How do you thrive as a one-person marketing team?

Matt (00:02)
and as a one person marketing team, like if you can squeeze more value out of, out of the work you completed, just going to make you a lot more productive. It's going to save you a lot of time, and help you focus on more

Benjamin Ard (00:37)
Welcome back to another episode of Content Amplified. Today I'm joined by Matt. Matt, welcome to the show.

Matt (00:43)
Thanks for having me, Benjamin.

Benjamin Ard (00:44)
Yeah, Matt, I'm excited for this subject. I think it's super relevant. There's a lot we can get into, but before we dive into that, Matt, let's get to know you. Let's get to know your background, work history, stuff like that. And then we always ask, what do you love about content and marketing?

Matt (00:58)
Yeah, that sounds great. I'm Matt File. I'm currently the EDP of Marketing at Penrod, who's a healthcare focused to Salesforce consultant. So at Penrod, I handle everything from content marketing to visual design, writing content.

designing the website, managing all of our programs for webinars. So one person marketing team there handling all of the marketing initiatives. And I think one of the biggest things I love about marketing is that it pays me to be creative. Being creative was something I always loved and I'm really fortunate that I found something that can make a living on.

Benjamin Ard (01:32)
I that. That's such a good answer. I think marketers love the creative side and it's also fun to kind of marry the creative but the art and science as well. It's just, if you like both sides of your brain, it's a fun area.

Matt (01:45)
Yeah, I think I always told during my internships, which were marketing focused, I just really can't imagine myself doing anything else. So this really makes sense for me. It's something that allows me to be creative in the day to day and be productive with it. So yeah, completely agree.

Benjamin Ard (02:01)
I love it. Well, Matt, today we decided to talk about how to be an effective one-person marketing team. You're in this current role where you're a one-person marketing team. I also believe this is starting to become a trend, not necessarily one person, but smaller marketing teams as we have more of a gig economy. We can outsource, we can use typical consultants or people that are fractional, things of that nature.

I think it's relevant. think marketing teams at companies are going to get smaller and smaller and so people are going to have to figure out how to manage more with less. So the first question on this front, as a one person marketing team prioritizing, how do you actually know what to do and when to say no? Because I'm guessing you have to say that a lot.

Matt (02:47)
Yeah, it's surprising. I say no is always something I've struggled with when somebody presents me with a challenge in the workplace It's always something I want to solve but you're correct. Like you can't do everything So in terms of prioritization, it is really tough because there's so much to focus on You know, and I think traditional marketing teams

You're going to have strategy that's driven by leadership, and then you're going to have tactics that are executed by managers or specialists or even directors in some companies. So the strategy is really going to involve how you're going to achieve the goal. then tactics are really going to involve the execution of what you're going to need to actually do to reach that goal. So

I sort of emulate this process even as a one person marketing team. I just do it inside of one brain. So I still separate strategy and tactics and that really helps me prioritize the strategies that are going to have the highest level of impact. And you know, I think a lot of that strategy still comes from our leadership team. So it's the executive team who represents, you know, revenue in our particular company also represents service delivery.

So they really choose and determine what strategies we should implement and the goals we should have, the KPIs we're going to measure, what sort of go-to-market motions we actually want to have, what industries we're going to focus in. So I can take that direction, build strategies around it, and then also create the tactics for it, whether it's building out a landing page, planning a webinar.

developing an email cadence, like there's a lot of tactics you could potentially do to fit into a particular strategy. The problem becomes like you can plan out your day, but the reality is that priorities are gonna shift based on what's going on. you know, just like speaking from my own personal experience lately, we had an event that just came up at a trade show. So suddenly I had to...

You know build a landing page to make sure people could register for the event We just had a webinar come up So I had to develop the landing page for that to make sure that people could register for that webinar and build up the webinar content So there's always things that come up that shift your priorities but it's really the idea of what What tactics are actually going to point us towards our North Star or towards all of our goals?

And sometimes like the things that come up do that and sometimes they don't. And, when something comes up that doesn't do that, that's really where you probably should be saying no. like I said, I don't always do that, but I should really be better at it because it doesn't necessarily point to the, or to the overall strategy of things they're going to move their needle in the business.

Benjamin Ard (05:14)
Yeah, I love that. That makes a lot of sense. Well, one of the reasons why, you know, we're seeing this shift as well is the advancement of technologies. The ability to have technology offload a lot of the workload for us as marketers. What technologies are you seeing that really assist the either one person or small team of marketers? What are some of these things that you really enjoy?

Matt (05:37)
Yeah, you're completely right that when you talk about the shift to smaller marketing teams, not only is that just a reality from a business perspective of cutting costs but these new technologies are actually enabling either one person or smalling marketing teams to do all these things. So really when I look at implementing technology, it's all going to be about how can I read reduce the amount of time it takes me to execute on tactics.

So for me, like the three major areas where I look for help is copywriting, web development, and then also just content development. So I guess in terms of content development, the big one kind of buzzword right now is artificial intelligence. For me personally, I think it's still somewhat limited for copywriting because the voice it generates is still just somehow a little bit off.

However, when you get into some of the paid AI tools, you can really train the voice pretty well based on content samples and just instructing it on what you want the voice to sound like, like what grade level you want it written at. And that makes it pretty spot on for tone. But that being said, I think that...

Like the AI generators are really much better suited for topic brainstorming. So they're also pretty good at improving your content, all the content that you write. It's really great at generating summaries from webinars or other recorded content, which really helps you repurpose every asset that you create. And that's such a great way to squeeze as much value as possible out of every tactic you're executing.

and as a one person marketing team, like if you can squeeze more value out of, out of the work you completed, just going to make you a lot more productive. It's going to save you a lot of time, and help you focus on more

I had also mentioned web development and for me, I still think WordPress is among some of the, one of the best CRMs out there, even for a, a, you know, B2B company. know in general it's had, some reputation as, you know, being good just for,

know, small blogs, but right now it's incredibly scalable. There's a ton of, you know, extended plugins out there that are really going to let you do whatever you want with the platform. then along with WordPress, there's so many like managed services backends out there. So you're not spending a ton of time on like server administration and staging environments or CMS updates.

So for me, like if I can get out of those administrative tasks, that's gonna make me a lot more effective on a one person marketing team. think just in general, kind of an older technology, but marketing automation tools, you know, great for making your marketing programs work in the background without you day to day, like maintaining and managing and sending out emails and maintaining forms and things of that nature.

And, you know, I think the last one would be just project management software. So still kind of an old technology at this point, but pretty crucial at least for me to keep me organized, you know, so that I can organize my strategies I want to actually execute, show like all of the things that are going to be a part of that strategy, all the tactics that I have to achieve.

And the added benefit there is that it also keeps your workload transparent to other people in the organization so that they can see what you're working on.

Benjamin Ard (08:37)
Yeah, I love that. I think those are all great categories of technology. So the next thing that kind of naturally comes to mind for me, there are great external resources and there are great people. Again, we mentioned, you know, the consultants, the freelancers, fractionals, whatever, you know, it may be. When and how do you decide to utilize those outside resources? When do you know it's right to actually engage with someone like that?

Matt (09:02)
Yeah, so I think there's measurables that help with that consideration. I also think that if you're a one person marketer, it depends on your strengths. So where possible, like I tend to insource the things that I'm good at or even the things I'm passionate about. And then I can outsource the things that I'm not especially good at or the things that I'm not especially passionate about. But then like when you get into the budget conversations, as long as those align.

With that, where can you make the most impact at the lowest cost versus an outsourced partner? Like just for instance, if we're talking about a BDR team, am I going to be really good at cold calling with the messaging I'm creating? Probably not. I'm probably not going to have the bandwidth for it. I'm probably not going to be especially good at it. So that could be something potentially that you would outsource just based on my expertise and what I'm actually good at.

so I guess the discussion becomes, you know, a mix of cost and impact. So some marketing teams are going to look to minimize costs for tactical work. and some others are just going to look to maximize impact regardless of the cost. I'm trying to find those thought leaders and experts in the market who can really help them as much as possible.

Benjamin Ard (10:08)
I love it. So the next question that comes to mind is obviously over time, you're gonna, you know, we have faith in everyone listening to this podcast. Your companies are gonna do great. You're gonna scale and grow and hit your numbers and all that fun stuff. And there will come a tipping point when you actually do need to hire more people. How do you know it's the right time? And then on top of that two part question,

How do you convince the budget holders that you're actually ready for that as well? How do you approach that?

Matt (10:37)
Yeah, I've seen, you know, a variety of ways that people project how much they should spend on head count and marketing programs, whether it's like, you know, two to 10 % of revenue, you know, things, things of that nature, measurements like that. But I think lately, as we were talking about marketing teams getting smaller, and I think more and more companies expecting,

You know, actual pipeline performance out of marketing that you have to make these decisions based on data and performance. So for me personally, like, I think it would be time to hire. Once you've scaled and you're creating pipeline volumes that justify it. So, you know, am I generating enough leads that, I'm not capable of nurturing.

or I'm not capable of converting or sending over to sales. So for me, that kind of means you're hitting like a, you know, five to 10 X return on total marketing spend, which would include head count and program costs. So, you know, part of the problem though, is that attribution is really a huge issue right now in the B2B sector. It feels like every department is sort of fighting with each other over who gets attribution for.

Specific things. I think a lot of people neglect to take a look at the impact that marketing is having from an awareness perspective So decisions you make now to cut marketing could affect things, you know a couple months down the road two years down the being seen as a cost center But yeah in terms of actually hiring more people. I think there are good ways to quantify those numbers Take a look at how much pipeline you're generating in marketing and if it's you know, 5x to 10x

The headcount and program costs I think it's about about time to about time to hire somebody

And then once you reach that point, you have to hire the roles that are going to empower the highest value tactics. So you've got to consider, it in paid ads? Are they related to outbound lead generation? Are they focused on creating organic content? These are all going to be good questions to ask. They just need to be triggered at the right time based on quantifiable metrics that relate with company performance.

Benjamin Ard (12:30)
it. Well, Matt, sadly, we have come to the end of the episode. We've run out of time. This was incredible. I think this is a trend that people are dealing with all the time. And I think the insights are really valuable. What technology you can use, how to prioritize, when you should grow, when you should outsource, all that kind of stuff. I think it's amazing. If anyone wants to reach out and connect with you online, how and where can they find you?

Matt (12:54)
Yeah, so I'm on LinkedIn. I just got to search Matthew File. I currently work at Penrod. So if you're in the healthcare sector and you need a Salesforce consultant, Penrod.co is the place to go. And if you fill out a lead gen forum on there, it's likely you'll talk to me because as a one person marketer, I qualify every single lead request that comes in. So that's a great way to reach out to me is through the forum on Penrod.co.

Benjamin Ard (13:18)
love it. And for anyone listening to this episode, if you go to the show notes, we will have linked to Matt's profile and the company's website so it's nice and easy to find. Matt, again, thank you so much for the time and insights today.

Matt (13:30)
Absolutely. Thanks for having me, Benjamin.

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