Bad at maths. badass at marketing.

The past:

Since I was little, I’ve always told myself that I’m terrible at Maths.

I loved English as a subject and always got good grades in subjects like French and Spanish without as much effort as the more numerical counterparts. So to me ‘my brain just didn’t work that way’.

Well. There’s that and a rather traumatic experience when I was 10, where my teacher demanded “what do you mean you don’t understand?!” over and over when I asked for help on a question in front of the whole class.

Earth. Swallow. Me. Whole.

Naturally, this lead me further down the garden path of “I’m a creative, I love words and language and I just can’t do that whole numbers thing”. So let’s rewind to over a decade ago where I’m finding my way in the post-uni world, landing myself a Marketing Assistant role at The Lucky Onion.

Nobody told me before I got into marketing, that despite all the beautiful branding, clever campaigns and creative ideas, the best marketers are actually detectives. They're curious. Constantly asking questions. And more often than not, the answers are hidden amongst the numbers. Outrage.

At first, I resisted them. Me? Numbers? I'd look at spreadsheets and dashboards and immediately feel that familiar school-day panic creeping in. But over time I realised something important: Marketing numbers aren't really numbers. They're just people.

Every click is a decision. Every repeat purchase is trust. Every unsubscribe is feedback.

Numbers are behaviour. And once I understood that, everything changed.

The present:

Today, when business owners come to me asking why their sales aren’t hitting the targets they set, how they can grow their business to the next level or whether their marketing is working effectively, I always anchor them back into the same place. Their objectives and their data.

If you’ve got those to hand, then you’ve got your compass and the start of a roadmap. Not because they tell you everything, but because they will tell you where to look next. More often than not, that gut feeling you get as a business owner is right, but it can often get lost amongst employee anecdotes, fast paced internal culture and the broader economic pressure to get sh*t done. That’s why I kick off my workshops with a handful of brand and business exercises. That way you can always root back to what’s actually going to drive your business forward and not just what’s shiny.

But if you don’t have either of those anochors, I’d highly, highly recommend taking a breath and spending time putting them in place.

The irony isn't lost on me that the girl who spent most of school convinced she was bad at Maths now spends a huge amount of her time buried in reports, analysing trends, building KPI dashboards and helping businesses make decisions based on data.

The difference is that nobody ever taught me that numbers could tell stories.

That they would reveal patterns to me to help me understand people better. To me, maths was all about getting the right answer. But marketing has taught me it's actually just about asking better questions.

The future:

These days, I spend less time looking for silver bullets and more time looking for patterns. And the truth is, most businesses don't have a marketing problem. They have a clarity problem. They're sat on years of customer behaviour, sales data, campaign results, feedback forms and website analytics, but they're so close to it that they can't see what it's trying to tell them.

That's the part of marketing I now find myself drawn to more and more. Not chasing vanity metrics or reporting for reporting's sake, but helping businesses understand what's actually happening beneath the surface.

How can you find more new customers? Where are people dropping off and why? What's driving loyalty or pushing customers away? Why does one product fly and another struggle? Which opportunities are hiding in plain sight? The curiosity is endless.

But when you stop treating data as a scorecard and start treating it as the foundation to your thought processes, it becomes something far more valuable. It becomes direction.

And perhaps that's why I no longer see myself as someone who's bad at Maths. (I mean, I still couldn't tell you what half of the equations I learnt at school were for and the speed of my mental arithmetic errs on the snail side of life) But I can tell you that behind every number is a person, and behind every person is a pattern.

So it turns out I didn't need to become good at Maths after all. I just needed to keep showing up at the front of the class to ask more questions.