If you are in business in 2025, you are likely glued to financial and market news to decipher how the winds are going to blow.

It is true that political chaos, tariffs and global conflict are having a big impact on our psyche and hearts, but also on our businesses, and in particular the certainty of our new client pipeline.

Because I do not have a crystal ball, in times like these, I rely on the only thing that has created certainty in my business in the past 3 decades:

Work the math of my marketingGet busy with Tiny Marketing Actions.How to Work the Math of Marketing:

While marketing is a field of human connection and storytelling, it is also a world of math.

The specific kind of math is estimating the amount of activity we need to do in specific areas to reach our intended outcomes in the form of revenue and profit for our business.

Most business owners go on a roller coaster ride of all or nothing, where we do big blasts of marketing activity, followed by silence or low activity when we get too busy with client work to market.

This leads to chronic under-seeding, and a very unpredictable flow of new leads.

What we need is a formula to estimate the amount of seeds we need to plant divided across our desired daily, weekly and monthly output.

We then need to monitor these efforts so that we gather real data to validate our assumptions about the amount of activity needed to drive a consistent flow of new leads in our business.

Marketing Math Goal Examples

To increase your visibility and opportunity as an expert-led business, you could set the following goals:
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​Podcasts: 4 guest interviews per month (48/year)

Speaking Engagements: 12 per year (1 per month average)

Webinar Partnerships: 4 per year (1 per quarter average)

Build a set of assumptions around each marketing activity. If you are an AI user, you can query for industry averages in your particular field and have it do the math for you (like I did for this model). If not, you can do research on Google then create a spreadsheet for your calculations.

Podcast Outreach

Podcast Outreach Projection Assumptions: ​
Industry-standard cold outreach-to-booking rate: 10–15%

Warm referrals can increase this to 20–25%, but we’ll calculate conservatively with 12% average.

Some outreach may yield bookings months later, so consistent volume is key.

Goal: 4 bookings/month ÷ 12% conversion = ~33 podcast outreach emails/month.
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​Rounded: 35 podcast outreach emails/month
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​Pro Tip: Batch your outreach weekly (about 8–10 per week). Over time, you’ll gain momentum, and older pitches may convert later.

Speaking Engagements

Speaking Engagement Outreach Projection Assumptions: ​
Speaking proposals have a lower acceptance rate due to limited slots, vetting, and often annual planning cycles.

Average success rate: 5–10%

For planning purposes, assume 7% success rate.

Goal: 12 accepted talks/year ÷ 7% conversion = ~172 speaking inquiries/year 172 ÷ 12 months = ~14–15 proposals/month
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​Rounded: 15 speaker proposals or inquiries/month ​
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Pro Tip: Focus on 60% conferences with open calls for speakers, and 40% on warm referrals or known hosts for a better blend of conversion potential and timeline control.

Co-Hosted Webinars

Co-Hosted Webinar Outreach Projection Assumptions: ​
Webinar partnerships require more relationship building.

Cold email conversion: 5–8%, higher if warm introductions.

We’ll assume 6% for projection.

Goal: ​
16 webinars/year ÷ 6% conversion = ~267 outreach emails/year 267 ÷ 12 months = ~22 webinar proposals/month
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​Rounded: 25 webinar outreach emails/month. ​
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Pro Tip: Focus on associations, communities, or networks already serving your audience. Track webinar response time and nurture slower-moving leads.
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​Summary Channel Outreach Emails/Month ​
Podcast Interviews 35
Speaking Engagements 15
Webinar Partnerships 25
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​Total 75 outreach emails/month

This averages a weekly cadence of 18–20 targeted emails/week.

Response rate will improve over time with refined templates, follow-up systems, and referral pipelines.

You can work with a VA to help research, organize and structure your outreach efforts.

If you have a dedicated marketing person on your team, these goals and metrics will be owned by them.

Create a Metrics Dashboard

It will be very useful to track your efforts and results.
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Use a tool like Google Spreadsheet or a Notion Dashboard to set your goals and report on your weekly activities.

As a strong reminder, you can control your efforts (number of outreaches), not your results. Focus on completing your Tiny Marketing Actions, learning and adjusting as you go, and you will start to see the impact.

If you get too tied up in the results too early, such as:

This is not working! I have sent out 20 emails and no one has responded!

remind yourself that what matters is taking action, and making adjustments as you go.

You may find that a marketing tactic in your plan is not a good fit or it is too hard, so remove it after a quarter and adjust your tactics.

These three examples are marketing actions many experts do to grow their business, but you could go another direction entirely, such as enacting a LinkedIn outreach campaign, working with paid ads or writing and sharing thought leadership content with an email capture attached.
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What matters is zeroing in on the marketing tactics most likely to drive leads in your business, doing the math on the amount of activity required, then putting your head down and executing like heck.

While Theater Kids may save our soul in these times, Mathletes will save our pocketbooks.

Do the math!
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