Use your Fantasy League strategy to boost your real-life marketing

Your fantasy league strategy is a data driven strategy

As I write this, the new Premier league season is upon us.  Football fans around the world are currently devising their own data driven strategies for their fantasy teams.

Picking players for their teams based on previous performance, the team they are playing for, their current status (are they injured, will they get selected?), the other players you’ve already picked, their transfer fee, or just because you just like them.

Jay our CTO knows nothing about football but he loves data. Fantasy League, has given him a whole new world of data to play with.  He’s devised dashboards and algorithms (just like we use in Websand) to identify which players represent the best value and find a few outliers. He’s used the data to build a fantasy league strategy, and help him with critical strategic decisions for his team.  He’s now delighted when  Burnley keep a clean sheet.  This was unthinkable before fantasy league.  To compare fantasy league strategy in Moneyball terms he’s Peter Brand (Jonah Hill) to my Billy Bean (Brad Pitt)

I know the Brad Pitt comparison is a stretch but Brad’s older than me and I’m writing this so I’ll allow it 🙂

Setting your fantasy league strategy for your marketing

By selecting your formation and then your players, you are setting out your strategy.  Your strategy might be complicated, based on 1000’s of hours of experience and research.  Or it might be very straightforward.  Whatever floats your boat, the key thing is whether is works or not.

What makes life really interesting this year is the number of ‘prospects’.  We know who they are, but no idea how they are going to perform in the environment of the Premier League.  So do you avoid these players or do you include them.  We all know a selecting the right ‘prospect’ could be the key to winning and losing the league.

The key thing is you’ve set your objectives – win the league, and you’ve planned the best way to meet this objective with your Fantasy League strategy.

Managing your fantasy league progress after the game begins

You’ve set your plan, and picked your players.  However, every fantasy league manager knows that once the game has kicked off you are powerless.  You can’t control or influence the selection policy of managers in real life and you certainly can’t control the performance of players.

But you’ll always know where you stand, and how we’ll your fantasy league strategy is performing.  The format of a league means you always know how well you are performing against your competition.

In Play – Making changes to your strategy

The game has begun, but the data and reporting is showing you it’s not going to plan.  That’s ok, you’ll have plenty of data on the performance within the game to adjust your strategy.  Perhaps you’ll change the formation, perhaps you’ll change a few players.  Maybe you’ll do both.   

The point is you’ll be making decisions based on the performance of your business against your objectives, and the data you have presented to you.

Of course, your decisions are based on historic data.  So you’ll need to continue to monitor your performance on a regular basis.

From a bit of fun to a data driven industry

What started out as an innocent game, is now a data driven industry in its own right.  Based on similar principles, the data driven performance of players within sport, huge businesses such as DraftKings have developed over the past 10 years. 

I mentioned Moneyball earlier, the basis of success within the Oakland A’s was to use the ‘game theory’ behind a fantasy league strategy to selecting baseball players in real life.

Just as sports have got deeper into using data to improve their performance.  The same is true of business.

 

Putting fantasy league strategy into your business and create data driven marketing strategies

Websand is a marketing automation platform, and we are a data driven marketing business.  We help businesses to devise and implement marketing strategies based on the data they collect everyday.

Essentially, we help them to create a fantasy league for their own.

Helping marketers to understand more about their customers and their behaviour / performance with your business.  So they can identify customers based on their spending and interaction with your business.

So we are interested in how data can drive strategy, performance and decision making.  It’s a lot like the process you go through while selecting and creating your fantasy team.  But perhaps you hadn’t looked at it that way.

Thank you for reading this far.  I’d ask that you re-read the post above, but think of how you could apply the same data driven marketing process to your business.

If you need any help, post to the comments below or get in touch.

Saul

CEO, Websand

Come and join the Websand Premier 2020/21 edition. 

Come and join us in our own private Fantasy Football League- the Websand Premier.  Sign up at https://fantasy.premierleague.com/leagues/auto-join/pv3a58

Or if you are already playing – enter using League Code: pv3a58

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