Jul 20, 2020 | Analytics, Marketing
Being a useful marketer has many foundations, most of them untouched in the course of a marketing degree.
One of the ‘must have’ but seemingly rare skills amongst most so called marketers I see, is a relationship with numbers.
In a seeming paradox, I do not like numbers, the piles of them I often see squeezed onto dense spreadsheets, with little thought or imagination beyond getting as much data as possible assembled in the one place. This drives me nuts.
On the other hand, I love numbers for what they can tell me. Once that data has been cleaned and organised in a way that enables smart, and curious questions to be asked, then answered. Data that moves towards knowledge, then to the source of insight is essential to success. It also clearly demonstrates the parameters of holes in the data, and your ability to address the challenges presented.
Analytical skill is a foundation of successful marketing.
Typically, marketing is seen as a creative exercise. I think this is why many marketers appear almost innumerate, and why the accountants and engineers who run many organisations have little time for those supposed to be running marketing. They love numbers, and assume anyone who does not is an idiot.
Well used, numbers tell a story, and marketing is all about stories. However, stories that do not have some sort of quantitative foundation are commonly called fairy tales. Children love fairy tales, but the accountant in the corner office making the resource allocation decisions, thinks they are for his grandchildren only.
Being analytical is way more than just having the numbers. It requires that they are turned from just the numbers into actionable insights, which generate further numbers to be understood and used to gain leverage for the investments being made. It does not matter if the investment is one on brand building, or buying a new machine, they are both investments, upon which a return should be expected.
We are not generally taught to have this sort of intimacy with numbers. We are not taught that they are key enablers of critical thinking, curiosity, and creativity.
A hypothesis without the means to test and validate it is at best, a nice idea.
I managed to pass (just) a reasonably high level of maths at the HSC, almost 50 years ago. I passed purely because I worked at remembering the formulas and circumstances where they worked. I never had the slightest idea of where this gobbledy-gook stuff might be useful, so by the time I had recovered from the post exam hangover I had forgotten everything. The absence of that key item, understanding, is why many of us shy away from numbers, we were never taught where and why they might be useful. We had formulas jammed down our young throats, and hated it, a dislike that coloured the rest of our lives.
Get over it, and allow numbers to speak to you, to help you understand the stories they are hiding.
- Look for, and identify the trends, and patterns in the data, and when there is an anomaly, be able to ask and find the answer to the simple question: Why?
- Find the gems of truth hidden amongst the averages we always seem to be fed.
- Understand what ‘normal’ looks like, so you can see the bits sticking out, and again find out the ‘why’
- Find the boundaries of an idea, circumstance, impact, and potential.
- Discover variances, and use the boundaries of those variances to improve performance over time. This is the core technique of continuous improvement in factories, engineers love it, and I have found it just as useful in many other circumstances.
- Numbers enable some sort of quantitative boundary to be thrown around uncertainty, particularly useful at the moment. By testing the numbers, then revising and retesting, you can progressively increase the level of certainty, reducing risk.
- Enable yourself to use perhaps the oldest and most useful tool in the marketers arsenal, the 80/20 rule, courtesy of Italian mathematician Vilfredo Pareto. In 45 years of commercial life, this simple technique has been used over, and over, and over again to uncover many ‘Why’s’
- Understanding the data enables you to be ‘numerically ambidextrous’. You can zoom out to see the whole picture, and then zoom in to see the details of anything that for one reason or another looks different, interesting, or just a hole in the data that might lead to an insight.
All these skills are just as useful to a marketer as they are to an accountant or engineer. When you have them, your credibility with those in the corner office will soar.
Jul 6, 2020 | Analytics, Communication, Marketing
Marketing has moved significantly into the digital domain, online. It appears to make sense, as it appears ‘SMART’ (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic and Time driven).
The engineers and accountants amongst us warm to this sort of seemingly measurable expenditure, they can look at a dashboard of quantitative outcomes, and feel good that they are not wasting money.
However, a closer look might give them pause.
Specific.
Yes, you can have a specific, focused activity that either happened, or did not, and people can be held accountable for them.
Measurable.
Yes, you can measure an activity done on line, so long as you are prepared to discount the bots and fakery hiding in the digital supply chain. The ad did appear, we got X 000 likes, Y 00 email addresses when they downloaded the clickbait, and sales reps are now chasing them as qualified leads. Hopefully a few of them actually are, but we may never really know.
Achievable.
Yes, the goal of getting likes and qualified leads has been achieved
Accountable.
Again, you know the intern in the marketing department was accountable for ensuring that there were X entries in the twitter feed, Y postings on Facebook and Instagram, and that the agency supplied a white paper a week as clickbait.
Timely.
Again, yes, the boss wanted this all done by the end of the month, as it was, Hooray!!
Problem with all of this is that we are measuring the wrong things. They are all about activity, nothing about outcomes. When we understand and can quantify the cause and effect links between activity and outcomes, a really tough problem, SMART goals may become useful.
‘Digital marketing’ has replaced using ‘digital’ as a tool of marketing. Those amongst us who do not understand the wide impact of ‘marketing’ have got it all the wrong way around. They have been seduced by the new shiny thing that appears to be useful, and sometimes it is, but not often as a standalone strategy, it is by its nature a short term tactic only.
Jun 22, 2020 | Analytics, Customers, Marketing
One of the questions occupying my newly monastic mind over the past few weeks has been: ‘what changes can we expect in the revenue generation processes as a result of the ‘Bug?’.
In the lead up to this crisis, I have been considering how automated everything was becoming, at the expense of humanity.
There is an inherent conflict between the centralising force that is the ‘Martech’ (marketing technology) automated decision making processes, and the front line sales function. Martech investment requires that a range of decisions to buy and install various combinations of software be made that automates a selling relationship. The decentralised nature of the sales front line does not benefit from such automation, as people still prefer to buy from people, particularly in cases where the investment is large, or there is an emotional element to the purchase.
To my mind, it has become too clinical and automated in most large businesses. This creates opportunities for smaller businesses whose niche is perhaps more clearly defined, and who lack the resources and capability to leverage an integrated ‘Martech stack’.
The Bug has brought the question to the fore.
On one hand, we are now compelled by circumstances to interact using the digital tools, but there is a steep learning curve for many, and SME’s are rapidly discovering their capability shortcomings. On the other, human contact will become more valuable than ever, and those same SME’s may be in a better position than most large companies to be ‘Human’.
Where on the scale does your business fit?
Jun 17, 2020 | Analytics, Change
To measure anything in a meaningful way, you need some sort of baseline.
To say you have a 20% increase in market share sounds impressive, but if your starting point is a 5% share, it is less so. By contrast, if your starting point is 40% in a competitive market, a 20% increase is a great effort.
Setting this baseline from which to measure change can be extremely difficult. Finding a simple measure that captures the impact of a wide range of variables while adequately reflecting the whole story is never as easy as it sounds.
Look at Australia’s published rate of unemployment. Whatever it is on any given date, it is an extrapolated survey that includes a definition of ’employment’ as: 1 hour of paid work a week. Clearly nonsense, but what is the real measure? How do you gather reliable data that offers actionable insights into segments of the population which are subject to a myriad of differing drivers?
Climate scientists faced this problem when setting out to determine the rate at which the decay of vegetable matter, which emits CO2 during the decomposition process, was adding to the store of CO2 in the atmosphere.
This is an enormously complex problem, driven by variations in temperature, humidity, type of vegetation, and the state of vegetation, particularly as it relates to permafrost slowly becoming less permanent.
The measurement solution came to two scientists as they struggled to assemble reliable data from the varied sources, collected in varied ways, around the world. They buried two teabags in the same location. One which decayed quickly at first, then much more slowly, and the other that decayed in the opposite manner.
By establishing the quantitative impact of differing conditions on the two teabags, a reliable measure of the rate of decomposition can be calculated. That calculation holds irrespective of the location, establishing a baseline from which the amount of CO2 being emitted by decaying vegetable matter from that location, can be derived.
Subsequently, they have engaged with interested people around the world using the same two teabag types. By pooling data, they had arrived at a means to calculate with considerable accuracy, how much CO2 was being emitted by the process of decomposition of vegetation globally.
They had The Teabag Index.
Economists use a similar measure of purchasing power of currencies across the world, by converting the local price of a Big Mac into US dollars. This is pretty obviously called the Big Mac Index, and has proved to be a pretty reliable indicator for over 30 years.
Sometimes the best solutions to complex problems lie in being creative about finding a simple solution. This is rarely obvious, but sometimes hiding in plain sight.
What is your teabag index?
It will be those few simple numbers that are a reliable macro indicator of the performance of your business.
