The absurdity of the single marketing hire

Over 250,000 UK businesses employ exactly one marketer.
One person. Expected to do everything. And deliver.

That’s a hard job.
Some might say (including me), an impossible job.

Although this depends on your definition of ‘deliver’.

If its:

Keep the website tidy.
Post on LinkedIn every few days.
Respond to requests from the sales team.

Yes, maybe that’s a one-person job.

But if its:

Grow leads.
Build pipeline.
Enter new markets.
Make you easier to buy.
Or any other meaningful contribution to growth.

No chance.

This article explains: 

- why so many businesses end up with a marketing team of one
- why it is flawed (limitations and constraints)
- if this is your model, how to make it work

Why so common?

Two reasons…

1 - Most B2B SMEs reach £3-5m despite their marketing not because of it. Mature sales, operations and finance departments are often a by-product of early stage growth. The marketing function typically receives investment last, when the business has run out of ideas to unlock more growth. As a result, marketing in B2B companies often lags behind other departments.

2 - The role for marketing, particularly in B2B SMEs built on relationships, which makes up a large proportion of UK commerce, is widely misunderstood. It is not always clear how marketing can or should contribute commercially, so under-investment tends to follow. Uncertainty breeds cautiousness, and businesses settle for what feels comfortably affordable, rather than pushing themselves to invest in a marketing setup that will confidently deliver growth.   

Why is the one-person-function flawed?

A marketing function requires at least six capabilities:

1. Institutional memory: insider knowledge of product, service, technical nuances and the competitor landscape

2. Strategic planning capability: to remove guesswork and avoid wasting time or money on activity that won’t move the dial

3. Hands-on coordination: Competent daily management of channels, campaigns, suppliers and budgets

4. Specialist skills: The right hands on the right tasks, from PPC, SEO and social to email, CRM, CRO, the list goes on

5. Analytics know-how: To confidently track and report on results

6. Commercial judgement: The experience and ability to take full results accountability and produce a return on marketing investment 

Expecting one person to be strong in all six is not ambition. It’s fantasy.

People like this exist, but they are rare, and to be frank, are probably earning a lot more elsewhere or running their own business.

So, SMEs with a one-person marketing function typically end up with an over-stretch, over-whelmed, under-productive manager who is working hard to keep up but having very little impact on business growth.

They tend to be a strong strategic thinker, or a strong coordinator – but rarely both – which leads to CEO frustration as they observe either all strategy, no action, or all action, no strategy.  

Then there’s the inevitable ‘jack of all’ marketing task that emerges. Compounded by a pressure to prove their worth, created by the knowledge that the business has committed 80% of its marketing budget on their salary – they increasingly turn their hand to work that really should require a specialist.

Writing copy with only basic copywriting skills.
Tinkering with websites without up-to-date SEO knowledge.
A work-it-out-as-I-go approach to email marketing.

Marketing becomes a patchwork of activity delivered to an ‘OK’ standard at best.

The bottom line? Around a third of companies in the UK grow each year. The rest stay still or go backwards. To drive meaningful growth, you need marketing that out-performs at least two-thirds of your competitors. There are many ways to structure a marketing function to deliver top third performance, but from my experience, for the reasons listed (and many more) a one-person-team is not one of them.

If this is you…

The one person function is far from ideal, but if this describes your current setup, what can you do to improve it’s effectiveness overall. In the short-term, how do you make it ‘work’.

Here are two quick ways to mitigate some of the most common limitations:

1. Get your marketing manager a mentor.

CMO-level, structured support, monthly 1:1s, on call to sanity check big decisions and provide an impartial view on quality. Relatively low cost, but potentially high impact if this can plug some gaps around strategic planning and commercial judgement. 

2. Build your freelance bench.

Encourage your marketer to build relationships with a range of specialist freelancers, and actively promote their use on high complexity, high impact tasks. Proactively agree rates, get them setup as suppliers to remove friction when the need arises, and get into a habit of asking your marketer “should you be doing that yourself, or handing it to an expert” on a regular basis. This obviously requires some budget and for you to get involved in prioritisation, but will go a long way to elevate your marketer from ‘do-er’ to ‘manager’ who is then able to take accountability for results, not just activity.

Whether it’s mentoring or freelance support, what’s most important is recognising that one person doesn’t make a function. Figuring out your ‘person’s’ strengths and proactively compensating for gaps is the only way to make this model sustainable for any length of time.

Is there a better way?

The average cost of a fully-loaded Marketing Manager in the UK is £60-70k. And for businesses who can’t afford to spend more than this on marketing in total, options might feel limited.  

Even so, before making that hire, or if you have the opportunity to reshape or rebuild your marketing setup, I would encourage you to consider whether a hybrid function (a blend of part-time, contract and freelance marketers) could be a better fit for your business. In most cases, a hybrid function delivers stronger results at similar cost.

Structured well, you can get the right mix of internal continuity and access to specialist skills, without necessarily costing more than one full-time equivalent – and it almost certainly delivers faster progress and stronger results.

The catch? A hybrid function is the more complex path that’s harder to manage. Particularly if the director responsible doesn’t come from a marketing background.

How to set up and run a hybrid function is another article in it’s own right, and a subject for another day. However if you have questions on the topic, feel free to send them to rich@richwebley.co.uk and I’ll respond personally.

Final thought

What would be the impact if your sales team’s headcount reduced to one? How about production? Would you ask your bookkeeper to build next year’s financial plan?

No serious business runs production, finance or sales with a headcount of one.
Yet marketing is routinely expected to carry growth on a single pair of shoulders.

If your marketing function is one person, it’s likely you’re on a path to disappointing results. Or, have unknowingly set the bar for marketing contribution in your business far too low. Neither is good for a business with ambitions to grow.

If you’re striving for growth and your one-person marketing team isn’t playing it’s part – you don’t have a people problem, you have a function problem. Fix the function and your results will take care of themselves. 

If you find these articles and way of thinking useful, you can read more about my background and the type of work I do here.