How to drive more impact from your small marketing team
You don't need a big marketing team to drive real impact.
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The fundamentals of marketing remain the same regardless of company size, except for few notable differences like quantity of output, impact driven by them, level of audacious OKRs, budget flexibility, and the breadth of the tech stack.
But some marketing teams clearly drive more impact than others, even when they’re significantly smaller in size.
Why and how?
When it comes to driving impact, your team size matters only so much, instead how it functions and what it prioritizes is what influences the results most.
The mindset shift from “are we using enough channels?” to “are we using our existing channels to their fullest potential?” is where it gets tricky. You could apply this to literally anything in marketing, for example,:
instead of wondering “did we drive enough MQLs?” to “what was the ratio of MQL/SQL conversion?”,
instead of planning “ten top of funnel blogs that drive zero MQLs”, shifting your focus on “five solid bottom funnel content pieces that drive significant MQLs.”
This is easier said than done. As a marketer, you’ll get tons of pushback from different stakeholders when you try to shift gears because you’ll always leave something at the table they “thought” was important. And that important element would change every quarter, if not faster.
Constantly having to re-iterate or “optimize” your marketing strategy is a failproof way to fail. Start with your audience at the core and work your way out to stakeholders.
1. Goals: Why does it matter?
Marketers are often guilty of doing busywork instead of impact-focused work that really moves the needle for the company goals. Typically this happens because:
marketing is often treated more agile than it should be,
marketing is pulled in different directions last minute,
there’s lack of visibility and misalignment between marketing and other teams.
Here are some deeper explanations of why most marketers fail to meet their goals often:
Frequent Shifts in Strategy and Direction: Marketing often takes the worst hit due to strategic changes in a company. You put months of hard work on your marketing strategy, only for it to be reworked upon the next quarter.
Lack of Visibility and Alignment Between Teams: Marketers are often siloed from other teams, leading to them doing unproductive busywork. For example, the way you research, create and distribute case studies varies depending on the goal — is it going to be a sales enablement asset or is it more of a proof of your product? In either scenario, you need to drill down on the goal of your case studies and work with the dedicated team to produce an output that aligns with their goals as well.
Overemphasis on Activity Metrics vs. Impact Metrics: Campaigns often get pulled down due to misalignment around audience preferences or the need for more fine-tuning in the strategy before the tactical part. This happens because marketers are often rushed to drive activity metrics, leaving impact-focused work on the back burner, resulting in the executive team taking down the entire campaign.
As a rule of thumb, I always set goals that directly tie up with the overall company’s goals. This helps me shift focus to impact oriented goals over activity goals where I would’ve done things to check boxes for the sake of it. Once I have my big level goals set in, I set up OKRs that break down my bigger goal into smaller metrics.
Having audacious OKRs challenges my team while remaining realistic and achievable. Think of OKRs like a compass—they should point you toward big wins while keeping your team aligned and motivated.
Example: Grow MQLs from SEO content by 40% in Q2; Achieve a 20% increase in the conversion rate from social media to product trials in Q3; Increase SQOs from x% to y%; Increase product demo request by x% and use case studies to close $ y amount of ticket size deals.
2. Audience: Who is it for?
Start with your audience at the core and work your way out to other things like channels, content assets, etc. By keeping your audience at the core of everything you do in marketing, you’ll create content and deliver it in a way your audience needs it.
Instead of saying we’ll write blogs for our “users”, narrow it down to specifics.
Example: We’ll write bottom of funnel blogs focusing on our X product for Stage 4 buyer (someone who’s considering using your tool). We’ll cover the specific pain points and objections of Stage 4 buyers to ensure our content resonates and delivers on the readers’ expectations.
When you do the opposite (work your way inward from channels to content) you tie your strategy to external factors that are limiting such as rented platforms (social media) instead of taking control over it with your content. Sure, it’s tempting to prioritize trendy platforms or the latest distribution channels. But if your audience isn't there, your efforts will most likely fall flat. By understanding your audience's preferences and habits, you can better identify what type of content resonates most with them.
Example: If your audience prefers long-form, in-depth content, a podcast or blog series might be the best approach instead of focusing on bite-sized social media posts.
3. Channels: Where will we distribute it?
Most content never sees the light of another platform. If it’s a blog, it stays right there — on the blog. You need to get the most mileage out of your content. This will extend the lifecycle of that content piece, reaching new audiences without starting from scratch every time. Plus, distributing content on various channels helps you reach new audience segments who might not interact with your primary content format.
Does this mean you need to experiment on 4-5 platforms, all at once? No.
Identify the channels your customers spend their most time on — your PMM could help conduct this research. Once you’ve jotted down the top three platforms, consider factors like message type, resources required, and budget to select the most important ones.
Then, you need to find your channel/message fit. It is the alignment between the messaging of your content and the distribution channel where it will be most effective. It's about crafting the right message for each platform and delivering it in a way that resonates best with the specific audience on that channel.
This could also influence the content format you create for that specific platform.
Example: Turn an industry trends report in a series of blogs covering sub-sections of the report and expand on them. Turn it into a LinkedIn carousel for both the company page and your team to share. Share the most interesting highlights from the report in your newsletter with a CTA to engage with the original report or specific blogs.
4. Content: What’s the look and feel of it?
Content deserves a whole another edition and I plan to send one in the upcoming weeks, but for the sake of this one, just note this: When you create content aligning with your audiences’ pain points and objections, you bridge the positioning gap and clearly establish your product in their day-to-day ops.
Right from the structure and design of your content to the copy within it — every single element works together to create a final content asset that engages with your reader.
Most marketing teams have a good mix of product, content, growth, and video folks, but the one I constantly see being hired last or perpetually being on contract is design. Till a dedicated design person is hired in-house, teams either self-design in Canva or wait for weeks/months at end to get one decent design from slow-moving and expensive agencies/contractors.
Content design matters just as much as the content quality. Strategic, on-brand, engaging creative helps create connections that fuel brand affinity and awareness. It’s what cuts the noise for buyers in a world full of blatant marketing and advertising campaigns. From the font you use to the illustrations in your reports, every single creative element helps shape the perception of your brand in a buyer’s mind.
Make sure you have catchy, engaging visuals for your content assets — be it blog banners, report templates, case study web pages, or landing pages in general. Don’t let bad visuals impact the ROI of a good content asset.
🔥 SHOUTOUT : Superside creates some of the most interesting and engaging visuals. Check them out for your visual needs (not sponsored/affiliated).
5. Growth levers: How will it drive better impact?
Growth levers are high-impact initiatives that , when prioritized, can move the needle and drive tangible results that support your overall marketing goals. These are typically based on analytics and data, and are designed to identify opps for growth and then double down on them.
Instead of viewing them as foundational strategies like your content roadmap, or email nurture campaigns, think of growth levers as mini-projects that give you the space to experiment. Use them to fill in gaps to improve funnel conversion, otpimize handoff from marketing to product/sales, increase prices for existing customers, create upsell opps, optimize prices, or find more good-fit customers.
Look for opps to iron out the gray areas such as product onboarding. If you’re a one-person or small marketing team, chances are you’ll need to support growth for onboarding too until your execs hire an onboarding specialist. Collaborate with your product teams to create a more structured onboarding process with educational pop-ups, email nudges, and a comprehensive help center, all guiding users through key features.
Example: Create upsell campaigns for highly engaged customers. Or, create more detailed documentation to help customers onboard themselves. Or, add more variables to pricing to drive up ACV for heavy-usage customers.
6. Operations: How will you manage it?
Great campaigns often fizzle due to poor management. Establish processes and use project management tools to keep everything on track. Hire marketers who can think strategically but aren’t afraid to get their hands dirty executing campaigns.
Example: Create repositories for hard-earned information that needs to be referred often (like customer quotes, internal SME insights) so they’re used multiple times and justify the time and effort invested.
Automate tasks like creating 3 Google Docs in a dedicated GDrive folder once a card is created in Asana for a new blog. Automatically tag the writer, SMEs, and final approvers in all the sub-issues once an action/trigger is complete.
7. Stakeholders: Who cares about what and who owns what?
It’s wayy easier to get approval on projects when you have buy-in from stakeholders. For this, you need to truly understand what matters to who. If your CMO cares about sales enablement, figure out how your project could possibly impact sales and write it down in your project brief. If your CEO cares about expanding to a new target audience, bridge the gap between how your project would help accelerate awareness in the new niche category.
See what I did there? Can you connect sales enablement and awareness now? Great!
Make sure you have buy-in from different stakeholders before you actually start doing the heavy work. Create a project brief that entails all the important details stakeholders need to know and can refer to in the future for context.
Have a “Captain” for every single project who are essentially the project owner and thus, responsible for ensuring it stays on track, aligns with the overall company goals, and doesn’t hit roadblocks. Assign a “Co-pilot” on every project who would assist during the project — this could be a senior stakeholder within the org who could help you get buy-in or a junior level marketer to support different areas of the project like partnering with other brands/running PR campaigns while you focus on the core project.
Example: Captain: Aarushi; Co-Pilot: James, contributors: Claire and Eddy, Reviewers: Daniel and Kylie, Design: Stephen, Distribution: Aarushi and Claire
🧠 More from The Content Playbook
My next edition will reach your inbox NEXT WEEK. To make sure, you don’t miss out, Subscribe.
Want to learn the difference between product-led mktg and sales-led mktg? Read my previous week’s edition here.
Want to build a unified dashboard for your marketing content for better visibility and cross-functional team usability? Read my previous edition here.
Want to build a repeatable process for your case studies? I laid out my entire framework here.
Newsletter sponsorships: If you’re looking to reach 1,000+ marketers from leading companies and startups, let’s chat. Email me at aarushi@thecontentplaybook.in
Next Week: A seven-part marketing series
We’re starting a 7-part series on how to get your marketing team to drive more impact next week. Each edition will be filled with reusable templates, checklists, and docs you can use in your org.
See you next week! Until then, have a great and fulfilling week 🙏
Hello ma'am/ sire can we discuss something about analogy in Gemini AI and API Apps?