Percentages, fractions, and averages, oh my! These mathematical fields are vital components to real-world marketing and corporate promotion direction. All factions of ROI (Return on Investment) require math skills of marketers, daily.
If you can’t do basic math, then marketing should not be in your title. During my childhood I confidently excelled at most subjects, then I encountered algebra and logic theorems and POOF! My intelligence perception and academic self-confidence disappeared. In college, I thought…”I am smart, maybe I had the wrong teacher and this math aversion was a mental hurdle to overcome. I should take math, it used to be ok, it could be fun”. No. I took a “Math for Dummies” type course titled, “Cultural Approaches to Mathematics”. Perfectly designed for liberal arts majors, we learned about Incan quipus, Base 6 systems and other sorts of counting and algorithms. I passed and decided NEVER to touch math again (except in my checkbook).
Embrace the Math Path
After I entered the real world, I discovered marketing and math go hand in hand. One must use math to measure to prove marketing campaign success. And to answer client questions, such as, how many visitors came to the special promotional website? How many leads did that campaign get to sales? Measurement was vital to bill a client and justify my paycheck in internet marketing. One of my first tasks was to track client billings in proportion to the hours worked on projects, resulting in over $11 million dollars that was not billed.
Simple math can lead to organization profitability!
The Proof is in the Pudding
You need to have math skills to prove campaign success: a hunch won’t prove it, but it can get you started in the right direction. Your career success relies on math. Start measuring something, it matters that you try to make sense of your data to justify your budgets and programs. Learn Excel and create graphs, they can add the punch to your marketing pitch. Creative left-brained marketers use analytics, too. And don’t forget measurement can take time. Figure out the growth percentage of visitors to your website, or to a specific landing page. Your investment into numbers can lead your organization to new growth areas.
You won’t see pitches like this in today’s meetings…
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=suRDUFpsHus[/youtube]
A pitch, a la Don Draper in Mad Men entertains, but today the creative marketer needs math to justify what types of marketing, the amount of budget dollars to spend and anticipate a ROI. If you don’t know where to start, contact VI to get a handle on where you should be spending your time and what tools, like Constant Contact you can use to measure your online success. What tools are you using today?
Even though I will never love math, I have learned to embrace the power that math can bring to my programs. Plus, using math to help you get the program you want to start, is a usually a brilliant career move. When career advisors talk about jobs which utilize math skills like astronauts, scientists, financial analysts…marketing should be at the top of the list.
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