Why a one-person marketing team is rarely enough

There’s a pattern I’ve noticed over the years working with smaller, growing businesses, and it tends to show up at a similar point in their growth. Marketing becomes important enough that it can’t be ignored anymore but not yet structured enough to be fully built out. So, the natural step is to hire a marketing person (manager or executive) and expect that person to take ownership and get things moving.

On the surface, it makes complete sense. One person, sitting within the business, who understands what’s going on and can connect the dots. But in practice, the role that gets created is often much broader than intended. It’s not just marketing management in the traditional sense. It becomes a combination of strategy, execution, coordination, and often a layer of design and admin work as well.

What I’ve seen, and experienced myself, is that this “one person marketing team” ends up carrying far more than is realistically sustainable. They’re responsible for planning campaigns, writing content, updating the website, supporting sales, organising events, managing emails, and keeping social channels active. At the same time, there’s an expectation that they’re stepping back, thinking strategically, and guiding the direction of marketing overall.

Individually, none of these responsibilities are unreasonable. But when they sit together within one role, the tension isn’t always obvious at first. It tends to build gradually. Work becomes more reactive, priorities shift depending on what feels most urgent, and things get started without always being followed through in the way they should be. There’s effort, often a lot of it, but it doesn’t quite translate into momentum.

From the outside, this is often where marketing gets labelled as inconsistent or ineffective. But in most cases, it’s neither. It’s operating without the structure or support it needs to function properly. There’s a gap between what the business expects marketing to deliver and what the current setup can realistically support.

Having been in that position myself, it’s clear that this isn’t really a capability issue. It’s not about whether the person in the role is good enough or experienced enough. It’s that the role itself asks for too many different modes of thinking at once. Strategy requires space, execution requires time, and coordination requires attention. Trying to hold all three, across multiple channels, makes it difficult for any one area to be done properly.

What tends to work better is not necessarily a complete restructure or a significantly larger team, but a more balanced approach to how marketing is set up. That might mean separating out where direction is coming from, who is responsible for execution, and where additional support is needed. It doesn’t have to be complex, but it does need to be intentional.

In many cases, businesses don’t need a full internal marketing department. But they do need more than one person holding everything together. They need clarity on what matters most, consistency in how things are executed, and enough support to allow the work to build over time rather than constantly resetting.

I don’t think this is always obvious from the outside, because activity can still be happening. Content is being created, campaigns are being run, things are moving. But underneath that, there’s often a sense that it’s harder than it should be, or that progress isn’t quite matching the effort being put in.

When that’s the case, it’s usually worth stepping back and looking at the structure around marketing, rather than just the output. In my experience, that’s where the real shift tends to happen.