Almost three decades ago, fantasy sports had around a million participants. Stats were manually tabulated, research was reading magazines, most leagues were season long formats and baseball was the dominant sport. In 2016, participation eclipsed 60 million fans, with fantasy football leagues grabbing a 70% fantasy market share. Four factors have helped fuel this growth:

  • Data feeds enabling real time stat tracking (analytics)
  • Increased Internet (accessibility)
  • Smartphones (portability)
  • More game formats, particularly daily (platforms)

These factors have likewise sparked interest in digital marketing over the past two decades. 80% of all purchases begin with a search engine query. There are over 1 billion daily views of YouTube videos. With the same growth chargers, what other parallels do fantasy football and digital marketing share?  Well, this article is my stab at answering that question.

  • Read the draft room and what keywords do customers use to search for your services?

 

Friends and family leagues tend to renew with the same GMs. Get to know your opponents’ tendencies. Do they like shiny objects thereby overvaluing rookies? Do they favor local players due to rooting interest? This insight might indicate how they draft or what they might like in a trade offer.

Similarly, know the keywords that prospects associate with your service. Organize your content. Optimize accordingly. Years ago, as an apparel e-tailer, we added shoes to our offering. We labeled the department “footwear,” but had far lower traffic than expected. Upon research, we discovered that consumer searches were more specific – sneakers, flats, sandals, etc. – and had to reboot our wording.

  • Understand positional scarcity – distinguishing premium versus commodity production

 

Suppose the following example characterized the player pool

  • The top 20 Wide Receivers (WR) all rate as “A+”, performing at similar statistical levels
  • The top 8 Running Backs (RB) perform as “A” while all others rate “C+”

The 20th best WR is rated higher than the best RB. However, the performance gap is small at WR and significant at RB. In this stylized example, most of the first ten picks will likely be RBs. The premium performance of the top RBs relative to the rest of the field creates “positional scarcity”. Remember the Law of Comparative Advantage from Economics?

So, if you run a restaurant and determine that lunch customers offer more margin despite dinner customers paying more, consider focusing your marketing campaigns accordingly. Oversubscribed during summer, but not as busy the rest of the year? Then offering seasonal discounts to rebalance demand is one marketing strategy you might deploy.

 

  • Aim for upside with late round picks and combine analog events with digital presence

 

In the latter rounds, try to get your injury-prone starter’s backup. Go for players with upside. Perhaps a player was traded to a better situation that offers an expanded role. These picks may pay off. If not, you can always release them and look for someone better on the waiver wire. If your business draws mostly local patrons, consider community building events that you can sponsor or organize. Reward customers with an appreciation event.

Use social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn to gauge the topics of most interests to conference attendees. Offering a day pass to a gym while customers come in for their next auto inspection. Not only are you partnering with another local business but also you are offering additional value to your customers.

  • The draft starts the season, but in-season management wins championships – nurture your house file

 

Drafting for a new campaign is as exciting as winning new business. However, as the season progresses, make adjustments between your starters and your bench as needed. Seek to trade where you have excess or to address a weakness. Businesses should segment lists of customers from prospects. Personalize the messages sent to your list. Would it make sense to send the same message to a parent curious about financial aid and a student who visited a campus? Having the email name matters; but the message has to be relevant. Know when you are in a different portion of the season. Know what area of the decision funnel your prospect is in.

  • Strive for Engagement

 

Estimated fantasy football revenue of over $11 billion rivals the NFL’s annual revenue of $13 billion. The interest in fantasy football buoys the NFL’s popularity. Fantasy football teams have players from multiple NFL teams expanding fandom beyond local markets. Studies show that two-thirds of fantasy players watch more live sports due to their larger player pool knowledge.

One blogger described it this way:

“Personally, fantasy makes football even more interesting for me. I find myself paying attention to games that I wouldn’t normally [watch]…. time you enjoy wasting, was not wasted.”

Another article echoed a similar sentiment:

“It has vastly broadened the game’s appeal to include people who previously followed football lightly.  It rewards viewers for paying close attention from kick-off to the game’s final seconds.”

In the B2B space, 70% of the customer journey is marketing (researching your services and reputation) and the balance is sales. How are you identifying and nurturing prospects early in your funnel? Do you follow up manually or deploy a CRM (customer retention management) system to keep in touch? Beyond your website, how does your social media presence amplify your brand?

 

  • Commit to Life Long Learning

 

I caught the bug in the late 1990’s when a co-worker invited me to a league with fellow colleagues. What started out as an accommodation became a passion. While none of us are with that original employer, the league continues. Playing fantasy football offers camaraderie. Winning the league is the ultimate bragging right. That quest has spurred each of us to spend hours studying for the draft or coming up with creative ways to memorialize another GM’s bad performance.

Beyond my initial home league, I sometime sign up for public leagues or compete in national tournaments. Perhaps we’ll meet on the virtual gridiron or diamond. If not, I always enjoy comparing notes with new models from different analysts or fans. I find the combination of analytical assessment as well as creative stirrings to be as compelling in digital marketing. If you are naturally curious, research is its own reward. However, when your findings add insights that improve your tactics, then it also boosts the return on investment of your marketing efforts. What’s Google’s secret sauce in search engine optimization (SEO) ranking? What content resonates with site visitors? How to best represent the excellent products that my clients provide?  If you’d like to find out more about services we provide at WSI Vital Marketing, contact us or visit our website.