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Mastering the Solo Game: How to Run A One-Person Marketing Department
286 Plays1 year ago
Ever wondered how to single-handedly run a marketing department?
Dock.us's Eric Doty delivers excellent insights that come from first-hand experience.
In this episode of Marketing Spark, Eric shares his thoughts on leveraging the power of connections and underscores the importance of striking while the iron is hot – capitalizing on the unique perspective, excitement, and unbiased outlook that newcomers bring to the table.
We discuss quick wins and how to attain them.
Eric dives deep into strategies and techniques that will help you make a splash and garner measurable success, even in the early stages of your journey.
Whether you are a start-up looking to set up a marketing department or a seasoned marketer planning to go solo, this conversation with Eric will equip you with the tools and motivation to succeed.
Recommended
Transcript
First Marketing Hire Challenges
00:00:09
Speaker
When you're hired as a marketing leader, there's no doubt that it's exciting. But what if you're not only the marketing leader, but the first marketing hire? You're going into a situation in which a company needs you to drive marketing strategically and tactically. Eric Doty seems to revel in this challenge, and as he says, has carved out a niche as a lone wolf.
00:00:35
Speaker
He has been the first marketing hire for three companies, most recently at Doc US, which he joined in October. Eric published a blog post recently in which he talked about his first 90 days at Doc and the lessons that he learned from being the first marketing hire.
00:00:51
Speaker
The post captured my attention because it provided some great insight into what many marketers experience with early stage companies.
Lone Wolf Marketer Experience
00:00:59
Speaker
So I reached out to Eric, realizing in the process, he was a fellow Canadian and invited him on the podcast. Welcome to Marketing Spark, Eric. Thank you so much, Mark. Yeah. I'll never turn down an invite from a fellow Canadian. Well, that's the very polite thing that we Canadians do. Yeah. And sorry for not being on earlier.
00:01:17
Speaker
Yeah, exactly. Perfect. Before we dive into the lone wolf conversation, tell me about your background and the companies that you worked with. Yeah, for sure. I've actually worked probably five or six marketing roles. Maybe I'll just focus on the last three where I've been in this lone wolf marketer situation. First, I got hired to a company based out of Vancouver. It was called GlobalMe as the content marketing manager.
00:01:44
Speaker
And then about six months into my role there, we got acquired by a global translation company based out of Poland. And suddenly, so I was a solo content marketer for maybe a 50 person company. And then suddenly I became the only marketing person at a 200 person company.
00:02:00
Speaker
So that was a bit like being thrown in the deep end. After that, the last two companies I've worked at, which were Butter, which was a sort of Zoom alternative for hosting more fun workshops online, and that was a seed stage startup. That's a tongue twister. And then my last role, or my most recent role here at Docker, I've been for six months,
00:02:24
Speaker
is another seed stage startup, very focused on the product-led growth kind of angle. And again, yeah, here I'm the first marketer. So in all those roles, I've been a content lead kind of in quotes, but normally when you're the only marketer or the only person in the organization thinking about marketing, you normally end up leading into other things that aren't just like pure capital C content.
00:02:50
Speaker
We have this lone wolf reputation. What are the biggest challenges when you walk into a company that doesn't have in-house marketers or isn't doing marketing at
Pressure and Autonomy of Sole Marketer
00:03:00
Speaker
all? Obviously it's exciting, but do you feel pressure given that you're now the marketer? And I put the marketer in quotation marks because it's a situation where essentially you're starting from scratch and you don't have any support systems in place. And people are looking at you and going, Eric,
00:03:19
Speaker
Okay, now you've been hired. Now is your time to make marketing happen? Is it stressful? Is it a pressure pack situation? How do you feel when you enter these situations?
00:03:31
Speaker
Yeah, it's a good question. I don't find it stressful necessarily. I think there's pressure in the sense that you can't point the finger at a team or you can't look around and say, well, this is sales fault. They're not using our marketing material or whatever it is that marketers normally sort of fall back on because I think you're the only one that's going to push those numbers. But I think
00:03:58
Speaker
I was actually talking to someone earlier today and I told them I actually find it easier.
00:04:02
Speaker
to be a lone marketer sometimes because you don't have as many external pressures from sort of your own, the marketing side, you can make decisions and you can switch your mind on a dime. So in some ways there's pressure because everyone's kind of looking at you. On the other hand, I have kind of full autonomy being the marketing team, right? That if I decide three months in, you know what, this isn't working. I don't have to go through red tape.
00:04:29
Speaker
of trying to convince the whole team or trying to shift this momentum of a big group of people to suddenly drop everything they're working on i just have to wake up monday and say you know i'm not gonna work on that anymore now i'm gonna work on this new thing so you hold a meeting with the marketing team of one you have a vote of one.
00:04:44
Speaker
you have the controlling power and you make decisions. It's a wonderful way to happen. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, it's great. And so I think the bigger challenge when you talk about coming into a company where there's no marketing yet is trying to create that culture of marketing from scratch. So it's really about getting buy-in from everyone else because
00:05:04
Speaker
You also can't, as a one-person team, you can't produce a large amount of volume or you can't really make the whole marketing engine run unless you get the support of your teammates. If you have a sales team or a salesperson, you need them to be bought into your marketing strategy. You need the CEO to be bought into the marketing strategy or whoever your
00:05:26
Speaker
whoever you're reporting to.
Aligning Marketing with CEO's Vision
00:05:28
Speaker
So it's more so about coming in at the beginning and creating this culture of content where you're going to have the support of your team. So yeah, that's always a big focus to me to deal with that pressure cooker of being number one marketer. It's like, okay, we're going to educate everybody else on how they can help me. And I'm going to make myself super visible in the organization to make sure that I have the support I need.
00:05:54
Speaker
I'm glad you brought that because I'm curious about some of the questions that you would ask a CEO when you're considering one of these lone wolf roles. What are you looking for them to tell you?
00:06:06
Speaker
What are the signs that the opportunity is interesting? Or conversely, what red flags suggest it's the wrong gig? Because as you say, marketing in many ways is a mindset. You're trying to get the organization to commit themselves to something new and different. And for a lot of organizations, especially those that are product-led or sales-led, it's a completely different way of operating. And the rules are different. A marketer speaks a different language.
00:06:34
Speaker
Sometimes it sounds slick and it sounds strange and there can be almost like a cultural issue that pops up because you're the new kid in the block and you don't look or act like everybody else. So what are some of the conversations that you have before you even consider taking a new gig?
00:06:55
Speaker
The way I thought of it when I was looking for my last couple of roles is what function does marketing play in the company's growth strategy? So is marketing just a nice to have kind of lead gen engine where you're just increasing the top of the funnel by twice as much? So people just think of me as this lead generating person and that's my only role. Or do you have a CEO who understands
00:07:22
Speaker
sort of all of the angles of what marketing can get to a company. So for example, it can help with the brand, which can just sort of help all the way through the funnel. It can help turn. So for example, now I'm at a product-led growth company where we have a free trial, and then there's the marketing assist for getting people more active in the product.
00:07:44
Speaker
email campaigns after they've signed up that just helps keep them sort of warm as a lead. Does the CEO understand all of those plays that marketing can have or do they just see marketing as like a
00:07:58
Speaker
adding extra stuff in the top, right? So the thing I normally ask is I sort of reverse interview them and say, like, how do you see marketing playing into your company growth strategy? Or like, how is marketing going to take your company from this size to that size? Or right now, what does Series A marketing look like versus when I'm coming in, what does the seed stage marketing strategy look like? And if the CEO can't tell you the marketing strategy on their own,
00:08:27
Speaker
You shouldn't have to make it from scratch. They should have an 80% idea of what marketing looks like at their company, I feel like. Otherwise, it's probably going to be an uphill battle to get the buying you need on strategy the whole time. I think the other important question that you have to ask the CEO is why marketing? Marketing can be a very emotional driven decision. It may be because
00:08:53
Speaker
there are competitors that are getting a lot of media coverage or competitors are winning a lot of business and marketers, CEOs are...
00:09:03
Speaker
In many ways, they're very ego driven. There's a lot of pride. You know, they're very vested in the success of the company. So do you ever ask them, so why do you want to do marketing? What are your motivations? What are some of the things that are driving you towards marketing other than you think it could be a key pillar for the company success? Yeah, absolutely. And I think specifically because I'm a content marketer, I normally ask why content versus going after like a paid ad strategy or something like that. And so to give a,
00:09:32
Speaker
a solid example, when I was interviewing at Doc, I asked Alex, our CEO, why content over something else? And because for him, he had an answer ready, which is what you want to hear, which was that in order for Doc is like a $50 user product, right? So if you want to be a billion dollar company, you have to have
00:09:53
Speaker
hundreds of thousands of users, which means millions in site traffic, meaning you need a really solid SEO strategy. So he's already looking forward to five, 10 years from now. What would it look like when we're a billion dollar company and then reverse engineering that we should get started on SEO and content right away. In our case too, for Doc, we're kind of a new product category or we're a combination of
00:10:20
Speaker
product categories that people know and might already have an idea of. And so we need to do a bit of reeducation of the market and a bit of shifting on what does a sales enablement tool look like? Or what are the typical tools in a sales team's tool stack? We're trying to change that conversation a bit. And one of the ways you do that is through thought leadership content.
00:10:40
Speaker
through an active social strategy, et cetera. So all of those things could tie back to why content. So absolutely, it's a great question to ask of a CEO and like what role is it going to play in the growth? And sometimes they might be wrong. Like sometimes, for example, at Butter,
00:10:58
Speaker
the sort of Zoom alternative I was working at, we thought content was going to have to play kind of an activation strategy for our product-led growth. But once I got there and started two, three weeks in, I realized that there needed to be more content that kept people active in the product. So what we actually needed to make was like tutorials and templates and guides rather than just trying to get more users.
00:11:24
Speaker
But again, that's a question of what role is content going to play in the organization's growth and the CEO should have a good idea of that. Personally, I think the best marketing happens when there's a partnership between the CEO and the head of marketing. There is alignment around goals and expectations and what will happen when. And as important, you know how to deal and learn from marketing that doesn't go as expected. I mean, failure is a part of the marketing mix. And no matter how hard you try,
00:11:55
Speaker
things aren't going to work sometimes. Do you have these conversations with the CEO? And how do you agree to the rules of engagement so that everyone's on the same page and that you go into the whole marketing journey in lockstep?
CEO Engagement in Marketing
00:12:09
Speaker
I've had two situations in terms of the leadership structure. At the translation company I was at and at Butter, there was a middle person I was reporting to. So at Butter, we had a chief growth officer who was responsible for more sort of growth outreach activities, whereas I was doing all the marketing content. I would assume a lingua I reported to a chief revenue officer.
00:12:31
Speaker
Whereas at Doc, we're an eight-person company, so I'm reporting directly to the CEO. And the relationship with the CEO is extremely important in both of those situations. Obviously, especially in my situation where that's my direct report. For us, it was setting really clear expectations.
00:12:47
Speaker
Like you said, of what role does marketing play in the company, but also like what is his time commitment to this and what guidance is he going to give me throughout this process? So he gave me, he's like, I want to spend 5% of my time on marketing. I expect in your first three months, it will be a lot more than that.
00:13:05
Speaker
But eventually like here's here's the time block. He's like he used to be the VP of marketing at lattice. So he was a marketer before he was a CEO. And so he knows that his time could easily get sucked into it just because he's interested in it. But he wants he wants me to help time block him of this is how much time I want to spend. But he also wants me to hold him accountable for
00:13:27
Speaker
I want to write one thought leadership post a month or a blog. I'm probably not going to do it unless you hound me for it. And so you need to have that open relationship of setting communication guidelines, expectations. So he sent me a thing on my first day that said, I'm available these hours. If you really need something from me, put it in an email. If you need something quick, put it on Slack. He gave me the whole kind of operating manual for how to work with him. But then he also
00:13:55
Speaker
flip that over to me and said, you know, tell me what you need for me to set, whether it's weekly priorities, monthly, quarterly priorities, like you tell me what that communication needs to be. And you have to come to that together. If you just are like a yes person to the CEO, I don't think you're going to become have this two way relationship where you can actually succeed. So the relationship I have is much more like I come to him and say, here are five ideas for what I think we should do next. I think this is priority 12345.
00:14:24
Speaker
How does that feel to you? Does that align with the company strategy? Does that align with the company vision? And he can then point me in the right direction. But what he's not telling me to do is here's how I think you should execute on each of these things. He's just telling me which are the most important. I like the idea that you've highlighted the fact that a CEO needs to be engaged in marketing. Now it could be 5% of their time or 25% depending on their priorities and how much time they have.
00:14:52
Speaker
When I worked for an AI powered company, CEO was super excited about marketing. I was a consultant at the time. They liked what I was doing, so they hired me full time. I joined them because I thought that marketing would be an integral part of how they went to market. When I got there, I recognized that the CEO wasn't engaged.
00:15:11
Speaker
didn't want to be engaged, thought that marketing was just more work for him. And in the end, it didn't work. I just didn't have his buy-in, his participation to make sure that marketing was on point. And I think that's, if anything, a CEO will hold you accountable. They'll give you direction. They'll give you guidance in terms of what you need to focus on, what's important to them. And if you don't have that, that really is a bad place to be as a marketer, especially if you're the only marketer.
Setting Realistic Marketing Goals
00:15:40
Speaker
Sure. And you have to have really clear guidelines set on what success looks like in agreement. And in our case, for example, at Doc, we realized that our biggest challenge being a one-person team would, especially at the beginning, wouldn't be setting traffic targets or something like that. We just set output targets for ourselves. So I'm judging myself mostly on how many blogs are we producing a month.
00:16:06
Speaker
I already know I have a certain quality barrier. So to me, setting a quantity output goal is actually the best way to keep me moving quickly. Because we know if we do all the right things and we focus on just quantity, we will actually get there. But some CEOs might have in their head, after three months, we should have this much website traffic. Or after six months, I should have this many leads coming to the pipeline.
00:16:32
Speaker
And maybe that is the right goal to set for some companies. For a siege stage startup, it's more so, how do we get the right processes in motion? How do I get, for example, an army of freelancers that I can rely on? And how do I make that process smoother and smoother until we get the output at the speed I want? So having an agreement with the CEO for months one through six, we're mostly just focused on like, can we do all the things that we put on our own plate? Is that realistic?
00:17:02
Speaker
And now that we're six months in, we're reevaluating those kinds of questions and looking forward, we'll then start to set more goals for ourselves around like the results we're getting. In a sense, what you're doing is you're building a marketing engine from scratch. There's probably nothing there or very little marketing that's happened.
00:17:21
Speaker
And you have to not only make marketing happen, but put in the workflows and the processes, build a marketing stack, find support staff in terms of contractors or freelancers. And that's a lot of grunt work that needs to happen before you can even think about establishing Northstar goals for KPIs and things like that. You've got to have buy-in. You've got to do the work. You've got to put the work in, set the foundation in place before you can even start doing marketing.
Importance of Marketing Budget
00:17:48
Speaker
And most CEOs know that. I think some who have less experience with it expect there to be this, you know, I hired you month one, month two, there should be stuff coming in from it. But so you have to just be super upfront. You have to be your own advocate. You have to sort of manage up in that sense of what the expectation should be.
00:18:10
Speaker
Let's talk money because obviously when they hire you as the first marketer, you are the biggest marketing expense. They may have not ever spent that much money. And I'm not saying you're making astronomical amounts of money, but you are a line expense, a marketing line expense and probably the biggest thing they've got.
00:18:28
Speaker
Tell me about the conversation that you would have with the CEO about marketing budget, because obviously, you're excited to join the company, you wanna set that strategic foundation, you wanna make sure that they've got that marketing engine in place, but if they don't have the fuel to power marketing, then all your efforts, all that strategic thinking goes for naught. So is that a conversation that you have, and how blunt is that conversation when the idea of a budget comes up?
00:18:57
Speaker
Yeah. Oh man. You've just hit such a pain point. I think, yeah, I think you can skimp on people or budget, but not both. So you can't have a one person content team and no budget that supports them. I think you could have a four or five person content team in house and not rely on any outside contractors or, or go light on tools. But when you have.
00:19:21
Speaker
if you're spending that money on me, the content marketer, you need to be able to support me. I can only scale so far. If I put my head down and just wrote blogs every single day, maybe I write two to three blogs a week, but then you're spending whatever it is, six plus figures on just eight blogs a month, which isn't enough. That's not going to move anything. What you need to do is
00:19:46
Speaker
have enough budget that helps me amplify myself so that the strategic inputs can actually see themselves realized in like stuff being made. So yeah, you have to have a commitment to at least like, for example, like 10K a month in content on top of that, where you can have enough
00:20:07
Speaker
freelance support, you can have the right tools. We're pretty quick to say yes to software at Doc. If we use a tool and we see it has value, it's not like no questions asked, but I pretty much get yes on any tool I want to use because we understand that
00:20:26
Speaker
If I'm a one-person team, I need to automate certain things. I need to save time whenever I can. And the best cost savings are going to happen through tools, really, in terms of saving my time. One way you can think of it is, what is your value per hour? And then are the tools that you're using saving you? If a tool is $100 a month,
00:20:49
Speaker
and it's saving you 10 hours a month, then you just saved $1,000. So it's more so flipping the mindset and seeing things as an expense or not seeing them as an expense and rather seeing them as a value add to you.
00:21:02
Speaker
And yeah, in terms of like you need contractors if you're a one person team to help scale things up, just to get, if it would, things would move too slowly, especially for a seed stage company for them to have an impact. Like if I was the only one producing things, great, it wouldn't be that expensive, but it would take two, three years for us to see value. And we need things to move quicker than that. So the way to just speed things up is increase your budget on contractors and freelancers.
00:21:31
Speaker
That's a great topic to discuss because I think when rubber hits the road, both parties got to be aligned and you have to be prepared to make an investment in marketing strategically, tactically and financially. And if they're not in place, then there's a lot of frustration both from the CEO who expects results and from the marketer who needs the support to do what they need to do. You've signed on the dotted line, you've agreed to terms, you have a starting date,
Building Early Wins in New Role
00:21:57
Speaker
Can you walk me through the first weeks of a new job? What about the first couple of weeks where they've announced your position? Everyone's excited about you joining the company. You walk into the office. I guess these days you don't walk into the office. You sign on to Zoom and you get started. What happens during the first two to three weeks? What are some of the key things that
00:22:18
Speaker
you need to do that you need to get the information that you need people that need to talk to it must be a very long checklist of a lot of ground work a lot of conversations on information to consume what does that look like for me i sort of looked at it in four pillars.
00:22:35
Speaker
The most important one, and I think one that a lot of people don't think of, is creating attention for yourself and getting buy-in in the organization. Because once you've been somewhere for six months, you're not new and exciting anymore. And so you have to take advantage of the excitement of you being the new team member to impact as much as you can early on in terms of what you need from the other teams. So for example, at Doc,
00:23:01
Speaker
I knew that we were going to be working, I was going to need the support of our designer quite a bit. So right away, I made sure I learned like what tools is he working in? How do I put things in his workflow that in a way that if I need his support, I'm going to get it? And making it really obvious, like right from the start, like here's here's 10 ideas I have for how we can redesign our blog and getting him excited. And then
00:23:27
Speaker
as long as I can get them ramped up right away and excited about it, then that relationship will continue. If I waited three months until I had my whole strategy laid out, I knew exactly all the, I had my whole workflow in place. And then suddenly I came to the designer and said, hey, I need you to do this task. I'd be kind of old news at that point. And so you really have to make sure you sort of make noise. So what I did is I met with every, basically every person in our company where only eight people talk to them about what I plan on doing, ask them about their job,
00:23:57
Speaker
made a connection there. I also set up all kinds of things on Slack that I could, anytime I do something like I publish a blog post, or we share something on social, it will announce it in our Slack where everyone else is. Basically,
00:24:11
Speaker
setting a stage for myself to get lots of visibility upfront and then on an ongoing basis. Like how are you going to keep people's attention? Because like I said before, you need that behind from everybody. And so that's just a big thing I think people miss so they don't think of it. They try to stay in the shadows for the first
00:24:28
Speaker
few weeks because they're like, I'm going to get a feel for things. I'm going to quietly listen. And I think that's a big mistake. I think you have to make yourself known, which is easy for me. I'm like an extroverted person. I could see how it would be harder for a lot of marketers and writers or shyer and don't necessarily want to put themselves out there. But I think it's super important.
00:24:48
Speaker
And then there's sort of the information gathering that does have to take place just in terms of like who is your target customer? How does your internal processes work? That sort of just has to happen actually.
00:25:03
Speaker
actively over your first month. But I think you have to not get too absorbed in strategy land because if you stay in information absorbing mode too long, you're not going to make any quick wins happen and you're not going to get to the action. So basically I balanced information gathering, trying to set
00:25:23
Speaker
myself up with my team for success, getting quick wins as much as I could right away, and then also getting all my tools set up and my marketing stack. Like you said before, it's a lot of work to get all that stuff set up, and you have to own that yourself. And so a great way to just come in and make an impact right away is just start getting your whole tech stack set up.
00:25:46
Speaker
As a marketing consultant, I have a new job on a regular basis and quick wins to me are gold. If you can demonstrate a positive contribution as soon as possible, that's a very, very good thing. And I try to identify quick wins.
00:26:03
Speaker
Things like updating the website's key pages, creating a one pager, making tweaks to sales decks. How do you identify quick wins? Do you have a running list? Is there a checklist that you have from the two other companies where you've been the first marketing hire? Or is it just conversations that you have and the salesperson says, you know, I wish that our sales deck was better. Or the designer says, I would love to update our homepage.
00:26:28
Speaker
What's the process to identifying quick wins and then recognizing the things that you can actually do quickly? Yeah, for sure. I think for me, the quick wins come from what are your personal expertise that you don't need that much information about the company to just know that you're making the right move. I think the homepage is a really challenging thing to tackle because
00:26:53
Speaker
you might come in thinking you understand the product messaging or whatever it is, but actually like two, three months in you've learned a lot more about the customer. You've learned a lot more about the product and you actually regret the changes you made to the website. You might want to change things back. So I actually avoid, I think the website, the homepage and sort of the key product pages are the first thing everyone wants to do. And I think they're actually the riskiest things to tinker with. So what I, I come from an SEO background. So for me,
00:27:20
Speaker
SEO things are super comfortable. Just to do a quick audit of the website, are we missing title tags, meta descriptions? Are we doing internal page linking? Just identifying those easy opportunities. One thing I started doing at Doc was to try to get more backlinks right away for the site because we had a pretty low backlink profile. And so I was doing help a B2B writer
00:27:44
Speaker
query responses, like help a reporter out, those things, because they didn't need to be that embedded in our marketing strategy for me to just try to get some backlinks here and there for the site. And that really quickly got us like 20, 30 backlinks, which boosted our sort of domain authority, right? So I leaned into the things that I knew super well that were kind of company independent. Also as a writer, it's easy just to spot things like, oh, there's this typo on our website, or I think our email,
00:28:12
Speaker
or automated emails that go to new product signups. I've five immediate ideas that I can overnight just make this better. And whether this is the perfect email campaign, I don't know yet, but it's okay. Let's just fix what's there right now. Yeah, I think you have to balance 50-50 of your time in your first two, three weeks on just immediately obvious things that scream out to you, but not spending too much time in
00:28:37
Speaker
quick wins and also planning for what is what is the first three months are going to look like? What are the first six months going to look like? I think the other thing about being a new marketing hire is that you come in without any biases. You've got a fresh perspective, you're not drinking from the company Kool-Aid yet. And so it must be interesting to
00:29:00
Speaker
Well, let me rephrase that. There must be a sense of urgency in terms of taking advantage of your unbiased view of the world. The fact that you have perspective that people inside don't have because they're operating in the either hurricane. You can see things right away that need to be changed. They're so obvious. But when you've been watching them and looking at them day after day, week after week, they blur into the background. So is that something that you're aware of when you join a company and recognize
Aligning Personal Strengths with Company Needs
00:29:28
Speaker
that
00:29:28
Speaker
i've got a fresh perspective and i better move fast otherwise it's going to disappear yeah absolutely i think that's true i also think it's true to check yourself every three months and remind yourself of that rookie mindset when you came in and you're like what are the obvious things that i would change if
00:29:45
Speaker
I were coming in today and it seems like such a stupid question to ask, but it's something that we just at Doc recently, for example, I was doing like daily social media posts on our Doc page and they were fine and they're going okay, but the amount of time it was taking us to make those versus the return we were getting from them.
00:30:04
Speaker
it made more sense for us just to focus our attention on other things. But that came from sort of taking a look at ourselves and saying, what are the obvious things that we're doing that are just wasting our time? So that's like the inverse of what you ask when you're new, right? Like what are the obvious things that I should be doing day one? For us, for example, another quick win was case studies. Like we just didn't have any. I don't need a ton of knowledge about the company or
00:30:28
Speaker
Etc to just jump in get the sales the sales team said hey We need case studies for this use case like for like using doc for in a sales use case like great So I just went out interviewed two customers while doing that I learned a lot about the product from our customers viewpoint So I was kind of killing two birds with one stone It was like Intel for me as a marketer, but also I could turn that into an asset I think it's really important when you're a one-person marketing team to keep that rookie mindset and
00:30:56
Speaker
constantly evaluate like are there things that are just on my plate because they're on my plate and Should I get rid of those when you have the benefit from day one of having that clean slate? But you have to keep you have to keep that up
00:31:11
Speaker
If you were to be approached after this podcast, after someone listened to this podcast by someone who was considering becoming the first marketing hire or someone who just joined a company as the first marketing hire, what are the two or three pieces of advice that you would give them about being the first marketing hire and setting themselves up for success? Oh man. Load of question. I think, um,
00:31:36
Speaker
I think making sure that you have aligned yourself with a company where the type of marketing that you like doing is aligned with what the needs of the company are. So if you really like doing SEO content or blogs, make sure that's what the company actually needs because it's easy to
00:31:56
Speaker
be a specialist at a small company where sorry if you're part of a larger marketing team it's easy to have a role where you're like okay I'm SEO specialist and like that's all I do and people get in that comfort zone but then when you become a one-person team your needs might be stretched in a lot of different directions but you still have to assess like does does the company's sort of core content needs align with what I'm interested in my skills and then
00:32:22
Speaker
sort of the follow up to that is like, do you want to be in a position where you're doing lots of, like, do you want to have a really wide set of tasks and skills that you're working on or do you rather be more narrowly focused and like, and that's looking for that match. So like at Doc, we are pretty content, like my role is pretty content focused where I'm
00:32:45
Speaker
able to keep my guardrails on. Some of my other path roles, it bled more into like sales enablement, like building slide decks for our sales team, or building them one pagers they could send to customers. And that wasn't really what I was passionate about doing. It was great experience to get, but ultimately wasn't that great of a fit. But I was trying to sort of fit my SEO content specialists like into
00:33:12
Speaker
Like a square peg into a round hole basically where what the company actually needed was like a sales enablement person Companies don't necessarily know when they're hiring what they actually need content for So I think really establishing that that you've you've got the right fit there as a content writer I have to ask you the obvious question these days is your thoughts on chat GPT and
AI Tools in Marketing
00:33:38
Speaker
how you're using it right now and what you see as its biggest strength for someone like you who needs to create a lot of content, but at the same time, it has to be high quality content. How are you using chat GPT and advice to other content marketers out there who are using it, but maybe feel that they're not leveraging it properly? For sure. I think
00:34:01
Speaker
When any new tool comes out that gains popularity and gains lots of hoopla and there's lots of opinions about it, I think the best thing you can do is experiment with it yourself and to make your own opinions with an open mindset. Because I think a lot of content marketers have approached chat GPT as like this disrupting enemy that's going to take something away from you. But really, it's a tool that can help you.
00:34:25
Speaker
you have to integrate into your own workflows and your own processes. So the best example so far for me is that I'm great at writing blogs, I suck at writing blog titles. I'm so uninspired when it comes to actually writing the title after the fact and I just normally like do something basic but I've gotten into the habit of asking chat GPT. Like I'll paste the whole article and I'll say give me 10 article ideas and it'll spit some out and I'll say okay give me some that are funny or more or more creative or
00:34:51
Speaker
Actually, can you introduce a pun? Recently, we wrote an article on a pricing proposal. I was like, give me titles about an article about writing a pricing proposal, except make them puns about a marriage proposal. And it gave me 10 awesomely written ideas. So that was a case of like,
00:35:10
Speaker
something where I normally get stuck already and it's a tool that can unblock me. I think it was Ryan Law Animals called it like using it as a sparring partner and I think that's the mode where I'm at right now. I think in the future
00:35:25
Speaker
with GPT-4 and I'm sure they'll be 5678910. I'm sure we'll get to the point on parity with human writers and then the way that it works will be different. It'll be more about giving it creative inputs. I actually have been thinking about it as an analogy in the same way I work with freelancers right now.
00:35:44
Speaker
Our freelancers that we work with at Doc, they're all great writers. They don't have the perspective on our company, our product, our customers, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So when I write them a brief, I'm trying to give them as much of that context as possible. So I'll write like a big long blog brief, explain at every point, here's where Doc fits in, how, here's our opinion on this, and sort of get into the weeds on our company perspective.
00:36:11
Speaker
That's kind of what giving a brief or a query prompt to chat GPT is like as well, except right now it's not that great at synthesizing inputs into a great answer. But it will eventually, I think. The technology right now is version 1.0 and eventually it will be good enough. So I think of it in the same way as I work with contractors of
00:36:33
Speaker
Eventually, it's just going to be about giving it the necessary inputs and you'll get a nice output. I'm trying to think of it more in that way. Like how do I enhance my current workflows? Where do I see it can add value? And then sort of keep in the back of my mind, like how would this be useful if it were like 5% better in the future and staying open-minded and optimistic about it rather than treating it as something that's going to replace writers?
00:36:56
Speaker
There was an interesting post on LinkedIn this morning by Rand Fishkin who said that chat GPT has essentially established the bar for content and that if you have writers who can't create better content than chat GPT, it's not worth doing. So essentially when I look at the
00:37:15
Speaker
content landscape, especially when you're using sources like Upwork and Fiverr, where you provide them with a content brief and the content comes back and it's pretty generic. They don't know your product. They don't know your target audience. ChatGPT could replace all of that work. But for your writers, the bar is set. They've got to provide better context, better insight.
00:37:38
Speaker
more creative writing. So in a sense, it is an interesting tool in the sense that writers got to write better. ChatGPT can write okay for now, but it's an interesting landscape right now and challenging for writers, I think.
00:37:53
Speaker
Yeah, and I think there is a lot of content that doesn't need to be written by people. And it's actually great that we don't have to write it anymore. Lots of companies have glossaries on their websites of defining terms. And I don't need to hire a writer to define a term for the 100th time. ChatGPD could do that. And we can provide the value to our clients in
00:38:15
Speaker
defining certain sales terminology, for example, without having to go out and hire writers in a way that doesn't cost us that much and everyone wins. But then for something that's more of a thought leadership angle, injecting those opinions into our pieces that the AI can't give us original opinions that are reflective of our actual company yet, maybe in the future, I don't know.
00:38:38
Speaker
Yeah, we've gone off on a bit of a bit of a tangent because chat gbt is such a addictive topic these days. It's hard not to talk about it, especially if you're a creator and a content writer. But I want to thank you for insight into chat gbt and obviously insight into being the first marketing hire. I think a lot of people
00:38:56
Speaker
find themselves in the same shoes, there's challenges, there's opportunities at the same time, and if they've got some guidance, better guidance in terms of how to do their jobs better, I think they'll be a lot more successful. Final question is where can people learn more about you and Doc?
Connecting with Eric Doty
00:39:13
Speaker
Yeah, so they can learn more about me on LinkedIn. My name's Eric Dodie. I'm sure Mark will link to it somewhere. I've been posting more actively there, trying to give advice. Lots of examples and sort of show behind the scenes of how I do my work and what I'm working on. And doc, you can visit us at dock.us. If you go to the revenue lab on our website, that's the name for our blog, and you can see the kind of content we've been putting together.
00:39:41
Speaker
Thanks, Eric, for being on the podcast and thanks to everyone for listening to another episode of Marketing Spark. If you enjoyed the conversation, rate it and subscribe via Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app and share via social media. To learn more about how I work with B2B SaaS companies as a fractional CMO, strategic advisor and positioning and messaging specialist, email mark at markevans.ca or connect with me on LinkedIn. I'll talk to you soon.