This question was asked by Stephanie. What I can gather is Stephanie is either a marketing department of one person or a small business owner doing the marketing herself.  

I’m going to get a little philosophical here because there is no straight answer for teams of one. One way to think about it is when companies are small, they want to show they are big, and when they are big, they want to show that they’re small and nimble.

For example, when Google was small they were showing they could take on the Netscapes and Yahoos of the world. Then, when Google grew big and they surpassed everyone in the tech world, they saw they were getting too big and bureaucratic. So they started adopting the concept of working in teams of four, like a startup culture.

Number one, I would say you are in a great spot right now because you are a team of one. But what that means is you’re going to have day-to-day survival challenges, because if you don’t survive today, you won’t survive this week or this month, and you won’t make it to the next month. That’s just business in the life of a startup.

Choose one tactic, but do it really well

If you are running a marketing team of one, you cannot afford to spread yourself too thin, so choose one tactic, but do it really well. Once you do one really well, then go on to the next one. I suggest looking at a single marketing tactic that has the biggest impact on your business. For example, in social media we see lots of people trying all the different channels; Snapchat, Linkedin, Facebook and Twitter. But you have to understand which one tactic is going have the maximum impact on your business. Look at what your business goals are and reverse engineer the process. Target your audience persona by knowing the places they hang out.

If your media of choice is LinkedIn, work to build a huge following. Do lots of advertising on Linkedin, post on LinkedIn groups and reach out to as many people on Linkedin as possible. Once you do one tactic amazingly well, then go to another channel. Until then, just keep the other channels on a low simmer.

Market with Content

The same with content. In content marketing, there are many activities you can do: videos, blogs, ebooks, infographics, you name it. But if you do too many, it’s not going to lead anywhere. Instead, narrowly focus on creating one webinar a month or maybe one webinar every other month. From that webinar, learn how to promote it, build your audience, and focus on increasing the webinar registrations and attendance.

For example, in 2011 when I did my first webinar at Instant E-Training, I only had 25 people attend and I thought that was a huge number of attendees. Fast forward to 2016, we started doing webinars and had thousands of people register and about 600-700 people who attended our webinar. So get started, but just focus on one tactic and do it well over a period of time until it becomes sustainable. That’s how you get better at it.

My suggestion to any team of one is to focus on one tactic that’s going to have the biggest bang for your buck, and the biggest impact on your business, then keep doing a lot of it. But hey, there is no straight answer because marketing is about A/B testing and trial and error so you’ve got to try many approaches, then you will find you can do really well in one tactic and keep doing more of it.

Are  you a team of one? We’d love to hear your story.

---

Hundreds of marketing professionals descended on this year’s Digital Summit Dallas on December 5, 2018 to network and learn about digital marketing. During Bob Tripathi’s session, Digital Marketing Trends in 2019, attendees asked questions and Bob answered! This is a compilation of a few sample questions from Bob’s Q&A from the event.

---

For questions or information, contact me at bob@digitalsparxmarketing.com.

Bob Tripathi and his team apply knowledge about your target audience to become a thought leader in the space by creating content to inform, inspire and connect people with your brand. Acting as your extended marketing arm, our dedicated team of creators, content strategists, designers and data analysts will help you craft a measurable digital strategy, produce expert-led content (in your voice), and distribute it directly to your target audience