How Fantasy Football Can Help Your Next Marketing Campaign (No, Really)

Fantasy football is a little like marketing!
Fantasy football is a little like marketing!

Hear me out: You can make your next marketing campaign much more effective if you treat it like a fantasy football team.

And I am not saying this just because I’ve spent all afternoon reading scouting reports and need to justify that time to my boss. (It’s called research, Matt, and it’s the heart of great blogs.) 

If you think about it, the winners in both arenas know how to use data to make the best possible decisions. Here’s what I mean. 



Know Who Your Producers and Sleepers Are

You’ve only got so many spots on your roster. You’ve got to draft players wisely in order to build a team that can outplay the competition. That means you’ll need to do a certain amount of research and analysis to identify the guys who can put up big numbers, especially if you want to snag an overlooked, undervalued talent.

And that’s not too different from how marketers plan campaigns. You have a finite amount of budget and time available to reach your campaign’s goals. So you have to have a clear, accurate understanding of what channels and tactics are most likely to produce the best results.

Know and Analyze All Relevant KPIs

Emphasis on “relevant.” We all know that one guy who fills his roster with every single Seattle Seahawk he can acquire simply because his grandparents lived in Washington State and they gave him Seahawks gear every year for Christmas. (Sidebar: HOLY COW, CARL, WHAT IS YOUR DEAL — THAT IS NOT A WINNING STRATEGY.) 

What a dumb way to pick a team, right? Except a lot of marketers do something similar with their advertising spend. They select sentimental favorites, even if their recent track record isn’t that great. Or they spread their budget over every single channel available, even if that means they’re throwing valuable money at a lot of underperformers. 

If you want to be successful, your decisions have to be driven by data. 

Adjust Your Roster As Necessary

You don’t just pick a lineup and then let it run the entire season, do you? Or you shouldn’t, at least. If you’re smart, you’re checking and updating your roster on a regular basis.

After all, last week’s lineup might not make sense this week because of different matchups, bye weeks and player injuries. Maybe your quarterback just decides to start dropping the ball around Week 5. To make the most of your matchups, you’ve got to be able to adjust your lineup every week, even up to kickoff. 

Same rule applies with your campaigns. Maybe your favorite social network starts tanking mid-flight. Or your go-to keywords fizzle. It happens. But you can’t wait until the end of the campaign to make changes. You’ve got to be able to adjust as quickly as possible, in campaign, so you can make the most of your budget.

Get Alllllll the Information

People who are really into fantasy football have a reputation for obsessively following the news not just about their players, but other players, weather forecasts, trade deals and, probably for some weirdos, the phases of the moon. Because all those inputs can impact what happens on the field and, eventually, your points. 

When you’re running a campaign, it helps to have additional (relevant) information, whether that’s a regional or geographic breakdown of results, sales or CRM data, industry benchmarks, you name it. They give you a greater context so you can make more informed decisions about media spend and strategy. 

Don’t Try to Crunch the Data on Your Own

Unless you’re criminally insane, you’re probably not pulling together all your fantasy football stats on your own, by hand. You’re using an app that collects the data for you, so you can spend your time exploring it and making strategic decisions. 

And that’s the approach that marketers should be taking, too. Automate your reporting so that you can spend the majority of your time on analysis. It’s one of the first and most important steps you can take to accelerate your insights.

Wish You Didn’t Have to Work Weekends?  

ChannelMix can’t help you pick your fantasy football roster, but we can make sure you have the time to actually enjoy your weekends. Our analytics platform helps marketers save hundreds of hours. Request your demo today!