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Executing effective marketing as a team of one

  • WBU
  • Nov 16, 2020
  • 3 min read

Marketing can be a lonely function in lean organisations especially when the company is proritising specific milestones. However, coordination and execution can be made more efficient with processes, leaving the marketer to focus on moving the needle forward.


The marketing function in smaller and/or product-focused organisations can be small. Ofttimes, we are familiar with a team of one, responsible for the full range of marketing such as brand-building, reputation management, customer and community engagement, public relations and events. Sometimes, the function has a realistic budget to achieve all these objectives but lack time and bandwidth to take everything on, at the same time.

One of our clients in the venture-building and support industry faces this problem. As a small company supported by a lean full-time team and several contractors, they typically handle 3 to 4 projects at the same time.

For them, time is clearly the limiting factor. Meetings and discussions to move items forward result in more supporting actions that consume more resources. It can be easier to procrastinate because similar to a ‘farming game’, delaying on an action earns the team more time to work on actions. The problem is, as time passes, the actions increase in complexity and the resources needed to complete them.

This is a challenge borne out of competing priorities for resources, even when the organisation is aware and champions the need for marketing and brand-building.

Our counsel was focused on identifying what processes and support are important to buy our client more space, and time for them to focus on their urgent and critical list.

Firstly, we inserted ourselves into the marketing function as an outsourced specialist. This provided the client the ability to create lists segmented across various matrices such as urgency, importance, information-sensitive, relationship required, etc. With the lists, the client was able to decide what areas to delegate. In this case, they authorised us to handle decisions and actions for public relations and social media. This bought them space to do partnership management, events and community.

Secondly, we recommended including self-serve options for information marketing would require and hybrid automation tools to acquire these materials. We copy-wrote questions and statements into customer-facing forms and connected them to cloud-based systems to ensure convenient access for all team members. The information obtained required manual viewing that fed into other mechanics that are also being automated wherever possible. In this manner, a small team is able to accomplish much more in a shorter time.

Finally, we ensured that a strategic communications framework was adopted by the organisation. We created positioning and messages that supported the work the organisation did across different areas; and included supporting points for each specific area. This provided the organisation representatives with a more stable foundation to speak about themselves and their work using the areas as examples. Previously, they had different messages for areas that gave the impression they were not from the same entity. We created toolkits that required standardised formats of materials, including some that could be recycled across areas, and this reduced the need to tap on outsourced resources.

In totality, our initial set of actions provided our client with space and time. With the additional resources saved, they created more processes in other non-marketing areas as well. With momentum, saving time across different pockets of the execution work led to more time being saved overall.

This article is part 3 of a series where we share about organisations and their challenges when it comes to implementing strategic communications and marketing for their brand, services or products.

Read previous articles from this series:

We are Brand Utility is a business consultancy. We work with brands in the corporate, retail, travel and technology spaces.

We offer strategy and tactics to support growth outcomes - revenue, scale, regional expansion and market entry – for our clients.

Areas of support include:

· Strategic communications: Approach to market, brand concept and map, positioning, messaging, story and narrative, thought leadership

· Marketing: Campaign/programme planning, story-based marketing execution, digital marketing, community amplification, content planning and production, go-to-market execution

· Lead generation: Digital advertising, social media advertising, social commerce, e-commerce

· Integration of marketing with business operations: We plan and execute as a seconded marketing and/or PR lead for your brand


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