If you have read any of my articles, you have probably noticed that I like to write about two things besides digital marketing topics. Those would be Star Wars and sports. The NFL Scouting Combine is one of the hottest takes in the sports world right now, and I thought it would be interesting to integrate marketing with the Scouting Combine for our weekly ENX2 Marketing blog.
For those who are not aware, the Scouting Combine is a weeklong event that showcases college football players performing physical feats and mental tests in front of NFL coaches, general managers, and team scouts in preparation for the NFL Draft. The athletes can attend by invitation only, and their performances can have implications on where they are drafted and the salaries associated with their selection in the Draft.
Here is a list of tests and evaluations that are performed by the athletes:
- Physical measurements
- Injury assessment
- Drug testing
- 40-yard dash
- Bench press (225 lb. repetitions)
- Vertical jump
- Broad jump
- 20-yard shuttle
- 3 cone drill
- 60-yard shuttle
- Position-specific drills
- Cybex test
- Wonderlic test
- Interviews (each team is allowed 60 interviews in 15-minute intervals)
Now that you have an idea of what happens at the NFL Scouting Combine, what would a scouting combine for digital marketers look like?
First, we have to think about who would be involved in the event. To take a page out of the NFL’s playbook, a digital marketing scouting combine should invite recently graduated college students who are currently seeking a job and have studied a field related to digital marketing, such as advertising, marketing, or journalism.
But, who’s going to evaluate what these prospective job seekers do in their digital marketing events (which I will get to shortly)? More importantly, who are the equivalent to NFL coaches, general managers, and team scouts in the digital marketing world?
The individuals who will evaluate these prospects should come from different professional areas, such as administration, automotive, education, finance, healthcare, real estate, sales, sports and a variety of other areas. The positions of these individuals should vary from social media managers to web designers and SEO specialists to marketing directors.
Now for the fun. What will these prospective digital marketing professionals do at this scouting combine? Depending on what the prospect envisions himself or herself doing, there will be different events that they will compete in; such as:
- Creating a mock-editorial calendar for multiple social media platforms
- Designing custom social media profile page for a mock business
- Creating customized and interactive posts for a mock event
- Developing a mock social media strategy plan for a business
- Writing mock replies to negative consumer or client reviews
- Creating a mock report on company’s website Google Analytics
- Creating a mock report on company’s social media analytics and insights
- Writing a mock proposal or sales pitch to a client
- Creating a mock demonstration of a provided service or product
- Writing a mock press release
- Writing mock comments for online blogs and publications
- Creating a mock pitch for bloggers to review a product
- Installing mock articles and blogs with proper meta descriptions and keywords
- Fixing multiple broken website links
- Sourcing images to accompany blog posts and status updates
- Designing a mock logo for a business
- Developing keyword lists for a business
- Renaming files so they are optimized for search engines
- Assigning appropriate names to mock images
These items are an elementary list of things that can be asked of most digital marketing prospects, but there could be much more added based on what is being asked of on behalf of the combine’s evaluators. For the list above, evaluators should be judging prospects on their speed, timeliness, creativeness, and quality of their work.
This just sounds fun, right? If I wasn’t already having the time of my life with ENX2 Marketing, I would definitely be interested in showing off my skills in a digital marketing coliseum. Who knows, maybe ENX2 will sponsor the first ever digital marketing scouting combine? Only time will tell.
For all of my NFL aficionados, enjoy the Combine! And if your business or law firm is in need of digital marketing assistance, contact our agency today. We will shine together!
