Moneyball Style Marketing

In the book, Moneyball author Michael Lewis showed that there were a few statistics that answered key questions about an offensive player’s potential:

• On-base percentage: Can the batter get on base?
• Slugging percentage: Can the batter hit for power?

In our game, there are three primary numbers we care about. Below I’ll refer to “content elements” which can translate to concepts, ideas, keywords or a simple premise for your content marketing endeavors. This will help you focus and improve your content efforts, because every piece of content you create has an opportunity cost associated with it.

• Revenue: Does the content element speak to a service or product line that produces revenue?
• Search Volume: Is the audience actively searching for the content element?
• Social Chatter: Is the audience actively talking about the content element?

1. Revenue Potential

The first step is to determine what concepts actually relate to products and services that make your organization money. Take note of the common questions potential customers and influencers have about your offering(s). Establish a healthy number of questions as you will likely make some eliminations later in your analysis. Essentially, you are creating a list of inquiry prospects to run numbers against.

2. Search Potential

Once you have some concepts in mind based on the service/product lines that drive revenue and the common questions people have about each, you can begin to explore the search database. Tools like the Google Keyword Tool, Wordtracker and Keyword Discovery can help vet and validate content elements. Additionally, these tools mayshed light on terms and concepts with a wealth of search activity that you had not previously considered. The metric to be considered here is search volume (daily, weekly or monthly).

3. Social Potential

The final step is to determine the level of social chatter about each concept. Social monitoring and listening tools will unveil what content elements are prevalent in consumer dialogue and those that are largely invisible in social media. As for metrics, you may choose to collect number of mentions within blog posts, tweets, video hits and forum postings that include your content element or keyword. Using those specific measurements for a client, we combined totals for each source (blogs, twitter, video, forums) and created a “Social Sum” for each content element on our prospect list.

After you have collected your data, you can begin your analysis. Consider adding a scale to the varying degrees of revenue/profitability, search volume and social amplification (e.g. 1=low, 5=high). Carefully uncover those topics that meet the following requirements:

• This concept speaks to a service/product that makes us money
• This concept is highly searched
• This concept is discussed often