Why your Lead Marketer needs to be good at math

TL:DR; Digital is integral to marketing today. Digital is about numbers. You have to be good dealing with numbers to be good at marketing.

Someone said to me recently, “if you can’t do math, you can’t do digital.” ( I wish I could remember who it was. Apologies.)

It struck me as accurate and a great way to differentiate the strengths (and mentality) of the pre-digital era marketer with the post-digital era marketer.

For arguments sake, let’s say that marketing started going really, really digital during the .com era, around 2000.

I remember when I was at Sprinklr that I would ask potential candidates questions to assess their math skills. Not calculus type stuff, but here’s one:

We have 70 people signed up for an event. We know our drop-off rate is 40%. How many people will be at the event?

Maybe you wouldn’t be shocked, but I was, at how long it took some people to get that answer and how some needed to verify with a calculator.

I reasoned (fairly or unfairly) that if someone could not get that answer quickly, they would not have the skills to conduct the never-ending series of A/B tests that we would need to drive outcomes.

Math and numbers are a mentality. With almost all marketing these days having a digital component, finding a good marketer means finding someone who is comfortable with numbers, understands variables, and the like.

I’ll have to go back and review the Marketing Lead Requirements Checklist for Crypto-Marketers to make sure it accounts for this as well as it should (I don’t think it does), and will update for v2.

And, in reality, crypto-marketers probably need to understand economics as well (as I shared here and here), but that’s a post for another day)

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