This week on Missing Half, we highlight the realities of being a marketing team of one inside a B2B company and offer practical strategies for making it work. You’ll hear directly from three previous guests—Grace Campbell, Katie Hagan, and Paul Liebal—who share honest insights about juggling responsibilities, managing expectations, and building momentum without a full team behind them. Alongside their stories, Bill offers commentary and recommendations to overcome these challenges. If you're tasked with “doing it all,” this episode will give you a clearer path forward.

Bill: Thank you for joining the Missing Half podcast where we're discovering what's missing in manufacturing and B2B marketing. I'm your host, Bill Woods. Today we're going to take a little bit of a different approach. We're going to go back through some of the commentary from three of our guests. Three of our guests, who were really candid and honest about their experience as a marketing department of one. We see this all too often. Companies with revenue from 10 to $150 million have one employee, one person by job title or role who is in charge of the marketing function. And they're tasked with so many things. And today we're just going to dive deep, get real, and talk with those folks about exactly what they're facing. This episode is built around direct quotes from these marketers. I'll have some commentary about each of their comments. And so let's get started. Our first conversation is with Grace Campbell from Conspec Controls. Grace is a young marketer who just came out of school and is facing tremendous challenges of dealing with the entire marketing department at her company, with various target markets and unique niche services. Let's hear what she has to say.

Grace: I think that where we stand now in the industry is that marketing has become such a catch all term. Now you're not only doing marketing in the sense of we're coupling graphic design and we're coupling analytics and we're coupling, like ROI and company organization and organizational structure and the management of literature, like all of these things have now become well, that's all marketing. When I you know, what happens, you can't say no because it's your job. But at the same time, it's it's this question of like, well, you have people who are extremely proficient in SEO, or you have people that are extremely proficient in Google Analytics. But I think on the, on the, so on one hand, that's I think that's an industry problem. I think that it's because we just created this term that is catch all, because when you have the amount of freelancers or you have the amount of diverse jobs that are in this market of marketing, it becomes this problem of, well, we need all of that. So we're just going to hire one person to do it all, which you can't fault the company for it. You can't fault the hiring team for it because, like as a marketer and I'm sure you can say the same thing. You have a little bit of all that. You have some aspects where you're like, okay, I've dabbled in Canva or Adobe Acrobat, or I've dabbled in Google Analytics before, or I've touched all these things then, but now I've become to this point where I can do as jack of all trades, master of none type, situation.

Bill: Grace absolutely nails it here. The scope of marketing has absolutely ballooned. There are so many things that marketers have to deal with, and when we're dealing with the internal challenges, as well as all of the technical items that we face every day, it can really be daunting. So what can you do as a marketing department of one when you're faced with this challenge? Number one, get really clear about your priorities and make sure you have management buy in so that everyone is aligned. You have to make sure that you're doing first things first, and you're not being distracted by shiny objects or things that just don't matter. This will help you remain creative, crisp and clear in what you need to do and give you the energy you need to succeed. Next, we'll hear from Katie Hagan, a digital strategist who's worked in the DTC world, the B2B world, and also the agency world. So she's really got her fingers on the pulse of what's happening and how this Department of One can be such a challenge. In this clip, she reflects on the constant stream of internal requests that are often one of the greatest challenges or roadblocks to being successful at executing your marketing program.

Katie: But everyone is passionate about marketing and exciting about marketing, so it can be troublesome to always be getting feedback and input. But it is great that just everyone is invested in marketing. But one thing I was just saying to a colleague recently is that sometimes not everything is going to get our 100%. You know, if you have to actually say yes to everything, then we do have to be very, we do have to communicate our bandwidth. We do have to say, well, X, Y and Z is currently in the works. This campaign, currently where you have to really establish with like your leadership and your management, like these are the things I'm working on. We can do this, but I just want you to know, like, I don't know how we're going to make it work or it's not the best it could be. It it's not the best it could be. So do we wait to for a time when we can execute this perfectly, or do we execute it at 90% instead of 100%? Or do we put something else on the back burner? And it's not so much, I know how to prioritize my to do list. It's having everyone else, youliterally, as a marketer, need internal buy in from leadership and your management on your own to do list. Like saying like hey, I’m de-prioritizing this, are we okay with that?

Bill: Katie's framing here is absolutely excellent. One of the biggest challenges when we're seeing all of these internal requests come in from everyone's ideas. Everybody has ideas on how marketing should work because they're consumers of marketing. So the HR department has ideas. The sales team has ideas. The owners, the founders, every executive, every manager. Everyone has a marketing idea and knows how it should be working. And the challenge is juggling all of those requests and prioritizing them. My recommendation is develop frameworks. Get everything on paper, have a plan, and then make the folks who are having all of these unsolicited inputs look at the plan when appropriate and have them help you prioritize or at least understand how their ask to do a thing is going to require you not to do something else. So it's about a juggling act. This will help you build trust in the organization. So you're not just saying no all the time. You're saying yes, but with context or no with context, so that everybody understands exactly what's being prioritized, what framework it fits in, what goals you're trying to achieve, and what the most successful path is to achieve those goals. Next, we have Paul Liebal from Mission Critical Solutions, and in this episode we talked about the challenges of expectations. Hiring a marketer, establishing a marketing program and a marketing budget does not directly lead to hockey stick like growth. We need to be patient. It needs to be developed over time. And Paul hits on this in his conversation.

Paul: Everyone who gets a marketing person, I think, always thinks in the back of the head like there's a chance we hire a marketing person, like we're going to take off. And, you know, there's obviously a lot more that goes into it than that. That's a good start. So but I think to, you know, being able to and again this is kudos to to our leaders for for being like this. But having an idea of being able to keep the bigger picture in mind and understanding that it might not look like a whole lot, week to week. But then over months you look back and you say, hey, we actually, you know, there's like a lot here show that we did. And that's all in line with our vision for where we want to go. So it might not be that instant gratification that we talked about earlier, but over time those things do add up. And this stuff doesn't happen overnight.

Bill: Paul hits on something I see all the time. As soon as we hire a marketer, as soon as we put in marketing program together, the leads will just start flowing in. And it's just not that simple. Marketing is developed over time. We have to develop authority and trust with our audience. We have to establish ourselves in the marketplace not only as the company's brand, but then also from a standpoint of the solutions we provide and the problems we solve in our target market. This trust isn't developed overnight, and it requires a lot of effort and a lot of trial and error to figure out the best way to activate the market. Paul hit on a really tough subject here, and my recommendation is to just be open and honest. Share benchmarks, share statistics and findings so that you're educating your ownership or leadership group along the way to make sure that they understand the process and really try to create those proper expectations with while building trust with those folks and showing them you're not just making excuses, you're building a reasonable plan that will have success over time if they're patient and willing to work the process. So if you’re marketing department of one, you've probably faced many of these same challenges that Paul, Katie, and Grace have. Whether you’re facing the challenge of having to be that jack of all trades and manage everything simultaneously, whether you're managing the problem of internal requests and the flood of ideas that are coming at you every day, or you're struggling with unrealistic expectations, the key to the whole process is communication. You have to communicate with your leadership and set really good goals that are achievable and that are realistic. Also consistent feedback along the way where you're sharing the wins and losses. And this is a really hard one for young marketers where they're willing to go to their their management team and say, hey, this campaign failed. We need to do that early and often in the process to make sure that our leadership understands that everything isn't going to be a success, that we're going to struggle to find the right mix. As long as management starts to understand that we're willing to share our successes and failures, they'll start to believe in the real process. They'll also not wonder what you're doing and become more accusatory or trying to figure out what's going on because they're not hearing things from you, they're not getting feedback. They don't understand the process. My general experience has been that most management team members are willing to go on that journey as long as you're forthright and just bring them the information. It's not good news. It's not bad news. It's just information. And management deals with this every day. And it's not just a marketing thing. They're facing challenges and mistakes and problems and failures and wins in other departments, whether it's HR, whether it's sales, whether it's R&D, whether it's on the manufacturing wing, whether it's in quality control. So this is normal. And marketers don't have to be different. We are allowed to make mistakes. We have to make mistakes. We have to fail. That's the first attempt in learning to figure out what's going to work and make our companies successful. A big thank you to Grace, to Katie, and to Paul for sharing and being very candid about some of their challenges and struggles. And I think this is something we can all learn from today and help us to be better marketing managers for our companies. Thank you for joining the Missing Half podcast where we're discovering what's missing in manufacturing and B2B marketing. Like. Share. Subscribe. Have a great day!