What World of Warcraft's Healing in Ulduar Can Teach You About Your Marketing Team

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Over the weekend, my Warcraft guild managed to down 4 bosses (really big bad guys) in Ulduar. Two of the bosses posed two separate challenges for healers. One boss, a giant robot named XT-002, hands out lots of damage over a relatively long time to your entire team. Your healers must continuously refill the team’s health throughout the fight in a fairly aggressive manner.

The second boss, Kologarn, hits only a couple of members of your team, but he hits them very, very hard and very fast. Your healers must protect those team members and shield them from as much harm as possible while healing them.

In the first fight, there’s a class of healer known as a druid who can dispense lots of healing to lots of people over time. Druid healers really are ideal for addressing XT-002’s damage method. In the second fight, there’s a class of healer known as a discipline priest who can put up shields on a few people – but not the entire team and still stay focused on key members – and protect them from harm. Discipline priests are ideal for mitigating Kologarn’s intense damage.

As you can probably imagine, discipline priests who excel and shielding and protecting a few targets have a difficult time healing an entire team on XT-002. Druid healers who excel at healing over a period of time get overwhelmed very quickly when Kologarn dispenses near-instant smackdown, and fall behind quickly.

So what does this have to do with marketing? It comes down to knowing which members of your team have which abilities, and knowing how to properly allocate those abilities for the “fights” you face in marketing.

To make a comparison, if you need to generate lead flow over a period of time, you want to look to your inbound marketing team for search engine optimization, for brand and awareness building, for affiliate and referral marketing programs – things that keep the leads flowing.

Likewise, if you need to apply intense, high lead volume over a very short period of time, you want to look to your outbound marketing team for techniques like press releases, blogger outreach, high volume email marketing – things that are not sustainable for long periods of time but can throw some big numbers up very briefly for a specific campaign.

Asking the inbound team to generate outbound results is exactly the wrong thing to do. They can’t put those numbers up any more than a druid healer can heal through Kologarn’s spike damage. Asking the outbound team to generate inbound results will end equally badly – they’ll burn up all their resources, generate intense fatigue in their channels, and likely piss off a lot of otherwise loyal customers and prospective customers if they have to maintain pace over an inbound team’s normal operating period, just as a discipline priest will not be able to sustain focus and effectiveness over an entire team versus focusing on mitigating damage on just a few players.

Inbound and outbound marketing are complementary and equally effective if you’re competent at the methods and you know what you should be using when, just as druid healers and discipline priests are both excellent healing classes, as long as you know what they are and are not capable of. The wise raid leader brings the right class to each fight to maximize success, and the wise marketing and business leader brings the right teams to each marketing challenge.

May your raids and marketing equally never hear a Tympanic Tantrum!


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Comments

13 responses to “What World of Warcraft's Healing in Ulduar Can Teach You About Your Marketing Team”

  1. Dude, I love how you keep it real. You're a total World of Warcraft geek, and although it might alienate some of your readers, you keep it real and keep on writing about it. Cause it's who you are. I'm into that.

  2. Dude, I love how you keep it real. You're a total World of Warcraft geek, and although it might alienate some of your readers, you keep it real and keep on writing about it. Cause it's who you are. I'm into that.

  3. Cydric on Gilneas Avatar
    Cydric on Gilneas

    Would this be an example of a proper re-post? I can't imagine that you are just clearing Ulda mid-way through 3.3.3?

    Aside from the geekiness, this has been overwhelmingly applicable in my business as of late. Our outbound contacts always have a direct impact on the number of inbound contacts that we have. Its interesting to see how 1-3 days of poor outbound contacts in one week drastically reduces the inbound contacts in another.

    Thanks for the insight!

  4. Nope, not a repost. Our guild is a casual guild. We raid just once a week.

  5. Chris,
    Every time you post about WoW I want to dust off my feral druid, Dodgy, who I haven't played in close to a year and a half. I get the metaphor. So what do you do in the case where you've only got one or two de facto inbound marketers and the rest of them are old school? To continue to WoW references, do you require folks to re-spec or re-roll?

  6. goldiekatsu Avatar
    goldiekatsu

    First of all I have to say:
    “NO NO NO NO NO!!!”
    and
    “I guess it doesn't bend that way.”

    And while I like the analogy, the right person for the right job, to continue the analogy –

    Even though a typical druid or priest might not typically be the best for job a or b, sometimes the different style can work due to a persons skill and approach. It may be that the new way of approaching the problem actually ends up with good results. Or as Ghostcrawler says – bring the player not the class.

    That said – use the group or person's strengths and use the right person for the right job. Just sometimes what you expect to be the result might be a bit different than initial assumptions.

    And with the right approach you can avoid “OBLIVION” (to quote Kologarn.)

  7. Cydric on Gilneas Avatar
    Cydric on Gilneas

    Would this be an example of a proper re-post? I can't imagine that you are just clearing Ulda mid-way through 3.3.3?

    Aside from the geekiness, this has been overwhelmingly applicable in my business as of late. Our outbound contacts always have a direct impact on the number of inbound contacts that we have. Its interesting to see how 1-3 days of poor outbound contacts in one week drastically reduces the inbound contacts in another.

    Thanks for the insight!

  8. Nope, not a repost. Our guild is a casual guild. We raid just once a week.

  9. Chris,
    Every time you post about WoW I want to dust off my feral druid, Dodgy, who I haven't played in close to a year and a half. I get the metaphor. So what do you do in the case where you've only got one or two de facto inbound marketers and the rest of them are old school? To continue to WoW references, do you require folks to re-spec or re-roll?

  10. goldiekatsu Avatar
    goldiekatsu

    First of all I have to say:
    “NO NO NO NO NO!!!”
    and
    “I guess it doesn't bend that way.”

    And while I like the analogy, the right person for the right job, to continue the analogy –

    Even though a typical druid or priest might not typically be the best for job a or b, sometimes the different style can work due to a persons skill and approach. It may be that the new way of approaching the problem actually ends up with good results. Or as Ghostcrawler says – bring the player not the class.

    That said – use the group or person's strengths and use the right person for the right job. Just sometimes what you expect to be the result might be a bit different than initial assumptions.

    And with the right approach you can avoid “OBLIVION” (to quote Kologarn.)

  11. That's a novel analogy to have made. I love the geekdom, too.

  12. That's a novel analogy to have made. I love the geekdom, too.

  13. That's a novel analogy to have made. I love the geekdom, too.

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