• by Cory Treffiletti , Featured Contributor, November 13, 2013

What’s a better way to win a game?  Is it the game where you grind it out and get one run at a time, in a heated battle with the opposing team that depends on fast pick-off moves to first and finessed bunts to advance the runners?  Is it the low scoring game, maybe 2-2 in the ninth, and your best player drives a deep fly ball to center field that drives the fielder to the warning track, only to be crushed when they see the ball fly into the stands, ending the game with a bang from a bases-loaded grand slam?  Who’s to say? A win is a win in my book!

Of course it’s not always about winning or losing, but rather about how you play the game.  Baseball is the best analogy for this, but I think if you look at the stats you’ll see that grinding it out is more dependable than relying on the walk-off to do it every time.  The same goes for football, where defense wins championships.  A reliable offense can take you far, and the long ball can stretch the field, but you have to be able to stop the opposition in order to win games.

The same can be said for the space of data-driven marketing, where iterative, dependable optimization can deliver significant results over the long term.  When you’re first getting started, it’s possible to win big and see hockey-stick growth from dramatic improvements you make, but over time you need to see gradual increases that come as a result of continual improvement.  Managing performance means having access to data, which can only be achieved if you put the right tools in place.

More marketers are turning to technology to make this happen.  The enterprise-level marketing stack is here to stay, and a technology-savvy marketing organization is crucial to your success.  The question is: How deep does your team have to be into tech?  How much knowledge is required, vs. partnering with your technology or IT team?

I believe it’s a gradual knowledge.  Recent reports from the DMA, Forrester, Gartner and other research groups all point toward marketers needing to be more tech-savvy -- but for now, marketers need only to truly understand their business model, the eco-system of data that’s available, and how sharing structured data can benefit their efforts.  I don’t think marketers need to understand Hadoop  or complex data architecture in order to see success.   The partnership between IT and marketing can supply the brain trust that will drive results. 

Marketers need to become well-versed in the standard acronyms, like DSPs, DMPs, SSPs, and such.   They need to be capable of examining a landscape document for the business and understand who represents a channel for data in (for example, data providers, first-party data channels); who represents an algorithm for unlocking value (for example,  DMPs, modelers, attribution vendors); and who represents an activation channel for data out (for example, DSPs, CRM vendors, site-side optimization tools).  If you can understand the landscape, then you can start to prioritize who provides what services and how they work together.  You can also start to understand the pros and cons of going deep in any one restricted area vs. working across them all. 

So the next time you sit down to develop your marketing strategy, think of your favorite sports team and come up with a game plan that is reminiscent of what they do to win.  See if they’re built for power and the long ball, or if they grind it out inning after inning to win.  Then look at the ways the last few championships have been won, and see what strategy breeds success at that level.

I think you’ll see a clear strategy for success.