#17 The Ballketing Letter
Relevant business lessons from 2020, calculating retention, embracing digital transformation & risk within your business strategy, tactical advice for SEO, blogging or Instagram and much more!
Hey Ballketers,
We are back with more great business oriented content to help you manage your sport or fitness. We bring you a cool selection of articles As for this week´s Ballketing Letter, our top 3 highlights are:
Awesome article on calculating customer retention and learning from the best businesses at it (think Spotify, Shopify, etc.).
Learn tactics to maximize the LTV of your sport / fitness related app with Phiture. You will find a breakdown of four different app business models with challenges and monetization strategies for each one.
We recently discovered the Masters of Scale podcast and it is fantastic. Today we bring you an episode which shares the 8 most important lessons some of the most relevant business leaders learned during 2020. Check it out as it is definitely worth listening to.
Let´s get down to business.
Podcasts
Business lessons learned in 2020 from the Masters of Scale Podcast
During these unprecedented times, it helps to hear the lessons that the more relevant business leaders are learning. This is why we want to share this fantastic episode from the Masters of Scale podcast, hosted by LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman, in which he shares 8 reliable lessons from different guest he has had in the podcast from 2020.
If you are leading a sport or fitness business, you cannot miss this one. Some of the lessons standout such as:
Prioritize speed in the decision making process.
Have a vision or a hypothesis for where you believe things will go.
"Over communicate" with your team, even if you find yourself being boring
Be "human" above anything else.
Be proud to work in fitness or sport
This is a different type of podcast episode than the ones we usually share, but we found it controversial and inspiring at the same time. Cal Fussman interviews Joe De Sena and they discuss everything from fixing healthcare and general issues in society, the current state of the Spartan Race events or the value of living and promoting a healthy lifestyle.
If we had two pick two ideas from the podcast, these would be our choices:
There is nothing that 30 burpees cannot fix, not matter how awful the day has been so far.
The following quote, that Mr. Fussman attributes to Mr. Sena whenever people refer to him as "being crazy", is simply awesome: "Wait a minute, I´m the crazy one for trying to get people to eat better, do some exercise and live longer?"
Well, as the classic Apple ad used to say: "Here is to the crazy ones..." and be proud to be working on fitness or sport and trying to get people to become a better version of themselves.
Grow your organic LinkedIn reach with SME
Are you currently using LinkedIn to engage with your community? Or even to prospect customers for your business? Would you like to even reach more people?
Then perhaps this episode from the Social Media Examiner podcast is for you. In it, they discuss a wide variety of tactics and tips to optimize the value that LinkedIn can bring in to your business. They even discuss the role of LinkedIn stories, which is one of the latest features the platform has launched.
Articles
New technologies & customer habits driving the development of new SPACs
It was announced last week that John Ledecky (New York Islanders co-owner) and Joanna Coles have raised a $300 million round to create a new SPAC that focuses on businesses from the “beauty, wellness, self-care, fashion, e-commerce, subscription and digital-media space" industries.
The following information was also published in its business plan, which serves as yet another proof that investors could be interested in "high potential" businesses from the sport & fitness industries:
Growth in these sectors has been driven by new technologies, the expansion of emerging markets, and new consumption habits lead [sic] by Millennials and ‘Gen Z’ who value experiences as much as ‘stuff,’ health over wealth and transparency in how something is produced. Some of these sectors may also reflect trends accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic.
Is your organization one of those businesses?
Do you want to prove your value immediately?
Have you had to make a sale of your product or service before? Or demonstrate the impact you create in a given job / brand / role?
If that is the case, and our hunch is that you probably have had to go through one or the other, then this article could be of great value to you. It shares a great list of ways in which you can demonstrate the value you create instantly. Our favorites are:
The Be / Have / Do approach: Proving how your product or service can help transform people or brands. This can be particularly relevant for fitness brands...
The "Before & After" storytelling technique
What are your favorites?
Why and how to calculate customer retention
As you may know, we are of the opinion that for any given business, customer retention is far more critical than customer acquisition. This is why we HAD to share this awesome article explaining why this is the case and different methods you can apply to calculate it.
In fact, some examples of the likes of Spotify or Shopify are shared in the post. Check it out as it can be of great value for any type of digital sport product or service you may have, eCommerce, etc. Even if you have a traditional gym, we are sure there are some concepts you can pick up and transfer to your KPI monitoring processes.
McKinsey on how businesses can optimize their "post-Covid 19" strategy
For business leaders, the questions "What now?" & "How will we come out of this crisis"? are probably one of the most frequent ones on their mind...
This is why we found this article so helpful. It basically outlines a framework for pondering the way in which businesses can adopt to a "post Covid 19 world." We found particularly useful these questions to consider:
It’s essential to your transformation that you follow through on the hard questions, particularly:
Which businesses are the company no longer the natural owner of? And which businesses could be lifted by trends accelerated by COVID-19?
What efficiencies and new-business models have been generated out of necessity as a result of COVID-19, and how can the organization capitalize on these in the next normal?
Has the organizational health of the company changed? What elements of organizational health and capability building will be required to maximize the impact of the COVID-Exit?
For instance, if you are a fitness business, will your virtual classes offering thrive in the medium long term? Are there any services that you can drop? Will you need your team to have new skills to adapt to a "new normal."?
Similarly, if you are sport business, how can you transform your sponsorship activation strategy from now on? How can you recover from lost ticket or broadcasting sales? Does your commercial operations team need to change some how?
This framework summarizes the article quite well, although our recommendation is that you read it entirely:
Sometimes, we may not have all the answers, but asking the right questions is critical to ultimately get there. We hope this article helps you do so...
Also from McKinsey: Embracing "risk" within your business strategy
If anything, 2020 has shown us that no business is "risk-free" when major events like the Covid-19 pandemic strike. And for all of us in the sport / fitness industry, the "hit" has been massive...Simply take a look at this graph shared by McKinsey in the article, which they describe how businesses can embrace risk and prepare their organization to face it at any given time.
It is important that lessons are learnt after such a shocking 2020 and we hope the frameworks included in this article are of help when preparing your sport or fitness business for uncertain times.
Are you using Instragram Guides yet?
If your business relies on Instagram for customer/fan engagement or acquisition and you still have not "played around" with Instagram guides, then this article on Hootsuite is sure to give you some ideas on how to do so. Check it out, there are 10 examples of ways it can be used and some may apply to your fitness or sport business.
Common mistakes in Google Ads
Very useful article in case your business uses Google Ads to drive traffic. It highlights 10 common mistakes including things related to the campaign set up, strategy or reporting so we believe you can take out something valuable from it.
Power up your elevator pitch
Chances are that at some point you have had to briefly tried to sell your product, brand or business to potential investors, customers or even, friends and family. In those situations, you only have a few seconds to spark some interest and let the other party wanting to ask for more information, which is what is commonly known as the "elevator pitch."
So, how can you make a powerful pitch to anybody? This Brandingmag article provides a detailed list of tips you can implement from now on, which may be particularly useful for your sport or fitness business, now that attention spans are generally much shorter.
In the article you will also find a framework for delivering it and even advice on how to execute your pitch better.
Lessons learned from a CXL Blogger
Do you run a sport business related blog? Then, this article on CXL could be "gold" for your efforts, or at least it was for us! It is post by a former CXL employee who worked on more than 200 articles in which he shares the lessons he learnt over that time. The article is overall pretty awesome but if we had to pick up 3 ideas, these would be:
Don´t forget the value of updating past posts to improve SEO
Perfect is nice but sometimes, as Seth Godin says, look to ship and learn with a focus on "good" rather than perfect
Make time to think about the strategy, the goals and your plan for your blog. Try to avoid entering the "publishing wheel."
In our opinion, while not as "trendy" anymore, a blog is a great way to get potential customers to get to know your business if you have the patience and the commitment towards it. Which is why we believe this article can be helpful for your sport/fitness content strategy.
Maximize LTV for your app
Do you have an app based sport / fitness service? Or does your traditional business rely on an app as another touch point to engage with customers or fans?
Are you considering launching an app but are not sure how to monetize it?
If you are asking yourself one of these questions, then we recommend you read this fantastic article we found on Phiture about how to monetize and maximize LTV for apps. The awesome part about the article is that they analyze for different types of apps (as shown on the chart below), address their challenges and even shares tactics you could try to maximize LTV, which, once again, we will not get tired of saying is the key metric for your sport or fitness business.
The most relevant email campaign metrics to monitor
Email marketing is one of the best ways to maintain your sport fans or fitness users engaged to your business. If you have an email marketing program of your own, then you might want to check out this article from Really Good Emails in which they share 9 key metrics to keep track of as part of your email marketing analytics efforts.
Woah, if you made it to end of this edition, I owe you a big Thank You! We hope it was worth it and provided the value it was supposed to do, which is to help you manage your sport or fitness business more effectively. Please feel free to contact us if you have any suggestions, doubts or content you want to share.
And, of course, if you know someone who would enjoy reading this newsletter please share it with them and lets all build the road back to an awesome sport industry together.
Keep safe.