Running a marketing team of one

Being the only marketer in a company is a different job from being a marketer. You can't do everything, so the real work is deciding what you won't do, and being able to explain that to people who outrank you. Most people in this position fail slowly, by trying to keep everyone mildly happy. That produces a great deal of activity and nothing anyone can point to six months later.

Our interest, stated first. We offer fractional and part-time marketing leadership, which often means sitting beside someone in exactly this position. Everything below is something you can do on your own, and the last section is an honest test of whether you need anyone at all.

The three jobs you actually have

Whatever your job title says, a team of one holds three roles at once, and they pull in different directions:

1. Deciding what the marketing is for. This is the strategy job. It takes the least time, and it's the first to be dropped.
2. Making the things. This is the doing job, and it expands to fill whatever room you give it.
3. Being the department. That means answering requests, approving artwork and explaining why the logo can't be bigger. It's invisible, it never finishes, and nobody counts it as work.

The third one is what eats a team of one. It arrives in small pieces, each perfectly reasonable on its own, and none of it shows up in anything you report.

Write down what you're doing this quarter, and show somebody

Keep it to one page: three or four things you're doing between now and the end of the quarter, what each one is meant to achieve, and what you're deliberately not doing. A one-page marketing plan is the right format, and here it does a second job that it doesn't do for a business owner: it's the document you hold up when somebody asks for a fourth thing.

Get it agreed by whoever you report to. Admiring it isn't enough; they have to agree to it, because the agreement is the whole point. Without it, every new request is a negotiation you'll lose. With it, the answer to "can you also do X?" becomes "yes, if we drop Y, which do you want?"

Protect two mornings a week

Block them out, give them a boring name in the calendar, and treat them like a meeting with a client. That's where the work that needs thinking gets done, and in a team of one it's the only place it will get done, because nothing else in your week hands you two quiet hours by accident.

The rest of the week will fill itself. It always does.

What to do yourself, and what to buy in

The test isn't whether you can do it. You can probably do most of it badly and some of it well. The real test is three questions:

• Does it need doing more than once a month? If it does, it's worth learning. If it's annual, buying it in usually costs less than the hours you'd spend relearning it every year.
• Would doing it badly be worse than not doing it at all? Technical work on a website, anything with legal rules attached and anything with real money going through it all belong here. A sloppy social post costs you very little, but a broken tracking setup costs you a quarter of decisions made on the wrong numbers.
• Is this the thing only you can do? Nobody outside the company can decide what the marketing is for, or knows what the sales team hears on the phone. Guard that time, and buy in the rest.

When you do buy, it helps to know which of an agency, a consultant, a freelancer or a fractional lead suits the job, and what marketing costs in the UK, our own prices included. If the work you're thinking of buying is a rescue for a campaign that went wrong, run the review in what to do when a campaign fails before you spend anything.

The measurement trap

A team of one usually reports on whatever is easy to count, because producing a number is quicker than forming a judgement. Resist that. Pick three numbers that connect to what the business cares about, report the same three every month, and say what you think they mean. A monthly marketing report gives you the format, and the five GA4 reports you need supply most of the numbers.

Three numbers reported consistently will do more for your standing than twelve reported once.

Saying no without becoming the difficult one

You'll have to turn things down, and how you do it decides whether people keep coming to you. The version that works isn't "no". It's "yes, and here is what it costs": name what would have to move, let them choose, and write down what they chose. People rarely argue with a trade-off they picked themselves.

The version that doesn't work is agreeing to everything and quietly doing whatever is most urgent, because that teaches people that shouting works.

When one person genuinely isn't enough

There are three signs, and you need all three before it's a problem of resources rather than of priorities:

• The agreed quarterly plan has slipped twice in a row, and not because the priorities changed.
• The work that does get done is the third sort, the departmental kind, and you can show how much of the week it takes.
• There's a skill the plan depends on that nobody in the building has, and it's needed every month rather than once.

If all three are true, the conversation is about hiring, an agency, or senior help for a few days a month. For what a bigger team would look like, I'd start with marketing team structures at five, fifteen and fifty. For the senior help, what a fractional marketing director does sets out the role with the costs beside it.

If you'd like somebody to do the deciding with you rather than take the work off your hands, that's what our fractional and part-time marketing leadership is for, and it's priced by the day.