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Is marketing hard math?

There are a wide variety of math skills that marketers should have. These include statistics, geometry, economics, finance and even calculus. These all have practical applications: understanding the customer, delivering value and measuring ROI.

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Imagine contacting your investment advisor and asking for an update on your portfolio value. “We don’t know,” your investment firm replies. “But we’ve spent your money and the companies in which we’ve invested are generating lots of activity.”

Would you hire – or fire – that investment firm?

Yet this is exactly the answer c-suite executives routinely get when asking about their investments in marketing. They’re generating lots of activity but return on investment is unknown. There’s something fundamentally wrong with the marketing profession, as evidenced by the screenshot below. These are the top Google search queries that start with the words “does marketing...”

The top quote is, “does marketing require math?” Think about that.

Businesses exist to make money and making money requires math. So why would marketers, or potential marketers, wonder whether they need math? Or do they feel they just need a degree in art or literature or whatever, then spend $ billions based on creative whims?

The fact that anyone would ask this question is amazing, or to be more blunt, crazy. There is a delusion among most marketers in they believe they live in a universe without math. And this creates problems for marketers all the way to the top. In my recent article chronicling the struggle between CFOs and CMOs, CMOs generally have no clue how to deliver the numbers that CFOs want but are baffled when budget increases are denied or even cut. As for CEOs, according to one study, 90% of chief executives trust CFOs and CIOs but only 20% trust CMOs. "The bar for the CMO continues to get higher and higher. If CMOs aren't demonstrating, very fast, they are not going to make it in this environment,” said Rich Vancil, group VP-executive advisory group, in IDC's 12th annual Tech Marketing Benchmark Study. “We know for certain that increases in marketing budgets follow increases in revenues. It is not the other way around." The fact is, marketing today is math. The tipping point occurred when Google analytics became the primary metric for measuring marketing performance. You see, Google analytics is all about the numbers, or in other words, math. Indeed, Google Analytics has 3.4 million followers on Google Plus and 592,000 on Twitter. Those are big numbers, and for good reason, people are seeing the value of measurement and math. Marketing today is increasingly about data. At a minimum, marketers need to do reporting, which is based on math. They should also be measuring their money, which again is math.

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There are a wide variety of math skills that marketers should have. These include statistics, geometry, economics, finance and even calculus. These all have practical applications: understanding the customer, delivering value and measuring ROI. And that’s where job growth in marketing is moving. The growth rate in marketing-related analytics hiring is growing astronomically – up 67% during the past year and 136% during the past three years. Math. On the software side, BPO for marketing analytics is expected to grow to $1.2 Billion in 2020 from $200 Million today, according to the National Association of Software and Services Companies (NASSCOM). Yet many marketers – including some CMOs – continue to mistakenly believe they are artists. In marketing, artistic creativity can be quite valuable indeed. However, you must use science and math to measure the success of the creation. Marketers today need to marry art and science, art and math. Conclusion: Businesses exist to make money. In order to make money, you must use math. And with the growing importance and impact of analytics and big data, marketing has undergone a fundamental shift and become a numbers-based profession. What did I miss? Please add your comments below, and I’ll reply to each Jeff Winsper is the founder and President of Black Ink – the only enterprise-wide, financial reporting solution that measures, monitors and maximizes marketing’s performance.

Image credit: Tom Fishburne.

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