Horse racing is an especially opportune metaphor for what’s going on in the fast-evolving worlds of Revenue Marketing™, attribution modeling, predictive and advanced marketing analytics, and bringing Big Data to the enterprise. Seconds can mean the difference between success and failure.
Have you ever heard of Zenyatta? You might have seen her on “60 Minutes” or the cover of W Magazine, but she’s a horse – not just any horse. With her towering stature and trademark “dance” she runs faster than any mare I’ve ever seen and owns a stunning career record, winning 19-consecutive races in a 20-race career. She is the first horse to ever win two different Breeder’s Cup races, and she’s so appropriately nicknamed, “Queen of Racing.” I think every organization’s marketing mix should model that kind of behavior.
Today, marketing organizations are in a race to adopt and deploy the best analytics to help them with optimally allocating budgets, and quickly applying test-and-learn techniques to use-case scenarios. Marketers not only have the tools to do this more effectively in real-time, but are able to quantify what they’re doing in a way that was unthinkable before.
The horse racing community has long employed a form of analytics of its own. They collect “handicapping data”, which in some cases can be tens of thousands of combinations of variables to predict which horse has the best chance of winning. This data includes attributes such as post-position, race length, track surface, weather conditions, and horse and jockey records.
Is this starting to sound familiar to marketers that are gathering and analyzing endless amounts of data about their prospects and existing customers, both online and offline? It’s the intersection of data and human behavior. The data that is attached to leads and prospects provides the leverage needed to trigger the audience with relevant content and encourages buying behavior.
Today, marketing is increasingly driving the business and playing a leadership role. Organizations with sophisticated marketing tools are rapidly taking hold in a highly dynamic environment. Those only taking small steps – or worse, none at all – will fall quickly behind. This is a highly competitive race for scale and tapping data to win.