1.2 How do you overcome math phobia? - Video Tutorials & Practice Problems

<v ->One of the things</v> that can be a little bit challenging with marketing analytics is that some of you, I'm not gonna say who, but some of you might've gone into marketing as a refuge from math, and you know what? Unfortunately, the math has found you because marketing has really taken a turn over the last 10, 20 years. So that analytics is critically important. And you might actually be very concerned about the fact that you aren't that good at math, and what I need to tell you is that you don't need to be, it's normal for us all to focus on our shortcomings. We always think about how maybe we're not up to this. I gotta tell you, you are definitely up to this. I've worked with hundreds of people who came to me feeling like math was just not their thing, and they did not even know if they could continue to be marketers, and I gotta tell you, you will be just fine. What you need to do is focus on your strengths. What are the things you're really good at? Are you good at creativity? Are you good at writing? What are you good at? Whatever you're good at marketing, you just need to do that the digital way, and so you'll figure out how to do this. And what we're gonna talk to you about is how to kind of overcome your math phobia, if that exists. So for those of you for whom it doesn't exist, that's fine. Use this material we're about to go through, to help other people that you're working with that really are freaked out by the idea that they've got to do stuff with numbers. There are people out there like that, you can help them. So a lot of the times we have this real dichotomy in our minds between an analyst and a marketer. And so think about how you would describe each kind of person, and these are stereotypes that are not completely true, but a lot of us may even think of ourselves this way, that we might think of ourselves as maybe being more analytical or being more of a marketer, being more creative. And so look at these words, think about these things, and if this is how you think about yourself, I don't want you to stereotype yourself. I don't want to feel like if you're one kind of person, like maybe you are very analytical then that means that you're not creative, or it means you can't tell a story. And also I want you to think that if you are more on the creative side, and more people-oriented and more conceptual, and abstract, that doesn't mean that you can't reason with data. It doesn't mean that you cannot be logical. It doesn't mean that you can't be factual. And so you may be better at some of these things than others, but it doesn't mean you're bad at the things that are your opposite. And it also means that you can with people who are opposite strengths of yours, and let those people help you. So find people to work with that compliment the strengths that you have. all of us are working in teams, and so you bring some strengths to the team, another person brings another strength to the team. But I want you to really think about is if you are very concerned that maybe you can't handle the math, that's what we wanna to talk to you about because you really can. Because we need to get past the stereotypes. If you keep telling yourself that you're not a math person, or if an analytical person keeps saying, "I'm not a very good communicator." That's all that's gonna do is to stop you from doing the things you need to do. Everybody can communicate, and everybody can reason with numbers. It may take a little more effort for you to do that if it's not your bent. But what I want you to do is to make that effort. And what I also want you to do is to reach out to people who can help you with those things, because we all work in teams, we're all going to have to solve these problems, none of us have all the strengths that we need to do everything by ourselves, and we don't need to. Because what we're really talking about with analytics is, we're talking about communicating about numbers. And so whether you're really good at communicating or you're really good at numbers, your strength will come out when you use analytics, and yes, your weaknesses will come out too. If one of those areas is harder for you, well that's what you need to work on, but you can work on it, and you can work with other people. It's really important for you to believe that you don't need to be a math whiz to work on marketing analytics. And I'm gonna show you something here. This is called Bloom's Taxonomy, and it's about learning things. And so if you go from the bottom to the top, the simplest form of learning is just to remember facts. Then maybe you start to understand the concepts or the ideas. Then maybe you can start applying them, and maybe analyzing them. We're actually connecting one concept to another. Then nearing the top, you start to be able to justify decisions by evaluating what you're seeing, and at the very peak of this pyramid, you can create new or original work. Now, I'm gonna tell you that you can do that. You can create new original work in analytics, even if you're not a math wiz. And by the time we're finished with this course, we're gonna actually show you that you did that. You actually came up with something that you had just thought of yourself, and didn't know before. And so this is something that everyone can do, whether they're good at math or not. So let's look at a simple example of applying reasoning about numbers, even if you're not a math whiz. So let's look at the concept of bounce rate. So for any of you who don't know what bounce rate is, it's about the number of people who come to your page on a website as the first page in their sessions. So they land on your website, they're on a page, and if they leave without going to any other pages, that's called a bounce, and your bounce rate is the number of people who landed on that page as the first page of their session and left. That's your bounce rate. So suppose you just changed a webpage, and we tell you that the bounce rate for that webpage is 25%. Is that good? Hmm. How would we know? We have to reason with numbers, maybe you immediately said, "Hey, I think it's good because I know the average bounce rate on pages is like 30 and 40%. So I think it's good." Well, maybe it was good because of that. But suppose I said to you, "Hey, the average bounce rate on your site is 24%." Then you'll be be like, "Well, maybe it's not that good. Maybe it's just about average." Hmm. Suppose I said that the bounce rate on this page before you change it was 15%. Now you'd say, "Oh, well, hmm, that doesn't seem good at all. Now I think it's not good." Then suppose I said to you, "Hey, there have only been four visits to this page since you changed it, and one of them bounced. Now, what do you think?" Well, what's your probably think is we ought to let this run a little longer before we make any decisions. Now what happened here? What happened is that I gave you a number, but without any context, and the more I added context for you, the more you started to hone in on what the right answer is to the question. So is the answer to the question, "Is this good?" Well, maybe you thought it was good. Maybe you thought it was bad, but in the end you realized we don't know yet. And this all has nothing to do with math. It has to do with reasoning with numbers. So can you reason with numbers? Can you ask questions? If you can ask questions then you can reason with numbers. So when someone says, "The bounce rate of the new page is 25%, is that good?" Well, that's the question that you have to start to answer. How do you answer the question of is it good? And you start to say compared to what? And so is it compared to the average bounce rate of all pages in the world or the average page bounce rate on the site or the page bounce rate of before you changed it? Those are all questions to ask. But a big question to ask, which we got to last was, "Is it significant?" Have we had enough repetitions for us to conclude anything? And these are all questions that anybody can ask about numbers, and you don't maybe necessarily know the answers to those questions, but you just have to ask them until someone gets you the answers, and then you can start to make a decision based on that number. And that's all you need to do is reason with numbers and make decisions. And as you do that, you can start to use analytics in your strategy. So for whatever problem you're gonna tackle, you can use key performance indicators, KPIs, which are basically numbers that are important about your business, then you can constantly assess where you are starting at that bottom. Describe where you are, use numbers to do it. You can envision where you wanna be. Maybe you're not happy with those numbers. Then you can start to assess what can stop you. So what are the things that get in the way of you improving that number to be where you envision it? And then you can start to define your plan. Now, some of you may be better at envisioning the future than others. There are people who are more visionary than others. There are other people that are maybe more practical, and those people maybe are better at assessing what can stop us from getting to the vision. And sometimes we might feel like we're one kind of person or the other, and maybe we don't even like working with the other kind of person, but we need to figure out how to work with the other kind of person 'cause we need each other. Without a visionary we don't go anywhere new. And without the practical people, we don't actually figure out what the obstacles would be, and without knowing the obstacles, there is no plan. Your plan is all about overcoming the obstacles that will come up along the way. So whatever kind of person you are, you need to make friends with the other type of person so that you get things done so that you envision a way forward so that you pick, figure out what the obstacles are. And so then you then put together a plan to overcome those obstacles, and you'll be using numbers all along the way. Because as you start to execute your plan, what happened then is you then start re-describing where you are, and you'll use numbers to do that. And that'll kick off a whole set of actions that will allow you to refine your strategy, because maybe after you start executing, you realize you have a different vision for where you wanna go. Maybe the vision you had isn't exactly where you wanna go. Or maybe you find out that there are new obstacles that you hadn't anticipated that are coming up. Either of those changes would cause you to change your plan, and now you're gonna execute a slightly different plan. And so rather than thinking about a strategy is something that you put on the shelf or that you do every three years, whether you need it or not, instead, what I want you to do is to use analytics to constantly be reassessing what your strategies are, and what your plans are, so that you engaging in continuous improvement. If you do that, you're gonna be one of those companies in that top core tile of using marketing analytics, that's what's gonna cause you to really get the growth that you're looking for.