Hello!
Back after a quick break and I want to talk about something I hope every marketer gets to experience at some point in their career:
being the only marketer at the company.
It’s not a job for the faint of heart. And hopefully this isn’t the first role in your marketing career (or maybe that’s a good thing? Trial by fire!).
I was first a solo marketer when I started freelancing full-time about 6 years ago. I worked with various startups who wanted to dip their toes into marketing. Then, I became a one-person marketing team for a startup and was in a “Director” position for 10 months before hiring my first person.
Being the only marketer at the company is a specific challenge. I want to talk through a few bits of advice based on my own experience.
But first…let’s set the stage.
If there’s a one-person marketing team then let’s assume the company is a startup. This means we must consider a few dynamics the solo marketer must operate in (obviously these are generalizations but c’mon, they are pretty spot-on):
Business processes are few and far between
There is little to no goal alignment at the individual, team, AND company level
You think you have product-market fit but in reality you’re about 7 iterations away (and just don’t know it yet)
There is likely a grand total of 0 people at the company who have marketing experience and can speak intelligently to marketing principles and modern marketing tactics and strategies
The company needs to generate revenue yesterday
Across the org, there is no consistent answer to these questions:
Why do people buy from us?
Why do people not buy from us?
Now that we understand the ground we are standing on, I want to give a couple tips to the solo marketers out there and then a nice list of bullets that solo marketers may appreciate:
1. Never get bogged down with ‘perfect’. Done is better than perfect.
If you’re a seasoned marketer going into your first startup role. This is going to be tough. You have set a standard for your work over the years and never want to deliver below that standard.
Well, welcome to startup world! Nothing is ever going to be perfect - and it shouldn’t be. Deliver work that addresses the challenge in front of you and consistently be mindful of how it can be improved. And improvements can mean anything: the process of creating, working across other teams, the content itself. Any progress or insight into how things can be improved is (usually) good if it’s just you at the helm.
Because chances are, there is no standard for how that work should be delivered at the company - it’s never been done before! So set the standard yourself and build on it from there
2. Be extremely clear on what success looks like
If you’re more junior in your career, you may have a CEO or Head of Sales that “owns marketing” or you may have leadership that wants to put the team in your hands - really just depends on the company.
Regardless of how much experience you have, you need to make sure that everyone is driving towards the same goal. While the rest of the company may not have their goals sorted out, you need to have a clear and honest conversation with leadership on the role of marketing at the company, the inputs you will focus on, and the outcomes you expect to achieve. (Input vs. output goals is a really helpful concept I came across a few years ago. Here’s a good explainer.)
This should trickle down to your actual project planning and protect you from distractions. Shiny objects are a dime a dozen in marketing. Focus on what you and leadership agree will move the needle for the business. So when someone comes to you with a brilliant (aka terrible) idea, you can point to the shared doc on quarterly marketing goals and tell them 😊 no 😊
It’s important to note that startups are still startups. You’re going to be doing a lot of different things every day and things are going to get bumpy. However, this can be at least a little bit mitigated by getting an official sign-off from leadership on the 3-5 goals you should be accomplishing this quarter (or this month…things move fast!)
List of random thoughts I had while planning this newsletter:
You’re in control of an entire business function. Make sure you’re being compensated appropriately.
Do a time audit and find what is taking the longest. Consider hiring a part-time contractor or agency to offload your most time-consuming work. For me, that was content creation.
I assume most one-person teams are marketing generalists. You kinda have to be to do well in this role. If you are only really good at email marketing, then either leave that role or get good at everything else (or least be able to speak to its efficacy).
Being a one-person team requires you to justify or explain everything you do to everyone. Yes, it’s important to do that in any job but I would expect it a little bit more when the whole weight of the company’s marketing falls on you. This is where your communication skills will significantly improve.
See if other people in your company have an audience online. Maybe they can be a brand advocate and help amplify your work. This is a good foundation to any social media advocacy program but can also be a lifeline to solo marketers looking for other distribution channels.
Set time every month for some audits. The days go by fast and solo marketers rarely have time to stop, take a breath, and actually dig into the performance of their work and see what could be improved. Email, social, SEO - whatever it is, take an hour or two every month to comb through your work and take specific actions to improve it.
Create an intake process for requests and force people to stick to it. Because while you should have a clear idea of your priorities, you don’t want to lose these other ideas and you need a clean way to manage them. This could be a form linked to a project management tool like asana.
Make it easy for people to submit them (details, attachments, priority with fixed dropdown options on # of days)
Communicate this form regularly and don’t accept a request unless it goes through that form (there will always be exceptions)
Tell people to be realistic and thoughtful when it comes to their priority level. People need to be reminded you’re a one-person team and non-marketers tend to think any marketing task takes 5 minutes.
I’ve seen lots of solo marketers go into management after that experience (I did) while many move on and stay as individual contributors. There is no set path and you can do literally whatever you want.
I will be forever impressed by one-person teams. They are both so much simpler and more complex. It’s a fantastic challenge I recommend for any marketer
Are you a one-person team? Reply to this and let me know what you’ve been working on!
See you in a couple weeks 🤘
-Connor
Great one Connor! Love the bullet points. I especially enjoyed that non marketers tend to think any marketing task takes 5 minutes haha