How to run marketing at an early stage startup as a one-person marketing team | Eric Doty, Content Lead at Dock
Building a modern marketing engine from the ground up as a one-person team
👋 Hey, Aarushi here! Welcome to this week’s edition of my newsletter. Each week I share practical frameworks, processes, mindset shifts, and skills needed to become a better marketer. Join 600+ marketers from companies like OpenPhone, Klaviyo, Recart (and many more) and get a weekly in-depth essay around modern marketing topics.
As a one-person marketing team, you need to do the impossible. You need to build a marketing muscle from scratch at an organization that’s (most probably?) still in the product-market fit phase, while learning dozens of new skills, experimenting with multiple channels and tactics, making countless decisions, driving growth from (some) wins, and learning from mistakes as you work your way forward.
It’s like being in Harry Potter’s Hedge Maze in the Goblet of Fire. You need to overcome various obstacles like giant spiders, dementors, and an anti-gravity mist. Then, reach the Triwizard Cup at the centre of the maze. Of course, Harry didn’t have a map.
Imagine if you had a map.
I had the opportunity to chat with Eric Doty, Content Head at Dock to explore how he runs marketing as a one-person marketing team. From mindset shifts, setting north stars and KPIs, getting early wins, to leveraging personal strengths, Eric shares extensively on how he has been building an efficient (keyword being efficient here) marketing engine at Dock.
Let’s dive in.
1. Creating mind share internally
Everyone talks about the 30-60-90 day plan, but rarely people talk about the mindset you need to develop as a new marketing hire, especially at an early growth stage startup where you’re a one-person marketing team.
In my personal experience, building out a marketing function from scratch or expanding multiple channels while your company is still figuring out product-market fit is extremely challenging. You’re not just posting “content” on a channel. You’re building up the messaging and narrative from the ground up as your company/team/product scales. You’re sitting with sales and customer success (if there are indeed two different departments) and figuring out what sticks with prospects better, what are their most pressing pain points, and how can you imbibe those customer insights in marketing.
On some days, there might be a lot of back-end strategy and positioning work. On others, you’ll execute those strategies. But, how do you get your company to see what you bring to the table OR communicate early wins?
“When you're a one-person team, you're essentially fighting two battles: the production battle, where you're working solo to create enough content for company success, and an internal battle that often goes unnoticed. As a lone team member, you don't command much mind share or real estate within the company, especially in a startup environment focused on finding product-market fit.
So, before you even get to the tactics or strategies, when you join a startup as the sole marketer (not just content) handling product marketing, newsletter, logistical ops things and a bunch of other things, it’s important to take the time to ensure you’re creating that mind share internally. This involves practical steps like creating a Slack channel, openly sharing ongoing work, and actively engaging with other team members in the company to build advocates and ensure awareness of your contributions. The key advice is to prioritize creating an impression and getting people's attention as soon as you join a new organization.
In terms of a 30, 60, 90-day plan, I take a three-pronged approach. First off, focus on creating mind share for yourself. Second, get your systems going — be incredibly good with tools. When you’re just a small team, or a one-person marketing function, you have to be incredibly efficient, find ways to scale yourself that you wouldn’t have to necessarily do if you’re like a five-person marketing team.
In my case, at Dock, we manage various channels such as blogs, podcasts, and social media. One person can’t do all these things on their own by just sort of brute force. To cope, I set up super elaborate Airtable with lots of automations to enhance scalability within my systems.
The second part of the approach is simply spinning up one channel initially, focusing on mastery before expanding to other areas. For us, starting with the blog was a strategic choice. I knew I could get the blog up and running quickly, figure out the strategy, hire freelancers, and run it efficiently. After 3-6 months, the blog started taking less of my energy and the system works with minimal intervention. That’s when we started our podcast, social media, and other components. The key is to avoid spreading oneself thin by tackling too many channels simultaneously.
It's better to start with one thing, do really well, move to get some quick wins on that channel, and then move on to another channel. It could be as simple as looking at your website and saying “Hey, this is clearly missing a lot of information”, and then proceeding to add it.”
2. Reverse engineer your goal to identify north stars for your marketing campaigns
Blogs, email, social media, newsletter, podcast, paid ads, PR, partner marketing, influencer marketing — there are 100 different marketing channels and 1000 different strategies & tactics for each one of them. It’s near impossible for one person to successfully drive growth across the spectrum in marketing. But you’ve got to start somewhere.
The question is: where?
How do you decide the north star when you’re running marketing as a one-person team and what takes priority when there’s so much noise?
“We’ve had a few motivating factors: our pricing structure, our product structure, and what is success going to look like. Our product right now is $50 a user and our typical accounts are going to be three to five users on an account anyday. We'd love that to be 100. But right now we're going after small mid market companies because that's sort of who we satisfy right now. And so when you do the math on how do you become a billion dollar company with $250 a month accounts or something like that, you're going to need a lot of accounts. That means that right away SEO has to be a strategy for us. We need to get into the tens of thousands of users and we're not going to do that purely through thought leadership, for example, or a podcast, right? So SEO is one channel that has to be there that has to be done right away.
But at the same time, through our sales cycle or sales motion, we learned that ideally right now, every company wants to be fully product led, right? Like Loom. You send a loom video to somebody, someone sees it and goes, “Wow, I also want to use Loom.” They just try it for themselves, they sign it for free and then eventually their organization adopts it because so many people in the organization are using Loom.
There's virality in that. So, when some of our customers send Dock Workspaces out and someone else sees that, they do say, “Well, our company should use this too. This is a way better experience. I'm going to use Dock now” — there is some of that virality element right there.
And to capitalize on this virality, we’ve got to focus on our champion buyers which typically includes folks like revenue leaders, heads of sales, and heads of customer success. From a content perspective, we need to be highly focused at this ICP with thought leadership. So, think of how-to type content like how to get 100 sales reps to follow the same sales proposal steps? Or how do you stop sales reps from sending out sales proposals that don't follow the pricing model you want to follow, right?
Even when we talk about a pretty top of funnel topic, we'll always talk about it through the lens of “would this appeal to a sales leader versus a sales rep?” Everything we do should has thought leadership. And like you said, it's not like a tactic or a channel. It's like we're going to put thought leadership into our SEO. SEO thought leadership has been our one big play so far.”
Eric further shares that they’re also using their podcast to support their thought leadership goals. While there’s plenty opportunity for repurposing and distribution that comes from a podcast, he shares the channel is a great way to speak directly to the type of people who fit their ICP. This also legitimizes Dock in their (podcast guests’) broader network. So, it becomes both a sales play as it is a marketing play.
“And so the podcast, for example, was just they check lots of boxes of it can be used for so many things, so many purposes. Even our sales team can then also say, “hey, did you see the latest episode with so and so?” I think that would be really interesting. And that can be like a cold outbound tactic, right? So there's so many different ways we can use that.”
3. Build a tech stack that supports and delivers on your expected ROI
Marketers suffer from shiny object syndrome big time. “Shiny object syndrome is when someone focuses all their attention on something new and current. Usually, this is at the expense of whatever they have or currently doing. In a business setting, shiny object syndrome takes the form of chasing the latest strategy, tactic, or advice making the rounds within the industry”, shares Everhour.
It’s the same with tools.
“Do I go with the one that has a lot of noise on LinkedIn? Do I adopt the one I personally use or like or am used to? Do I ask for the best recommended ones in communities and then explore?”
Eric’s approach for choosing the right tools is great advice for anyone struggling to justify costs to higher management and getting buy-in from C-level folks.
“We take a very ROI centric approach. For example, if a tool is $100 a month, it’s a bit expensive. The question then becomes “Is it adding $200 of value?” Yes. Let's just do it. Because when you're at an early growth stage startup, you need to consistently grow, like 20% to 30% MOM (month-on-month) to meet our goals.
So, naturally, at Dock, we’re more than willing to invest in tools if they help us grow faster. The only catch is, you need to make sure you don’t suddenly have 20 tools and you’re using only a third of them. As long as your tools support and deliver on the ROI that you're expecting, that makes sense.”
4. Be loud about what you’re working on
Saying NO to internal content requests can be a wee bit hard for some marketers.
You want to support sales, customer success, and product — all while running marketing campaigns you decided on. But, there’s only so much one person (or a small team) can successfully do.
Here’s Eric’s advice on taking in content requests:
“Be really loud about what you're working on and your personal capacity. Remember though, you don't want to create a culture where people don't ask for things because you say you're too busy all the time. But if you are proactive on sharing what it is you're working on and what you're delivering, people can get a better sense of that.
You're not just the department the post memes on LinkedIn. You're actually doing something. So, that might look different at different companies, but for example, at our town halls, I'll share the plan for the quarter on what it is we're going to be, or maybe the month is probably more realistic. Here's results, here's some things we did last month. Here's what we're going to do next month. And you deliver on that and then that gives people a chance to see the types of things you're working on and throw ideas out there or say, it would be really nice to have this. Because you're showing you have a plan and you're vocal about it, you don't just become the department that just takes requests and spits things out, because that's a really crappy situation to be in.”
5. Spin up only one channel at a time
The B2B marketing industry flipped on its back in 2023 when AI came out, a half-baked recession hit, and B2B buying journey got more intricate and complicated.
That’s when modern marketing was born. In chaos. And that’s when everyone started doing everything all at once. Social selling on LinkedIn, running a podcast on Spotify, building a community on Slack, and publishing 1000 blogs in a year.
But, if you’re a marketer in an early stage startup, you don’t need to focus on everything. Eric shares more in-depth around how he sets realistic intentions and prioritizes the right channels at Dock.
“It's definitely a feeling out process and that's why I advocate spinning up one channel at a time, getting really efficient at it before you start adding things. Otherwise, you're doing product announcements, blog, podcast, sales, has requests for sales enablement resources, and then you're just spread super thin. At Dock, we worked out like, okay, let's set a target of eight blogs a month and let's see pretty much the fastest we can do that.
We chose the number eight just because the budget made sense. Personal capacity, that's how much time we want to allocate, and then we just got that down to as little time as possible. And then I can go to my founder or leader or teammates and then say, “okay, now I have capacity to add these other things.” And then obviously when things take priority, you can slow that down or speed it up. We say eight blogs a month, but I think some months I did six, and then the next one I do like 15 because I had time and I threw lots of things out there and now I can slow down the next month and take on a new project. So it's a bit about flexibility in that way, but I think just being really communicative about it is never going to hurt you.”
6. Pay attention to social selling
Social selling is a huge lever in the modern marketing engine — it’s becoming bigger each day in B2B.
First off, there’s the key reason that algorithms favor people more than product pages. But this idea in itself gets a lot of pushback, especially from early stage startups and founders who are excited to go big on the company page with memes, dashboard, congratulatory posts, and new employee highlights.
You see, when you’re social selling, your first priority is to build resonance with your audience. It’s to share things that ring true to their experiences. When you do that as a person on behalf of a company versus as a company page, the impact, reach, and perspective it builds is far stronger.
Some marketers go as far as to claim that LinkedIn wants companies to pay for advertising and not just get free exposure, which is why company pages have lesser reach. While I have no solid data to back this statement, I do believe people simply trust people, not brands. “This isn’t revolutionary and social selling comes with a huge marketing value for early stage startups as well for marketers to draw some quick wins,” Eric says.
Even if your audience is completely different from your company’s ICP, over time, you can bridge that gap and shift your focus to your ICP. Here’s how (in Eric’s words),
“My audience is primarily built up of marketers and while Dock isn’t exactly for my audience, it doesn’t hurt for them to know about it. Like I said, some products are built on virality and Dock is one of them. Founder-led marketing and social selling is the new way — it’s refreshing and interesting to see how you can impact prospects. It also gives off the illusion that your team and company are bigger than they actually are. That’s because at Dock, each one of our employees will sort of resort to their own superpower.
I'll talk about marketing, our designer will share designs he's working on and he just has like a designer audience. But that's fine, we all use our own sort of audience to just move the needle a little bit and you never know what backlinks that's going to get you what person's attention you're going to get. So even though it's not like a direct one-to-one between Dock’s prospects and us (as creators), it's at least building that mind share and legitimacy.
The traditional sort of barrier between employee and company is blending a lot. And there's so many benefits to letting your people just sort of loose out there.
Have your sales team, even if it's just, like, once a week, just post, like, anecdotes or your designers post examples of things they're working on, because it's not in everybody's wheelhouse to do that, or the build in public thing isn't for everybody. But I think encouraging your company to do that is like a no brainer free marketing play. Don't chase an algorithm or don't chase whatever best practices you've read build out from the problem you're trying to solve and build a solution that solves that instead. Right?”
7. Be a company leader, a brand advocate
Marketers have been pigeonholed for the longest time. Content teams struggle to get a seat at the table. Lifecycle marketing is only being born in B2B and B2C while it’s been thriving in D2C for years. SEO folks are boxed in the “keyword research” team. This needs to change.
For that, marketers should take more strategic ownership on a company-level. When I asked Eric about this, he shared,
“I got an incredible advice recently - to become a really good leader of any department, you have to become invested in the entire company, in every other department as well.
You have to be like a company leader, not just a marketing leader. So you have to understand how does the product team work, what is the sales process, all these things. The more you can learn about all that, then it informs your marketing strategy way better. So I actually think more marketers need to spend time learning things outside of marketing.
Go listen to a sales podcast. That's when you really start to take your knowledge from you're good at marketing tactics versus you can build a strategy out from a new company or a new startup, especially as a one person team, you need to become more knowledgeable about how all the other departments work.”
8. Leverage your personal strengths to drive your campaigns
There could be a million different channels, platforms, strategies, and tactics you could be focusing on as an early stage marketer. But you shouldn’t. Here’s a great take on using your personal strengths to drive campaigns early on in your role from Eric:
“If you are one person team, if you're very good at blogs, make blogs. If you're very good at video, make video. Because just being a one person team is all about maximizing your time, your personal time. And so what can you get the best quality out of? Best quality and quantity combo that's going to be focused on your strengths, which is why I focused on blog. You should be hired as a match to your company. Match the channel and make sure it's appropriate for the company. In fact, when you’re interviewing for the role, highlight your wins around your strengths. Tell them we should do blogs or emails or whatever it is.”
9. Focus on getting things done, not perfect
Every marketer struggles with perfection, on some level. But great marketers know when to ship fast, fail fast, and when to take it one step at a time. When you’re a one-person marketing team, your focus should be on the former — do more, faster.
“Go get things published. Get them published quickly. Focus on becoming efficient at publishing if you're a one person team and getting projects over the line, rather than just focus, like living in a quality world all day, because then that's where pressure builds diamonds, as they say, that's where you start to really get your cadence by putting those guidelines on yourself,” says Eric.
Next week: 🌐 Distributing your content the right way (best tools to use)
Final words of wisdom:
“There is no such thing as a self-made man. You will reach your goals only with the help of others.”
– George Shinn
“The strength of the team is each individual member. The strength of each member is the team.”
– Phil Jackson
A big thank-you to Eric Doty (Dock) for sharing his insights and experience. You can watch the complete podcast here, connect with Eric on Linkedin, and follow Dock.