8 Surprising Marketing Lessons From Baseball [LNIM266]

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Episode 266,.

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Late Night Internet Marketing.

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This week on the Late Night Internet Marketing Podcast, we're going to talk about all of the incredible marketing lessons that you can learn from something as simple as baseball. All this and more, on the late night internet marketing podcast the late night internet marketing podcast.

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You want to know how to start and where to begin. Can you get out your comfort zone, my friend? Yes, you can do it right when it's late at night. At the end of the day, your dreams burn in your sights. Keep it up and you will find that you're building your business one night at a time.

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And now broadcasting late at night from a little studio in the big state of Texas, your host, mark Mason. Hey, hey, hey, how are you doing? I am your host, mark Mason, coming to you from the little studio in Dallas, texas, where, right now in the beginning of May, we're all about high school baseball, high school baseball playoffs and all the excitement that that entails. At the same time, my Fightin' Texas Aggie baseball team while they're struggling at LSU right now, they're also a highly ranked number one in the nation at the moment, although I suspect that their troubles at LSU are going to actually knock them down a notch. They're looking really good. And the Rangers, my Texas Rangers, who won the World Series last year they're also struggling a little bit, but they've got a lot of pitching coming back from injury soon and I expect them to be just fine by the All-Star break.

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So there's a lot of baseball going on in my life, as is often the case. Most of you know that have been listening to me for a long time. I've got a high school baseball player. I've also got a daughter who plays youth sports and we're just sports-focused around here all the time pretty much, and so I thought I would talk a little bit about the things that I see in a game that are one of the most fundamental games with regard to American culture that there is baseball. Now you can argue that basketball or football has a higher popularity velocity. Those sports seem to be getting more popular more quickly, especially football, which is probably the most watched sport in the United States now, but baseball is really a tried and true part of American culture. We've been playing baseball for well over 100 years, and I suspect we'll be playing baseball 100 years from now. Basically, baseball is the granddaddy of all professional sports in the United States, and so it's worth looking at to try and understand what it is about baseball that we can learn and apply to marketing. Now, if you're not a huge baseball fan, I'm going to talk you through it, so don't worry about it. Baseball is a super exciting game. It's one of those games that has many games inside of the game, and so the more you peel the onion, the more you dig into baseball, actually, the more interesting it is, and I'll say that marketing is a lot like that as well. The more you dig into marketing, the more you understand what makes people interested in things, what helps people make decisions to buy things. So another thing that I think is really interesting about this is you can come at this from a big agency you know ads for Coca-Cola or Toyota point of view, or you can come at it from the perspective of a solo entrepreneur or a small business person, someone who owns a small local business or a small online business. You can come at this question from that perspective, and that's the perspective that I choose to come at this from today, because that's my audience. But there are also many, many lessons that apply to marketing more broadly, and we'll hit those as we go. So let's get started here.

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So the first thing I'd say that is true for both marketing and baseball. Something you can see in baseball that you can apply to your marketing is this idea of consistency being key in both baseball and marketing. I'll tell you, in baseball, it's all about practice, it's all about repetition, it's all about paying attention to small details like footwork and plans for particular plays and exactly what you're going to do in particular situations, and marketing is the same kind of way. We need to get up every day with marketing top of mind. We need to make constant efforts on social media. We need to have clear marketing plans that we execute not just this week but throughout the year. And I know particularly, for example, in my wife's photography business, she has a marketing strategy, but in addition to that, she has a 12-month marketing tactical plan that she executes as she goes out through the year. That's the same way late night internet marketing runs and that's the same way that I recommend that you run your small business. It's the same way we run a baseball team, so we're doing things like spring training. In the spring, we have weightlifting programs. In the off season, we're doing particular things in the summer, and in baseball particularly, we're doing things like working with other teams to get additional reps and game experience, and so we have a very detailed, consistently applied plan that we apply throughout the year with our baseball efforts.

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And we need to do the same thing in marketing. For you, that might mean consistent content creation. It might mean hacking away at search engine optimization consistently, it might be consistently engaging your audience, but whatever it is, for you you need to be consistent. I think one of the challenges as a small business person is you get this energy, you want to go do this thing and you work on it for a couple of weeks, and then you get this energy. You want to go do this thing and you work on it for a couple of weeks, and then you get distracted by whatever life is for you right. You're busy doing other things. If it's a side hustle, you're working in the margins and those margins disappear. That's one of the problems that I deal with all the time, and so consistency is key in your business. It's also key in baseball.

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Let's talk about the number two idea, and that is that you need to really understand your competitors. This is super critical in baseball. I tell you, we're just going through the baseball playoffs Now. We will sometimes, for example, set our pitching rotation depending on what we know about our competitors pitching, because we want to end up winning two of the three games in the series. We're about to play in high school baseball playoffs, and so we need to make sure that we do what we can to get the pitching matchups that are favorable for us. Additionally, you know, if we're going to face a right-handed pitcher, we might consider putting some more lefties in the lineup, for example, and I think these kinds of things understanding your competitors are one of the major ideas in baseball. This is particularly important if you're a pitcher at any level. If you know that a guy has a reputation that he cannot hit the curveball, you are going to throw him curveballs, and so knowing your competition before and during the game is super important, and I think this is critically important in your marketing. And let's take the most simple example that I can think of.

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Let's say that you're trying to rank a page on your website and your business for a particular search term, a particular set of keywords. Well, right now you might be ranking on page two or three in Google. How do you improve that? Well, the very first thing that you need to do and maybe it's the second thing the first thing you need to do is make sure you've got great content targeted at the keyword you're trying to rank for. That really helps your audience. But the second thing you need to do is you need to look at your competitors that are currently ranking 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5 in Google. Search for that search term and look and see and figure out what's going on. And the first thing you're going to want to do is look at their content all 4, 5, 6 of the top rankings for that keyword. Look at their content and try to understand why is their content better than your content? Google thinks that your content is not as good as that other content. That's why they're ranking your content lower, and it's always going to be one of two things Either your content is actually not as good, it's not as rich, it's not written as well, it's not covering all the topics that are being covered by your competitors content, it's not as long as your competitors content it's going to be something like that or it's going to be that your competitors content has backlinks from authoritative sources that you need to go out and get. Either way, you can look at your competitors' content and you can do what they're doing to get the rankings that they're getting. And that's the fastest way for you to get your content ranked. It's by knowing your competitors. Just like in baseball, if you want to beat your competitors, you've got to know them.

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The third idea I want to tell you about is you need a fan base. You know, right now, again in high school baseball, it is incredibly powerful to have a bunch of people turn out at the ballpark to support the baseball team. It energizes the players, it intimidates the other team. It's a big deal university. The 12th man, which is what we call the fans there at Texas A&M, which is a whole different podcast episode where I could tell you about all the traditions at Texas A&M. That 12th man fan base is a massive home field advantage for the Texas Aggie baseball team and it really helps the team.

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For you, building a fan base is critical. You know, my friend, pat Flynn, says that you really only need a thousand raving fans to make a valid, profitable, thriving business online. You need a thousand people that are super excited about whatever you're doing, whether you're selling garden hose end sprayers or you've got a podcast about internet marketing. You need about 1000 people that are super excited about everything that you do, everything that you publish, every podcast episode that you come out with. Once you get that, that community will in some ways do your marketing for you. They will be your biggest fans, they will encourage you, they will sing your praises to others, they will defend you against trolls, they'll do all the things, and so building a fan base is super important. Also important in local business. You really need a fan base to be out there telling people about how your Mexican food restaurant is the best Mexican food restaurant in your community. You need that fan base, just like you do in baseball.

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Now, the fourth thing I want to tell you about is statistics, and in baseball man, statistics are everything. It is a game of statistics. We have this thing now in baseball and professional baseball and also now in college, called Saber Metrics, where we can tell you all of these amazing statistics. For those of you that have seen the fantastic movie called Moneyball, it's all about the statistics of baseball and how, if you pay attention to the statistics, you can really find the hidden gems. Same thing is true in marketing.

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If you're trying to sell something and you are buying paid traffic and driving it to a landing page and capturing people's email and sending a follow-up sequence until you sell that item, that would be a typical marketing funnel Paid advertising to landing page, to email, to sale. If you've got that kind of funnel, that whole thing is about statistics. What are you paying for ads? Which keywords in your ads or which channels are converting the best on your landing page? Which ad graphics are converting? Well, those are all numbers that you need to pay attention to on your landing page. What's your conversion rate? And does changing the headline or the call to action on that landing page, does that improve the conversion rate for the landing page? It's all about the numbers, and I tell you what's really interesting. This is also very similar in baseball. These things are not linear. What I mean by that is, if you improve your paid advertising efficiency by 1% and you improve your landing page conversions by 1% and you improve your conversion rate of your email sequences, or your open rate of your emails and the conversions they're in, by one or 2%, those things don't add, they multiply, because you're sending more people into the sequence, you're widening the funnel at every conversion step, and so that multiplies instead of ads. You're sending more people, and so you're converting a higher percentage of those more people. It compounds, and so that's an incredibly powerful idea to use stats to your advantage in your business, just like we do in baseball.

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Okay, so let's talk about this fifth thing, because I'm super excited about that, and that's the importance of coaching in baseball. I can't even begin to tell you how important coaching has been for my son in his baseball career. When he was a little kid, he had a little league coach. It wasn't actually little league, but he had a rec ball coach that cared about kids and really encouraged him to play the sport. And then he had this coach that we're still friends with that basically taught him how to play baseball, had played baseball in Venezuela and came to the US and we still play baseball with that coach's son on the high school team. That guy actually taught my kid how to play baseball and since then my son's had a pitching coach that is an actual major league baseball player, actually pitches in the major leagues. He has another pitching coach that is a doctor and a specialist in pitching kinetics and kinesiology. He's got a coach on the high school team that has won championships at the junior college level. His head coach in his high school baseball team has over 350 wins coaching baseball.

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Coaching is incredibly important in baseball and it's not just about footwork and technical details, although that is critically important. It's also about sort of the mindset around baseball and how to win and how to approach games and how to handle failure. This importance of coaching can't be overstated in baseball. It's really an unbelievably important, maybe the most important thing in baseball, second only to raw, god-given talent. And so the same thing is true in business you need coaching in order to be successful.

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You know I have a saying we have a lot of sayings here in Texas. I have a saying that you can't read the label from inside the jar. I mean, when you're close to the problem, a lot of times you can't see the answer because you're right on top of it, you're too close, you can't see the forest for the trees. You need to have someone who's either been there and done that If you're looking for solutions to problems or can help you unpack the things that are holding you back and limiting you. That's one of the things that I enjoy most about the coaching that I do, both in my day job and the business coaching that I do here at late night. Internet marketing is I get to help people achieve things that they never thought were possible. That's what coaches do. That's what coaches my son's coaches have done for him and that's what your coaches will do for you in business.

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Coaching is critical in business, just like it is in baseball. I'll tell you another thing that's true. In baseball, small wins are really critical, and that's the sixth item here is that small wins matter a lot, and in baseball we pay attention to the small wins. You know one of my favorite small wins that we pay attention to at the high school level in baseball is something we call quality at bats. So you know most casual fans of baseball. They would imagine that if you have an at bat, you do well if you reach base and you don't do well if you don't reach base. They would say. Casual fans of baseball would say that if you make it to first base or farther, that's a win and anything else is a failure.

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And I think we tend to look at business that way as well. If we are making the money that we want to make, if we sold as many of the things that we're trying to sell as we wanted to, that's a win. But really it's small. Wins are what you need to be looking at Because, like in baseball, business is a game of failure and I think a lot of people don't realize this. They don't want to accept that. But if you think it's about sales if you're a salesperson you know this very well you might have to go through 100 no's to get 10 yeses. You're failing 90% of the time. Same thing is true in baseball. In that previous example where we were talking about batting even the best batters in major league baseball they fail seven times for every 10 times they go to bat.

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So in baseball we look for small wins and one of the small wins that we look for is the quality at bat. We look at a batter's performance at the plate and we ask the question was this an easy out or a hard out? And we have definitions for what a quality at bat is and if a batter strikes out. But they had a quality at bat. They saw a lot of pitches, they responded well, they fouled off foul balls, they had a good at bat at the plate as defined by the metrics that we use the number of pitches that they saw. They responded well in situations. They handled the counts well. When they were in plus counts they handled those counts well. They were hunting fastballs and fastball counts. When they have those quality at bats, we call that a win. Coach is not going to jump on you if you get up there and see 10 pitches and you end up striking out, maybe unless there's a runner at third base. If you strike out with a runner on third base we might have to have a conversation. But if you have a quality at bat, that's a small win that we're going to celebrate.

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In baseball and likewise in business. We need to find those small wins and we need to celebrate them, and I think the main reason for that is motivation. Especially for solo entrepreneurs, it's really easy to get down on yourself You're not making progress as fast as you like because for you, progress is hitting that million dollar a month mark or $100,000 a year mark, and you're not getting there as fast as you want. One reason you might not be getting there quickly enough is because you might not have the right motivation, and one way to go get that motivation is to celebrate the small wins, just like we do in baseball, and the best example there is quality at bats.

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Now, the other thing I want to talk about we talked about this a little bit, or we alluded to it, but item number seven is training and development, and in baseball, I think we're always doing work to try and get better. Some of that comes through coaching, which we talked about a little bit before, but most of it comes through work. We're hitting balls off the tee. We're going through spring training, we're taking private lessons. We're hitting balls off the tee. We're going through spring training, we're taking private lessons. We're doing work that we need to be doing to get better. We're studying the game, we're studying situations, we're studying data from the other team. We're doing all these things. We're training and developing ourselves so that we can be better baseball players.

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Absolutely the same thing needs to be happening in business. You need to be doing work to learn about the impact of AI on business, the impact of AI on SEO, how you can rank your pages better by learning more about SEO, how you can become a better writer if you're a content creator, how you can get better audio if you're creating podcasts, and so on. You need to be learning and developing your craft. Marketing of your business is another place that you can invest in training and development, because those things are also always changing. For example, the latest technology for things like evergreen webinars and other kinds of conversion techniques. You can learn and train and develop those things. That's a really critical part of your business.

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But let me offer you the standard caution that I always offer around training and development, because there's always this tendency to go out and buy the next course to learn the next thing and go down the next rabbit hole. What I recommend that you do to keep from getting distracted with the latest shiny training and development object is that you practice what I call just-in-time learning, which means we go and get training and development on the thing that we're trying to accomplish right now. So, for example, if you're trying to develop a new course that is for your audience and your business let's say you have a business in golf training and you're trying to develop a new putting video course that you want to deliver to your clients or to bring to the marketplace, you're going to sell that course. You're trying to develop that course. The training and development you might need there might be something about how to build a fantastic course, how to do great videos for a course, how to set up a course in a tool like Kajabi or Thinkific. Those might be the trainings that you need, because that's what you're working on right now. The training that you do not need right now is the training about how to handle customer service for courses or how to market a course, because, guess what? You don't have a course. So don't go get distracted getting the training that you don't need right now. Stay focused on the task at hand creating the course and get the training that you need for what you're doing right now.

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So the eighth and final thing that I think is true in baseball and in business is you need sponsorships and partnerships. Now, in Major League league baseball, this is obvious, right? Major league baseball is all about money and they have sponsorships from advertisers and they have partnerships with networks and they play baseball and they make a lot of money doing that for you and your business. You also need sponsorships and partnerships. Those partnerships might be simple, like affiliate relationships, where you have a partnership with a product that you believe in and you recommend that product and you get an affiliate commission when that product is sold. Or it might be a more complicated partnership your podcast might be part of a podcast network, or you might have a group of like-minded individuals that you work with and cross promote. Whatever it is that you're doing, you have those partnerships. Likewise, sponsorships. If you're creating content and you're trying to bootstrap a business, a sponsorship can make all the difference in giving you the cash flow that you need to get your business running.

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If you're on the content creation side of small business and marketing, partnerships and sponsorships can make a huge difference and a lot of times what you can find is those simple, small partnerships can really be very straightforward. For example, let's say that you're in the expert space and whatever it is you're an expert in. You're a golf coach, a baseball coach, you're teaching people how to do whatever it is that you know how to do accounting or engineering, or whatever it is that your marketing niche is around. An easy partnership is to create content for a podcast host. Podcast hosts are always looking for content, and many shows not this one so much, but many podcasts rely on guests to generate that content, and so you can go be a guest on someone's podcast. You can create incredibly valuable content for their audience and through that partnership, you can have the benefit of those people that you weren't able to reach previously being aware of your brand, following your content and potentially buying your products. So sponsorships and partnerships, just like in baseball, are incredibly important.

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So, in conclusion, some takeaways from these eight things that we mentioned. We talked about the importance of consistency. We talked about how you need to understand your competition. We talked about how you need to understand your competition. We talked about how you need to build your fan base and use statistics to your advantage. The fifth thing we talked about was the incredible importance of coaching and how small wins matter, both in marketing and in baseball, we talked about the key idea of training and development, but I don't want you to do that unless you're working on the thing you're trying to get developed on. And then, finally, we talked about sponsorships and partnerships. All of this, we recognize were fundamental not only to baseball but also to your marketing adventure. And you know, the other thing I'll tell you that should be obvious to you is that I really love baseball.

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Hey, listen, if you like this podcast, if you enjoy it, if you love the sound of my voice well, if you love the sound of my voice, that makes you a little weird.

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But if you enjoy the podcast as much as I enjoy making it, I would invite you to like or share or whatever you can do on the platform that you're listening on. If you're listening on an Apple platform, I invite you to leave a review. If you're over on Spotify, same deal, in fact, it's really hard to leave a review on Spotify. So I challenge you, if you're one of my Spotify listeners, see if you can dig around and figure out how to leave me a nice review on Spotify. I'd really appreciate that.

Speaker 1: 28:24

I'd love to get feedback from you. You know a lot of the ideas for episodes come from listeners, so if you've got feedback for me or for the show, hit me up by email feedback at late night. I amcom. I respond to every email that I'm sent, so send me an email, say hi, tell me what you're up to, give me some feedback from the show. I would love to hear what you think about what's going on with the show. Other than that, it's been absolutely fantastic. I can't wait to talk to you again next week and until then, ciao.

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Other than that it's been absolutely fantastic. I can't wait to talk to you again next week and until then, ciao, you can do it right when it's late at night. You've been listening to the Late Night Internet Marketing Podcast.

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Be sure to visit LNIMpodcastcom today to leave feedback for Mark. Download special bonus content, access the show notes and more.

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See you there. Until then, go and make some great progress on your internet business one night at a time.

Speaker 1: 29:36

Hey, this week's been really exciting. It's in high school baseball season, as I mentioned in the show, and we're in the playoffs. And my son goes to the largest high school in the state of Texas and he is in the bullpen on the varsity team there and as a junior pitcher he's at the back of the bullpen but he's happy to be there. We love baseball and love making whatever contribution that we're able to make and we're just enjoying baseball games right now. We had a tough battle at the bi-district level. So baseball in Texas basically there's seven or eight playoff games until you get to the state finals. Seven or eight playoff games until you get to the state finals. First you compete at the district level, just like you would imagine. You play all the other teams in your district and then you have a bi-district champion and then an area champion. You keep having these head-to-head competitions that are typically three-game home and away series that you play, and so that's what we're doing and we won the first one. It was tough, we didn't play our best baseball the first game in the series, but we rallied in the second and third game to win the series and we're off to what I believe is area playoffs next, and so that's going to be exciting. So we're looking forward to that this week, and maybe this is something that we will talk about in a future episode.

Speaker 1: 31:01

It's something that I've been talking about with my coach that commitment that I have to baseball, to my son's high school baseball, just as a baseball fan in general. Baseball takes time, especially if you're a baseball parent, and that time eats into my margins between the day job and baseball and my daughter's volleyball commitments and so forth. That doesn't leave a lot of time left for late night internet marketing. So if you've been looking for content that you hadn't been able to find lately, I apologize. That's what's going on.

Speaker 1: 31:36

Still have a very high level of commitment to this show and this brand, but my family is super important to me as well, and I just love baseball. I love my kids too, but I love baseball, and I'm even getting pretty dang excited about volleyball. For those of you that have never gone to a high school volleyball game, I really recommend. That's a super exciting sport, and the cool thing about volleyball is it doesn't get rained out, because at least the volleyball that we play is indoors, and so it doesn't matter. It can be 13 degrees outside and you can still play volleyball and that's really cool. Until next week, I hope you're having an amazing one, because I certainly intend to have an amazing week next week.

Speaker 2: 32:20

Ciao, Late night Internet Marketing.