Blog 3 Making the Right Pick 3-27-15    March Madness has begun, which means its bracket time here at Epic. When it comes to putting a bracket together, there are so many questions and things to consider. Here at the office we have a wide variety of participants, from people who have little to no idea of what March Madness is, to self-proclaimed college basketball experts. The great thing about filling out a bracket is that everyone has a chance to win at the beginning of the tournament. For most participants, picking the best bracket is pretty much a combination of guessing and team statistics.

Last year Warren Buffet offered a billion dollars to any person who could pick a perfect bracket. The odds of doing this successfully were 1 in 9.2 quintillion.  So, you might be wondering why Buffett isn’t putting up his money again? It was great publicity. What happened? As Jordan Weissmann describes, it all boils down to lawyers. There’s literally no chance of it happening and being forced to make a payout. After all, getting a perfect bracket is like running a two-minute mile or Kentucky getting a shutout in a game. Mathematicians claim it’s all about the algorithms when it comes to picking a perfect bracket. Many of these mathematicians have come close to producing a perfect bracket, consistently having brackets in the top 5% of those picked. Despite all the odds they still remain in Warren Buffet’s favor.

This idea of striving to pick the best (possibly perfect) bracket is an interesting one to us, because in our business we are also striving to produce the best results for our clients though marketing. And like picking a bracket, it’s a combination of insight and knowledge. The closer you pay attention to all of the data, the more knowledge you’ll have to make the best decision. The longer you are involved in developing this knowledge, the more heightened your instinct becomes for making the right pick and producing an effective marketing algorithm.

When it comes to marketing, everyone has a chance to kill it and explode their business on their own. However, just like picking the perfect bracket, the odds are not in your favor. Look at it this way, if you want to pick the best bracket, would you have a better chance of doing this on your own, or by having access to the algorithms that the top bracketers use? Knowing that there’s an algorithm designed by mathematicians that consistently produces top brackets, I don’t know about you, but I’m going with the best algorithm to pick my bracket. This will significantly increase the odds of winning.

You know that marketing is a key component to growing your business, and professional marketers know the algorithms necessary to produce the best results for your company. Instead of taking an approach to marketing where you’re guessing that your approach will work, first think about how many times you’ve been in the top 5% of the NCAA March Madness bracket, without any expertise or help? With that in mind, our professional team is here to help you achieve much better odds with your future marketing success.

As always, The Academy thanks the Contributing Authors at Epic Marketing for their contribution.  Visit Epic on the Web at www.marketingepic.com.