How To Run Your Marketing Department As One Person

As small business owners, many of us find ourselves wearing multiple hats, including that of a marketing team of one. Personally, I have spent countless years as a solopreneur, single handedly taking care of all aspects of my business. 

I get how challenging it can be to not only keep up with all the things that go into running a business, but also to execute all the different tasks required for it to thrive...It's A LOT! Within this article I am going to share with you my best practices for running a thriving marketing department as a small business owner doing it all on your own.

It's important to remember that it's not necessary to do everything alone. Yet, sometimes we have no other choice. Seeking support from others, delegating tasks, and prioritizing what's most important can help make the (what often feels like endless) workload more manageable and allow you to focus on what you do best & love!

There Are Many Ways To Market Your Business

One way could be to focus on building a strong online presence. This is what most of us focus on and includes social media marketing.  This can also include creating and optimizing a website, setting up and managing social media accounts, and regularly posting short and long form content. 

 Yet, you can also take other approaches to marketing such as focusing on search engine optimization (SEO) techniques to help grow traffic directly to your website and thus your brand.  Blogging is a great way to help support this focus.

 Another option is to prioritize networking and brand outreach. You can collaborate with other small business owners and brands in your industry, go the influencer marketing avenue, focus on user generated content, or get rocking with collaborative partnerships. This could also take you down he avenue of attending local or online events, forming affiliates or referral programs, and so on.

 It is important to continuously analyze and evaluate your marketing efforts. Track your website traffic, social media engagement, and results to determine what is working well and what can be improved. Use this information to tweak your strategies and refine your approach over time.

 It's not about doing it all because let's face it: As a one person show that is just NOT possible! Instead, decide what you DO want to do, go all in on it, and get really great at it! 

How To Manage Your Marketing Department as 1-person 

Organization is your BFF 👯‍♀️ :  If you are running your entire marketing department by yourself, it's going to be incredibly important to establish a system that is organized and easy to follow.  You know all of those super complicated processes and strategies you see folks share on social media? Yeah, you're not there right now so don't get sucked in!  When you're running things solo, you want to focus on what is SIMPLE and SUSTAINABLE for you.

Determine WHERE to direct your focus: One of the biggest reasons solopreneurs struggle with marketing IMO is because they stretch themselves too thinly.  When you try to be all the places, it becomes nearly impossible to run marketing campaigns well as a one person show. SIMPLIFY where you are putting your energy by only focusing on 1 social media platform and 1 owned media platform. This could be focusing on Instagram as your social media space and blogging or email list building as your own media space.

Establish a PLAN for your marketing for each quarter, month and each week.  This is probably my best tip I can offer you: PLAN! This will create a roadmap for you to follow, which becomes especially helpful when you get in the weeds and are too busy to even think about your marketing.  If you establish a plan ahead of time, you can then just follow the plan on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis.  

Create HABITS for setting up your plan.  This could look like designating a specific time each quarter than you plan the upcoming quarter, designating a specific week each month that you plan the upcoming month, and designating a specific day each week that you plan your upcoming week. Within your plans, designate what content you will be creating, how much of it, content ideas, strategies, and so on.

Designate content creation days.  You may not want to read this, but you have to make time for content creation if you want your marketing to thrive. Not only do you need to be planning, you also need to then create from the plan! Within our Studio we have specific “design days” that are when we batch design content from the plans we have established.

Work from a calendar: If you set up planning habits, from your planning you can then move what you come up with onto an editorial calendar.  This calendar acts as your monthly overview of your marketing plans.  You can map out your months directly onto the calendar and then when you go into planning your weeks you already have the monthly overview to relate to! If you build out the habits of quarterly, monthly and weekly marketing planning, then this calendar can be scheduled to be set up each month as you are doing your monthly planning!

Have an active weekly content plan that you set up your upcoming content on that is coming up on publishing deadline. From your monthly editorial calendar, you can then easily set up your weekly content plan!  Your content plan is where you can then begin putting together the content that supports your marketing goals and objectives that you have established during planning.  If you build out the habits of quarterly, monthly and weekly marketing planning, then this weekly content plan can be set up each week when you are doing your weekly planning!  This is where you can map out your designs, captions, copy, optimizations, publish dates, and so on.

Automate and streamline as much as you can: The above tips will help you start streamlining how you manage your marketing… but you also want to consider what will help you automate!  By using a content scheduling platform like Later (this is what our Studio now uses!), you can start pre-scheduling content so it is set to publish!  If you are writing blogs or emails, you can set them up in advance and get them pre-scheduled, too.  The best feeling is hitting the ground on a Monday morning knowing that ALL of your content is done for the week, scheduled, and ready to rock!  Go for that ;).

I hope this article helps you pin point what you can focus on to improve the way you are running your marketing department, as well as highlights some of the things you do not need to prioritize!

Have more questions about running your marketing department as a 1-person show?  Or maybe you're reading this thinking “Yeah… i'd much rather just have someone else run my marketing for me", then drop us a message and let's see if DGB Studio would be a good fit to support you! Reach out!

Until next time…

Natalie Brite - DoGoodBiz Studio