6 Tips for Succeeding as a One-Person Marketing Team

Are you wearing all the hats in your role? Whether you’re a small business owner or a marketing director, you need to make the most of your time and your resources to grow a successful business. One of the most challenging roles is marketing. As a one-person marketing team, how can you get the most from your marketing without sacrificing other parts of the business?

Know Your Target Market

Before you spend time and money creating marketing materials and campaigns, you need to learn who your ideal customer is (hint: it’s never everyone) and how you can best reach them.

You need to decide first whether your market is B2B or B2C. Then you can define who your ideal customer is, including what they do, where they live, and how your business helps them, as well as other characteristics that will help you connect with them.

Knowing your ideal customer will allow you to save time and money as you target your marketing directly to the people who need and want what you have to offer.

Calendar Your Marketing Campaigns

A calendar is critical to a successful business. When you’re a marketer, calendars are your lifeline. Whether you’re using an appointment scheduling calendar like Acuity or CalendarHero, or you’re using a blog and social media planner, a calendar can help you avoid double booking yourself, as well as help you accurately gauge how much time you need for different marketing projects. 

Not only will using a content calendar help you plan your projects and give you a better overall view of your marketing strategy, research suggests that companies that publish more than 16 posts per month generate three to five times the traffic than a company that publishes less than four.

Keep It Simple

Once you know what you’re marketing and who you are marketing to, you can begin to plan and execute your marketing campaign. Keep in mind that simple is nearly always better than complex. As a one-person marketing team, you want to make your job as easy as possible. Most businesses rarely have a need for multi-page brochures and complicated marketing strategies.

Using what you’ve learned about your customers, evaluate your top options to reach them. Instead of spreading yourself too thin all over the internet, start with just a couple of platforms, like your website combined with their favorite social media platform or email marketing.

Simplifying your marketing efforts will make it easier for you to see what’s working and keep you from feeling overwhelmed.

Automate Your Marketing Tasks

After using your content calendar to plan out your marketing cadence, take advantage of automated schedulers for social media and the blog post scheduling function in your website creation platform to automate as many of your marketing tasks as possible. 

Popular social media schedulers such as Hootsuite, Buffer, and others allow you to schedule a week or a month’s worth of posts at one time. In addition, some schedulers will allow you to schedule recurring posts as far as several months out. This means you can schedule an entire marketing campaign in one sitting whenever it’s convenient and free up time for other tasks in your business.

Measure Your Results

The best marketing in the world won’t do your business much good if you have no idea whether it’s working. You spend a lot of time and effort marketing your business, so you want to know you’re focusing on the right things.

The first thing to measure is your ROI, or return on investment. This will tell you if the time and money you’re spending on marketing is paying off. Along with that, you want to track such things as website traffic, conversion rates, and social media engagement.

While there are many tracking apps on the market, you can begin by learning to read the built-in analytics included in most social media platforms.

Outsource Whenever Possible

Marketing your solo business can occupy a good chunk of your time. If social media scheduling sucks your day into a black hole of distraction, consider hiring a social media manager to schedule and track posts for you. 

If writing blog posts and marketing copy aren’t your forte, outsource your writing and save yourself valuable time, money and frustration by letting Comma’s expert writers craft content that will build your credibility and your business. Learn more about how Comma can help you become a marketing ace in a free 20-minute consultation.