Being a one-person or very small staff marketing department in today’s marketing world often feels overwhelming. Just considering MarTech choices alone, chiefmartec.com is now charting 8,000 different solutions available for you to evaluate (see Marketing Technology Landscape Supergraphic).
Even removing that daunting task, you or your small team, are tasked with the responsibility of – take a deep breath – marketing strategy, market research, market segmentation, segment persona and pain point identification, value proposition identification, messaging conversation mapping, customer messaging, branding, media research, media strategy and planning, media negotiation and purchasing, media execution and performance tracking, marketing automation, lead nurturing, marketing content creation, ad creative, demand and lead generation planning, lead delivery, and overall marketing lead performance measurement to be accountable to sales and your business. Whew! – that’s all!? Well, I may have missed a few things. Oh and, you most likely do all of that with a relatively small budget and limited support in the organization.
Did that stress you out? This series of articles is to offer specific lessons learned during my time as a one-person marketing department and in a small staffed B2B marketing agency.
The truths you may face
Unless you happen to be superhuman, you are dealing with many these truths:
- Being a one-person department doesn’t allow you to short-change the full requirements of full-service marketing making major sacrifices in results – you don’t want that!
- Today’s B2B marketing execution environment requires a vast repertoire of knowledge and skills that span multiple marketing and MarTech disciplines – and you likely can’t find time to learn them all.
- You get bombarded with offers from agencies to do digital marketing, SEO optimization, paid search, lead generation, account-based marketing, marketing automation, creative, content creation, media buying, and so much more – and you are not sure how to even evaluate the service or the firm offering the service (i.e., what is the offering, who is good or bad, what will work best, where you should start given your budget).
- You only have so much money and you only have so much time you can invest – even with the commitment to work extra, you have to go home sometime!
A marketing playbook for success
This series of articles is designed specifically to cover the unique challenges that one marketer or small marketing staff face. The end goal is to accelerate the overall process enabling you to deliver all of the full-service marketing deliverables required to drive sales success for your business.
Here are some topics I will be covering. I am honest enough to admit that I want to leave it a little open-ended in case I have a genius moment and remember something good I forgot to add.
- Filling the gaps
- Defining what success will look like
- The marketing investments you can’t skip
- Marketing content