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Web Marketing and Baseball: What They Have in Common

I am a huge baseball fan which is mostly a night time past time. My day job is running a web marketing agency delivering SEO services and social media marketing strategies. Last night I realized that baseball has a lot in common with web marketing. Here’s how.

My team, the Tampa Bay Rays, was leading yesterday in the ALCS 3 games to 1. In the fifth game they took a 7 – 0 lead through six innings. By all accounts, it was looking pretty good for them to clinch the ALCS title and celebrate their first ever World Series birth.

But, just like the unpredictability of web marketing results, the Boston Red Sox came back with an impressive vengeance and won the game in dramatic style, spoiling the Rays’ chance to celebrate.

When we implement SEO services and social media strategies for our clients I like to say that “every day is a new day.” Whatever search engine rankings you had yesterday may or may not be the same today. Whatever influence your content had yesterday in the social mediasphere may or may not be the same today.

The web is dynamic and constantly moving. And, that is a double edge sword for marketers. The constant movement is incentive for marketers to keep producing positive results through ongoing relationship building and good content that gets indexed by search engines. The flip side is that if you “take your eye of the ball” for one day, the results can change negatively.

This baseball cliche has multiple meanings. To achieve sustainable web marketing results, marketers need to “keep their eye on the ball” by:
- constantly producing good content
- continually building relationships (offline and online)
- consistently listening to the conversations taking place in and around their target communities
- working to engage their community with sincerity and in a human voice

So, let’s tie this back to baseball. My Tampa Bay Rays didn’t expect the Red Sox to come back hard like they did when they had a 7 – 0 lead. They took their eye off the ball. And, they lost this game, but not the entire series. As of this writing, they are still leading 3 – 2 in the series. So, they can still get to the World Series.

Marketers lose small battles from time to time in the context of ongoing marketing plans. Keep your eye on the ball by following the best practices described above to minimize the small battles you may lose. You don’t want to lose the war.

Okay, so the ALCS is not a war. But, when you play the Red Sox for a major league championship, it can feel like a war.

Your thoughts on either the ALCS or these marketing best practices?

Bernie

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