When you’re a solo (and often) junior marketer in an small organisation where you’re working mostly independently, or with an agency or freelancers, it’s a challenging place to be.
Not only do you have to manage the day-to-day marketing output for the business, you also have to keep one eye on long-term strategy, aligning with commercial goals of the organisation and responding to invevitable last-minute requests.
Those who’ve worked in marketing know this position all too well: the urgent event that needs promoting, the social post that needs to go out today, the deck the sales team needs for a prospect meeting. It’s a lot. Without clear expectations or support, it gets overwhelming quickly.
I’ve been there. After 13 years in B2B and B2C, now working with purpose-driven brands, I’ve worked as a consultant, in-house, solo and within teams. Here’s what I’ve learned that can really help you step out of survival mode and into something more strategic and proactive.
Set expectations early
This is all about making sure you’re performing against the expectations of the role and meeting the objectives of why you were hired.
In a lot of instances senior leaders within business don’t always understand marketing. Certainly not from a strategic perspective, so they’ll tend to hire a junior role with a salary between £28k to maybe £40K, expecting this person to be able to do everything under the sun.
They might expect you to manage brand, lead generation, content, social, events, and reporting, and also contribute to sales growth. That’s just not realistic, especially without the right experience, training, support, tools, or team.
As a marketer in this role, make sure you communicate this risk early on and set clear expectations about what you’re able to achieve.
Understand senior leadership’s commercial goals
Try to be really clear what your measures of success are in your role. What will you be evaluated on? If senior management is looking for huge growth in turnover, profit and other commercial metrics, it’s likely that you will underperform against their expectations. This isn’t a reflection on your ability, it’s a common misalignment between marketing roles and business expectations.
If you’ve been hired to fill a content and promotions role – which a lot of general marketing manager roles are – then it’s very unlikely you’re actually going to have the ability, resources, experience and budget to achieve the commercial expectations of leadership, especially within the timeframes they expect.
Create a strategic marketing plan, no matter how basic
I always go on about the importance of having a marketing strategy and it doesn’t necessarily need to be as overblown as the word strategy sounds. It’s really just about setting two, perhaps three at the most, clear, SMART marketing objectives for the year. Ideally that can link to a demonstrable return on turnover, profit, customer lifetime value and various associated metrics.
Too often, we get stuck measuring the wrong things. Social reach and email opens are fine as indicators, but they won’t prove your value. What matters is being able to trace your efforts back to commercial impact, even if it’s a loose link.
Not sure where to start? I’ve got simple frameworks and guides that walk you through this process:
- How to create an effective 2025 marketing strategy for your purpose-driven business: Part 1
- How to create an effective 2025 marketing strategy for your purpose-driven business: Part 2
Be clear about what support and resources you need
When drafting a plan it’s great to be ambitious, and it’s important to aim high, however you always have to bear in mind the limitations of the plan. For example, what’s your marketing budget? How much time do you have in the week? Do you have freelancers or marketing agency that you’re able to lean on? Will you need more resource to achieve some of the outcomes that leadership wants? These are all important questions that you need to consider when putting this plan together.
Make the most of your resources
Although negative from an environmental perspective, in 2025 generative AI can do a huge amount for solo marketers. It’s easy to end up producing content for content’s sake though, but your audience still wants clarity, value, and relevance. Focus on quality over quantity, even when you’re automating or outsourcing.
Do try to lean on these platforms and tools to help you speed up processes so you can spend more time focusing on commercial outcomes and strategy.
Also, don’t overlook potential allies in your organisation. Is there someone in another team who wants to grow their marketing skills and could support you on a project? Ask around. You might be surprised.
Prioritise clear, consistent communication with senior leadership
Always make sure you’re showing what a great job you’re doing, and you’re communicating the value of your work to senior leadership. You can link this to commercial outcomes on a monthly basis, but try not to get too stuck in the weeds and obsess over every metric. Try to really get under the skin of the frustrations of the CEO and your boss to see where your impact matters most.
And whenever possible, use the language of the business – think ‘pipeline,’ ‘retention,’ ‘revenue’ – not just ‘engagement’.
Evaluate performance but don’t obsess on the numbers
It’s important to measure your work, but try not to fall into the trap of overanalysing data that doesn’t link to real outcomes. Use tools like a CRM to help connect marketing activity with sales or customer actions.
Yes, you’ll still want to report on engagement metrics, but always pair them with insights. What are you learning? What will you do differently? What’s driving results?
The real challenge is joining the dots between marketing and sales, and it’s worth investing time here. This is one of the most important challenges to work through when you’re in this position as a solo junior marketer.
If you can, invest in mentoring
It can often feel quite lonely when you’re acting in this role, especially when you feel really under pressure to deliver across multiple different areas.
One of the best pieces of advice I’ve had is to try and seek out a mentor external to the business who has more experience than you and can help you gain confidence, feel better within your work, and operate more strategically.
This is a service that I offer with my one-to-one mentoring, so please feel free to get in touch if that’s something that’s interesting to you.
Get in touch for one-to-one mentoring
Regular mentoring is ideal for up-and-coming team members who would like to grow their confidence, skills and learn how to think about marketing more strategically. We’ll make a joint plan to begin with to define outcomes, and then we’ll work through it.