The myth of the 1-person marketing team
Right now on LinkedIn, you’ll find dozens of job postings for do-it-all marketing managers. The responsibilities look something like this:
Build a brand
Run paid ads
Generate a lead pipeline
Develop an SEO strategy
Plan out a content calendar
Write viral social content
Turn SME interviews into engaging, thoughtful articles
Manage the CRM
Design graphics for one-pager downloadables
And later this year, launch a podcast
Of course, it’s a “fast-paced environment” where “we work hard, but we play hard.” Despite the impossibility of actually succeeding in this role, there are hundreds of eager and talented applicants with beefed-up résumés promising to “do more with less.”
Once someone is hired for the role, there’s a ton of excitement in the honeymoon period. Strategy docs get drafted, shared, commented on, and revised. Goals are drafted for filling the lead pipeline, increasing follower counts, and boosting organic and paid search. Inevitably, someone will ask the poor marketing manager, “Is this realistic? Can we pull this off?” To which the marketer reluctantly responds, “Yeah, I think we can do this! LFG! 🙌”
A few months later, reality sets in. The marketing manager is swamped, unable to deliver anything, constipated by endless backlogs, developers who don’t have the time to meet, and execs who say things like, “Content is a major priority right now, but our bigger priority is getting this new product out.” Now the marketer — who probably doesn’t fully understand the company’s product and was never fully onboarded — is burning out, feeling constantly behind, and suffering.
It’s unrealistic for one person to have this much work to do and such a big purview. Today’s digital marketing industry has a real problem and I have some ideas on how to approach it.
Jack of all trades, master of burnout
A “one-person team” sounds heroic, but as every software company finds out, heroism and firefighting are symptoms of deeper problems. We celebrate stories about individuals who “save the day,” especially if they’re an underdog, but running a business like this is unsustainable. It comes at the cost of results, revenue, reputation, lost leads, unhappy customers, and frustrated employees.
From a marketing standpoint, spreading a one-person marketing team (OPMT) too thin will only undermine the goals of the position. The person in that role is unable to do anything proactive and instead spends all their time playing whack-a-mole, dealing with one incident after another. Lead-gen suffers because the product copy isn’t that good and the email sequences are boring and the social media posts are completely ignorable.
And yet, lead-gen is the lifeblood of a company. If you have no pipeline, you are at the whim of churning customers. They have control over your survival.
Having worked with dozens of companies over the past several years, I can tell you that this situation is not unique. In fact, one-person marketing teams are probably our ideal customer. Marketers suck in this situation really need help with one thing: execution. However, even if they have help with execution on marketing tactics, it’s usually not enough to truly change the problem.
Marketing success comes from culture, not roles
The main reason one-person marketing teams fail isn’t an inability to deliver, but actually a lack of support. Executives have their hearts in the right place when they see they need a dedicated marketer to promote growth, adoption, conversions, etc. But even the greatest marketers can’t overcome the friction they face if the company’s culture doesn’t support marketing efforts.
For example, I’ve written dozens of technical articles for OPMTs that have gotten stuck in the “technical review” black hole. Usually, I’m asked to write a technical article to support a feature launch or a new technical initiative. I interview the subject matter expert, write an article based on the interview, send a draft to the SME, and the SME doesn’t have time/capacity to read it. Even if we escalate to engineering leadership, the priority is engineering and not reviewing marketing content. (As a former dev leader, I would have made the same decision.) The OPMT is blocked, which frustrates sales, and risks losing the opportunity to inform the market about the new feature.
When marketing is supported from the top, an OPMT has a much greater chance of success. Active CEOs/executives who visibly promote the company and its products will set the tone for the rest of the organization. People follow behaviors and determine what’s acceptable by looking at what the leadership team does. If the leadership team delegates all the marketing success to one person, it’s much easier to blame failures on the OPMT. Then it kicks off a vicious cycle of “we need a new approach,” followed by finding a new marketing leader, followed by a year of different types of frustration.
How one-person marketing teams can succeed
All this isn’t to say that OPMTs can’t be successful. Sometimes they are, though it is rare. Here’s how they win:
The entire company is involved in marketing in some form or another: Employees are active on social media, sharing site content and product updates. They write articles for the website. They are invested in the product’s/company’s success.
The OPMT has execution assistance: If given enough execution support from consultants and agencies, an OPMT can focus solely on strategy and quality across multiple channels.
The OPMT finds success in a channel employees can rally around: Non-marketers usually don’t want to be involved in marketing because the payoff is dubious. “Fine, I’ll click the ‘share’ button but it won’t make a difference.” But if the content is engaging and actually leads to success on a regular basis, employees are much more likely to want to participate.
The OPMT has an in-depth, technical understanding of the product: OPMTs that truly and deeply understand what they’re marketing can act autonomously, posting things that won’t make developers cringe or heads of product smack their foreheads.
The OPMT has a library of internal content/documentation: Instead of asking people, an OPMT can read documentation to get the answers they need. Even better if that documentation can be fed into an AI that understands the product and can answer questions on others’ behalf.
How one-person marketing teams can un-bury themselves
When you’re buried with work, it’s easy to feel like the only way out is to quit. But that’s definitely not the case here with the OPMT.
Anyone who’s studied Kanban knows the importance of limiting your work-in-progress (WIP). Humans operating in meat space are not constantly productive, but are subject to chemical reactions in the brain and body. Some hours are more productive than others. Throwing 45 hours of marketing work at an OPMT every week will have diminishing returns. We know this is true in so many aspects of our lives and there’s science behind it.
My recommendation to OPMTs who are totally buried are:
Hire some help, even if it’s just temporary: You need someone to give you a hand and take on the difficult work of execution.
Learn as much about the product as you can: One of the reasons you feel helpless is because you’re so dependent on others to feel “good” about putting your marketing out there. When you feel confident with your product knowledge, you will feel confident with your marketing.
Stop trying so hard and just imitate: Look at what your competition is doing and find ways of emulating what’s working for them instead of trying to do big, original initiatives that make you feel bad if they don’t get the results you need.
Stop doing everything and focus on just doing one thing really well: Produce results that get you meaningful results. Your leadership team will invest in what’s working, which will free up budget to get that help you need. Only work on what’s working.
Track your work in a system that illustrates your capacity: Back to the Kanban thing again, find a way to illustrate all the work you have in flight. When you can show yourself (and others) your WIP, you’ll have a visualization that illustrates why you’re buried. A good leader should want to help you unblock yourself.
I’ve helped a lot of OPMTs these past few years. I’ve been told, “You’re the secret sauce to our marketing success.” I’ve been a stand-in therapist for OPMTs, helping them to sort through all this. It is possible to be successful, even when you feel like you’re in the biggest jam of your life. It doesn’t have to be this way!
Want to chat? You know where to reach me.
