This Is Why Marketing Needs More Mathematicians

I’ll always remember my first marketing class in college. I did a group project about the psychology behind Keeping up with the Joneses. We talked about how we can use brain tricks to convince people that they’re interested in buying something. This meant product placement, naming exercises and pricing strategy.

This made sense. A long time ago.

Now we’re in the digital era. And you don’t need to be a psychologist or artist in order to sell something online. You need to be a mathematician.

At the end of the day, marketing is all about the numbers. Let’s think about a traditional marketing funnel.

And let’s add the internet to that:

OK, it’s getting a bit more complicated. Now let’s turn this into a subscription business.

This means we’ve gone from a 3-step process into one that has potentially infinite purchases and steps to optimize towards.

At the end of the day, we need to make sure that we’re always focusing on the business aspects of running a business. That means we need to understand where we’re spending money, and where that money is coming back.

As a technical marketer, I am intimately familiar with every single stage of the funnel. Every drop-off point, and how every conversion rate between steps of the funnel compare to historical performance and how that compares to expectations.

I’m also responsible for driving tests at each stage with the goal of creating revenue. Creating the hypotheses, designing the experiments, executing those experiments, ingesting and using the data to start the process all over again.

I need to be amazing at experimental design, data analysis and winding the two together into a business story. Marketing needs more than designers and psychologists now. We need more mathematicians.