All Great Marketers Are Scientists

From the famous copywriters of the 1920s through to the internet billionaires of today all great marketers love numbers.

I’ve noticed the same thing over and over again with the businesses I’ve worked with. It’s the entrepreneurs who talk about things in concrete numerical terms who get results. Have a look at these 2 sets of quotes from coaching sessions I’ve held with CEOs this year…

(Note: I’ve changed a few details and removed names to protect people’s privacy)

“We’re running an advert in the newspaper next month. It’s a great opportunity and Claire from marketing has some awesome ideas. We urgently need more leads so we’re going to throw £10k at it and see what happens”

“We need 500 new customers for this campaign to break even. Since our conversion rate on the phone is 50% that means we need 1000 leads. From the last campaign we did in January we know that we can get a 1% response rate on the advert. Therefore we need to be sure we can reach at least 100,000 people or it’s not happening.”

In quote number 1 the entrepreneur in question relies on the popular blind hope as a marketing strategy approach and in the second quote he relies on solid metrics based marketing. I’m sure it’s no surprise that I’m endorsing the second approach.

What if you haven’t measured any numbers yet or you don’t have any figures to plug into your calculations? Then you find out what the average numbers are in your industry, you ask your entrepreneur friends or you do anything else you can think of that might help you get some ballpark figures to work with – after all, even a bad estimate is better than no estimate at all.

Here’s a simple example so you can see for yourself how it’s done. The marketer in question is Noah Kagan employee #30 at Facebook and CEO of 700,000 strong entrepreneurs’ marketplace AppSumo. He sketches out the actual numbers he used to plan the marketing push that grew Mint.com from 0 to 1M customers in 6 months.

The bottom line is if you want your marketing campaigns to be successful you need to start thinking of everything in concrete numerical terms. Even when you can’t know for sure you should at least be scribbling down estimates to sense check your decisions. Marketing is both a Science and an Art but the Science bit is where the easy wins are for most businesses.