all the things our brand stands for”. This provides us no direction from which to create a strategy.
But a good persona gives you an idea of who you’re talking to and how you should be talking to them. I’ll give you an example using these boots, and 2 clients I’ve worked with previously.
Brand A is a women’s fashion brand. Brand B is a company focused on selling outdoor equipment and tactical gear.
The description for brand A, may include words like “Military look”, “chunky sole” & “customisable laces”.
For brand B, the description would focus on “Long-lasting”, “comfort for miles”, “fully waterproof”. Same product, 2 different ways of talking about it. The same would go for our product photos.
Lifestyle shots for brand A, would show the boot in a streetwear setting, with jeans and maybe someone having fun with friends.
Brand B’s lifestyle shots would involve muddy walks, tough hills and rugged wear. These are small, low cost ways you can tailor your message to your customer.
By knowing who your customer is, you can make more effective advertising and save money by focusing on the platforms, mediums and places that your customers spend their time.
2. Be Creative
The 2 areas that marketing promotions can be broken down into are:
- Communicating a message
- Distributing the message
Dr. Kite’s article referenced earlier refers to ways of distributing your message.
The problem is, bigger brands will be better at distributing their message to the masses. They have bigger budgets and in this game, spend trumps all. Channel selection can be important, but big companies can pay for every channel.
It’s the same in politics. The party that spends the most, tends to win.
Where smaller businesses can compete is by communicating their message more effectively. You can do this by being bold, saying something different or saying something a lot.
Standing Out
The key is to be noticed. To do this, you need to be different. You can choose to be “quirky” or use fluorescent pink in your branding, but there are ways any business can stand out. Here’s 3 examples.
- Position yourself against a competitor
- Find a niche within the niche
- Be Bold
Vs. Positioning
Everyone loves an underdog. You can use this to create an angle to push against larger incumbents.
A large brand can’t position itself in a David and Goliath battle. They are Goliath. It would just be punching down and giving airtime to a brand people may not have even heard of otherwise. But for a small brand, this can give you an edge.
Harry’s razors are a great example of this as are challenger political parties.
Niches
Some niches are just too small for big brands to consider. For example, Nike wants to dominate sports. They’ve focused on large, mainstream sports such as American Football, Basketball, Running and Football. These are some of the most widely supported sports in the world. But that doesn’t mean you can’t make a mark with an athletic brand.
Gymshark was able to gain a huge advantage by focusing on gym goers and bodybuilders. A sport that seemed too small at the time for Nike to even consider. Now Gymshark is valued at over $1 billion.
This is similar to how Nike themselves gained a foothold in the market. They focused purely on running shoes in the early days, whilst bigger brands like Adidas focused on more widely support sports like football. This allowed Nike to develop their brand and use it to launch apparel in other sports like basketball and dominate in those areas.
Be Bold
Being bold is difficult for big brands. Bold means risk. Big businesses want to guarantee their return and so choose tried and tested strategies and safe creatives. Things that nobody’s going to get fired for if they go wrong. As a small business, risk in marketing is your friend.
The danger for small businesses isn’t that people will be put off by your message, it’s that they won’t hear your message at all.
In politics this is why establishment politicians and parties all feel the same. There is too much risk for them to be bold. They need to guarantee what works. That’s why someone like Donald Trump is able to gain coverage, by being different,
3. Make Use of What You Have
There are lots of free pieces of marketing that small businesses ignore.
To grow, you need to maximise every single asset you have. This can be making sure you have a sign outside your office, your business is listed on Google maps, you have branded packaging. All these things are relatively low in cost, but can make a big impact.
Utilise your network of friends and family. Make sure everyone knows what it is you do. A lot of us are too shy to do this, but it can be key to growing your business.
Social media channels are another example of an asset that is underutilised. These channels are free to run. If you’re not effectively using Instagram, TikTok & YouTube there’s little point at looking at paid advertising. Whilst the inconsistency of social media results is frustrating this is actually an advantage for small businesses.
One blast of large exposure is a huge win for small businesses. It can transform them. For large businesses, the inconsistency makes results hard to predict. This is why they tend to prefer paid channels. There’s a guarantee of what they can get in return. Fighting in paid channels therefore provides them the advantage. Organic channels provide us with the advantage.
4. Don’t disregard traditional channels
Traditional media has worked for years. The research we began this article with shows that it still does. As a small business, you can make these platforms work for you.
For example, using direct mail, you can focus on a local area for not a lot of money. This may prove more effective than social media, as people will spend more time on average with a piece of mail than a social media post.
You can also take advantage of out of home by using underutilised placements. These placements often don’t have takers after your 30 or 90 days period has finished, meaning your ads are up for much longer than you’ve been billed for. Great examples of these are placements on phoneboxes.
You could use print marketing in a niche or local magazine to get your message in front of the right people. Again, these can live for much longer than the initial exposure and are much cheaper than large placements in broadsheets.
5. Be Consistent
Consistent messaging is critical to outperforming big business. Lots of businesses lurch from one message to another trying to find whatever works. The truth is, one of the biggest factors in marketing effectiveness is consistency.
Think about it like this. You meet a person, let’s call them Sally. Sally tells you on the first meeting that they’re an accountant that loves walking. The next time you meet them, Sally says their a painter who like white water rafting. You’ll probably think it’s 2 different people.
6. Double down on what works
Once you’ve found what works, keep going. Too often, businesses get distracted by new marketing channels, thinking they may hold the answer.
For example, if you run a direct mail campaign and it brings in sales, that’s the channel that works for your business. If it’s Google Ads that work, then spend more on Google Ads. Spending time chopping and changing can cost a lot more than it brings in, both in terms of time and money.
There is a small caveat. Once you’ve found the channel, that is where most of your spend should go. However, it is always worth finding one additional supporting channel. I’ve seen this a lot and it has been proven. Ad spend split across 2 channels, has a better ROI that increasing spend on one channel.
Take Away Points:
- Stand out / be creative
- Tell your friends and family
- Make use of what you have
- Don’t disregard traditional channels
- Double down on what works