Mastering the Solo Game: How to Run A One-Person Marketing Department

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Mark Evans: 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. 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 ninety days at DOC and the lesson that he learned from being the first marketing hire. The post captured my attention because it provided some great insight into what many marketers experience with early stage companies. 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.

Guest: Thank you so much, Mark. Yeah. I'll, never turn down an invite from a fellow Canadian.

Mark Evans: Well, that's the very polite thing that we Canadians do.

Guest: Yeah. And, sorry for not being on earlier.

Mark Evans: Yeah. Exactly. Perfect. Perfect. Before we dive into the lone wolf conversation, tell me about your background and the companies that you worked with.

Guest: Yeah. For sure. So I'll I've I've actually worked probably five or six marketing roles. Maybe I'll just focus on the last three where I've I've been in this lone wolf marketer situation. So, first, I got hired to a company based out of Vancouver. It was called Global Me as the sort of content marketing manager. 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. So that was a bit, like, being thrown in 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 for hosting more fun workshops online, and that was a seed stage seed stage startup. That's a tongue twister. And and then my last role or my most recent role here at Doc where I've been for six months is another seed seed stage startup, very focused on the product led growth kind of angle. And, again, yeah, here, I'm the I'm the first marketer. So in all those roles, I've been a content lead kind of in in quotes. But normally, when when you're the only marketer or the only person in the organization thinking about marketing, you'd normally end up bleeding into other things that aren't just, like, pure capital c content.

Mark Evans: 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 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, okay. Now you're you've been hired. Now is your your time to make marketing happen. Is it is it stressful? Is it is it pressure packed situation? How do you feel when you enter these situations?

Guest: Yeah. It's a good question. I don't find it stressful necessarily. I think I think there's pressure in the sense that, you know, you're you can't point the finger at a team or, you know, 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 sort normally sort of fall back on because I think you're the you're the only one that's gonna push those numbers. But I I think I was actually talking to someone earlier today, and I I told them I actually find it easier 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 you can switch your mind on a dime. So in some ways, there's pressure because everyone's kinda looking at you. On the other hand, I have kind of full autonomy being the marketing team, right, that I if I decide three months in, you know what? This isn't working. I don't have to go through red tape of trying to convince a 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 what? I'm not gonna work on that anymore. Now I'm gonna work on this new thing.

Mark Evans: So essentially, you hold a meeting with the marketing team of one. You have a vote of one. You have the controlling power, and you make decisions whether it it's a one Yeah.

Guest: Yeah. It's great. And so I think the bigger challenge with 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 you also can't as a one person team, you can't produce a a large amount of volume or you can't really make the whole marketing engine run unless you get the support of your teammates. So, like, you need 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 you're whoever you're reporting to. 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 so, yeah, that that's always a big focus to me to deal with that pressure of pressure cooker of being number one marketer. It's like, okay. We're gonna we're gonna educate everybody else on how they can help me, and I'm gonna make myself super visible in the organization to to make sure that I have the support I need.

Mark Evans: Yeah. 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? What are the signs that the opportunity is interesting? Or conversely, what if red what red flag suggest it's the wrong gig? Because as you say, marketing in many ways is a mindset. 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. The a marketer speaks a different language. Sometimes it sounds slick and they're it sounds strange. And there can be almost like a cultural issue that pops up because you're you're the new kid in the block, you don't look or act like everybody else. So what are some of the the conversations that you have before you even consider taking a new gig?

Guest: The way I thought of it when I was looking for my last couple 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 I'm people just think of me as this lead generating person, and that's my only role. Or do you have a CEO who understands 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, like, getting people more active in the product. There's, you know, email campaigns after they've signed up that 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, adding extra stuff in the top? Right? So the thing I normally ask is, like, sort of reverse interview them and say, like, how do you see marketing playing into your company growth strategy? Or, like, how is marketing gonna take your company from this size to that size? Or or right now, how what is 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, Like, you shouldn't have to make it from scratch. They should have a like, 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 buy in you need on on strategy the whole time.

Mark Evans: I and I think the other important question that you have to ask the CEO is why marketing? Right. You know, marketing can be a very emotional driven decision. It may be because there are competitors that are getting a lot of media coverage or competitors are winning a lot of business. And, you know, marketers you know, CEOs are in 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 wanna 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's success?

Guest: 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 a solid example, when I was interviewing at Doc, I asked Alex, our CEO, why why content over something else? And because for him, his he had, you know, he had an answer ready, which is what you wanna hear, which was that in order for DOC is is like a $50 user product. Right? So if you wanna be a billion dollar company, you have to have hundreds of thousands of of users, which means millions in site traffic, meaning you need a really solid SEO strategy. So he's already looking forward to five, ten years from now. What 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, we're for Doc, we're we're kind of a new product category where we're a combination of 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, you know, what does what does a sales enablement tool look like or, you know, what are the typical tools in a sales team's tool stack? We we're trying to change that conversation a bit. And one of the ways you do that is through, like, thought leadership content, through an active social strategy, etcetera. So all of those things could could tie back to why content. So, absolutely, it's it's a great question to ask of a of a CEO and, like, what role is it gonna play in the growth? And sometimes they might be wrong. Like, some sometimes, for example, at Butter, the the sort of Zoom alternative I was working at, we thought content was going to have to play kind of an activation strategy for a product led growth. But once I got there and started, you know, two, three weeks in, I realized that there was 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. But, again, that's a question of what what role is content gonna play in the organization's growth, and and the CEO should have a good idea of that.

Mark Evans: Personally, I think the best marketing happens when there's a partnership between the CEO and the head of marketing. There's 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, 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?

Guest: I've had two situations in terms of the leadership structure at the translation company I was at. And at Butter, there was a a middle person I was reporting to. So at Butter, I we had a chief growth officer who was responsible for more sort of growth outreach activities, whereas I was doing all the marketing content. At Sumo Lingua, I reported to a chief revenue officer. 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 in both of those situations, obviously, especially in my situation where that's my direct report. For us, it was setting really clear expectations, like you said, of what 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 wanna spend 5% of my time on marketing. I expect in your first three months, it will be a lot more than that. But, eventually, like, here's here's the time block. He's like, I 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 want he wants me to help time block him of this is how much time I wanna spend. But he also wants me to hold him accountable for, I wanna write one thought leadership post a month or a blog. I'm probably not gonna do it unless you hound me for it. And so you need to have that open relationship of setting communication guidelines, expectations. So, you know, he he sent me a thing on my first day that said, I'm available these hours. I'm 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 flipped 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 you have to come to that together. If you just are, a yes person to the CEO, I don't think you're gonna 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 one, two, three, four, five. 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.

Mark Evans: 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. 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. Didn't wanna 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 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 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 that really is a bad place to be as a marketer, especially if you're the only marketer.

Guest: For 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 ourself. So I'm judging myself mostly on how many blogs are we producing a month. Like, I already know I have a certain quality barrier. So to me, it's setting a quantity output through goal is actually the best way to keep me moving quickly. Because we know if we do all the right things and and we focus on just quantity, we will actually get there. But some CEOs might have in their 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. And 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 we how do I get, like, a 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 on you know, 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? And now that we're six months in, we're reevaluating those kinds of questions. And and looking forward, we'll then start to set more goals for ourself around, like, the results we're getting.

Mark Evans: In a sense, what you're doing is you're building a marketing engine from scratch.

Guest: There's Yeah.

Mark Evans: There's probably nothing there or very little marketing that's happened. And you have to not only make marketing happen, but put in the workflows and the processes, build the 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 North Star goals for KPIs and things like that. You gotta have buy in that. You gotta do the work. You gotta put the work in, set the foundation in place before you can even start doing marketing.

Guest: And and most CEOs know that, I think. Some 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 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.

Mark Evans: 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. 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 the idea of a budget comes up?

Guest: Yeah. Oh, man. You've just hit such a 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 if you're spending that money on me, the content marketer, you you need to be able to support me. I can only scale so far. Right? I can only make if I've 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, 6 plus figures on just eight blogs a month, which isn't enough. Right? That's not gonna that's not gonna move anything. What you need to do is 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 you have to have a commitment to at least, like, for example, like, 10 k a month in content on top of that where where you can have enough freelance support. You can have the right tools. Like, we're we're pretty quick to say yes to software at Doc. Like, if if we think if we use a tool and we see it has value, we just the there's it's not like no questions asked, but I pretty much get yes on any tool I wanna use because we understand that if I'm a one person team, I need to automate certain things. I need to, yeah, I need to save time wherever I can. And the the best sort of cost savings are gonna happen through tools, really, in terms of saving my time. Like, one way you can think of it is, like, what is your what is your value per hour? And then are the tools that you're using saving you? If a tool is a $100 a month and it's saving you ten hours a month, then, you know, you just saved a thousand dollars. Right? 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, like, a value add to you. 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 the way to just speed things up is increase your budget on contractors and freelancers.

Mark Evans: That's a great topic to discuss because I think when rubber hits the road, both party gotta 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. Can you walk me through the first weeks of a new job? Like, what about the first couple weeks where they've announced your position? Everyone's excited about you joining the company. You walk into the office. I guess these days, don't walk into the office. You sign on to Zoom, you get started. What happens during the first two to three weeks? What are some of the key things that you need to do, that you need to get, the information that you need, the people that you need to talk to. It must be a very long checklist of a lot of groundwork, a lot of conversations, a lot of information to consume. What does that look like?

Guest: For for me, I I sort of looked at it in four pillars. The 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, I knew that we were gonna be working I was gonna need the support of our designer quite a bit. So right away, I took 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 gonna 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 as long as I can get him 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 I knew exactly all the I had my whole workflow in place, and then it suddenly I came to the designer and said, hey. I need you to do this task. I'd be kinda old news at that point. And so you 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. We're only eight people. Talked to them about what I plan on doing, asked them about their job, 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, setting a stage for myself to get lots of visibility upfront and then on an ongoing basis. Like, how are you gonna keep people's attention? Because like I said before, you need that buy in from everybody. And so that's that's just a big thing I think people miss so they don't think of it. They they try to stay in the shadows for the first few weeks because they're like, I'm gonna get a feel for things. I'm gonna quietly listen. And I I think that's a big mistake. I think you have to, like, 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 a lot of marketers and writers or or shyer and don't necessarily wanna put themselves out there, but I I think it's super important. 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 do you how does your internal processes work. That sort of just has to happen actively over your first month. But I think you have to not get too absorbed in strategy land because if you stay if you stay in information absorbing mode too long, you're you're not gonna make any quick wins happen, and you're not gonna get to the action. So, basically, I I balanced information gathering, trying to set 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, like, my marketing tack infra 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, like, come in and make an impact right away is just start getting your whole tech stack set up.

Mark Evans: As a marketing consultant, I 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, 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 a running list? Do you 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'd love to update our our homepage. What's the process to identifying quick wins and then recognizing the things that you can actually do quickly?

Guest: 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 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. Might wanna chase things back. So I actually avoid I think the website the 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 to tinker with. So what I I I come from an SEO background. So for me, SEO things are super comfortable. Like, just to do a quick audit of the website, are we missing title tags, meta descriptions? Are we doing inter like, internal page linking? You know, just identifying those easy opportunities. One thing I started doing at 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, like, help a b help a b to b writer, query responses, like, help a reporter out, those things because I didn't need to 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 and that really quickly got us, like, twenty, thirty backlinks, which boosted our, like, sort of, domain authority rev. Right? So I leaned into the things that I knew super well that were kind of company independent. Also, a writer, it's easy just to spot things like, oh, there's this typo on our website or, you know, I think our email our auto automated emails that go to new product sign ups. Like, I've, you know, 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 sort of fifty fifty of your time in your first two, three weeks on just immediately obvious things that scream out to you and then but not spending too much time in in quick wins and also planning for what is what is the first three months gonna look like, what are the first six months gonna look like.

Mark Evans: 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 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 high in the eye of the hurricane. You can see things right away that are 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 that I've got a fresh perspective, and I better move fast. Otherwise, it's gonna disappear.

Guest: Yeah. Absolutely. I 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 I were coming in today? And it it seems like such a stupid question to ask, but it's something that we just at Doc recently, for example, I was 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, it made more sense for us just to focus our attention on other things. But that that came from sort of taking a look at ourselves and saying, are the obvious things that we're doing that are just wasting our time? So that's that's, like, the inverse of what you ask when you're new. Right? Like, what are the 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 etcetera 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 in a sales use case. I'm like, great. So I just went out, interviewed two customers. While doing that, I learned a lot about the product from our customer's viewpoint. So I was kinda 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 I think it's really important when you're a one person marketing team to keep that rookie mindset and 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, yeah, you have to keep that up.

Mark Evans: 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 a first marketing hire, what are the two or three pieces of of advice that you would give them about being the first marketing hire and setting themselves up for success?

Guest: Oh, man. Loaded question. I know. I think yeah. I think I think making sure that you have aligned yourself with a company where the 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 be a specialist at a small company where or 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 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 sort of the follow-up to that is, like, do you do you wanna be in a position where you're doing lots of like, do you wanna have a really wide set of tasks and skills that you're working on, or would you rather be more narrowly focused and, like and that's looking for that match? So, like, at at Doc, we are pretty content like, my role is pretty content focused where I'm 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, it wasn't that great of a fit. And but I was trying to sort of fit my SEO content specialist, like, into, 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.

Mark Evans: As a content writer, I have to ask you. The obvious question these days is your thoughts on ChatGPT, 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 ChatGPT and advice to other content marketers out there who are using it but maybe feel that they're not leveraging it properly?

Guest: For sure. I think 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 with an open mindset. Because I I think a lot of content marketers have approached ChatGPT as, like, this disrupting enemy that's gonna take something away from you. But, really, it's a tool that can that can help you, but you have to integrate into your own workflows and your own processes. So the best example so far for me is that I 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 then it'll spit some out. And I'll say, okay. Give me some that are funnier or more or more creative. Or, actually, can you introduce a pun? Recently, we wrote an article on a pricing proposal. I was like, give me titles that about an article about writing a pricing proposal, except make them puns about a marriage proposal. And it gave me 10, like, awesomely written ideas. So that was a case of, like, something where I normally get stuck already, and it's a tool that can unblock me. I think it was Ryan Law at 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, the all like, with GPT four, and I'm sure there'll be five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, 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 I actually have been thinking about it as an analogy in the same way I work with freelancers right now. 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, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. So when I write them a brief, I'm trying to give them as much of that context as possible. So I'll 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 and sort of get into the weeds on our company perspective. That's kind of what giving a brief or a query prompt to, like, ChatGPT is like as well. Except right now, it's not that great at giving me at synthesizing, like, inputs into a great answer. But it will eventually, I think. Like, the technology right now is sort of version one point o, and eventually, it will be good enough. So I think of it in the same way as I work with contractors of eventually, I'm it's just gonna 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 where do I see it can add value? And then sort of keep in the back of my mind, like, what how would this be useful if it were, like, five percent better in the future and staying open minded and optimistic about it rather than, yeah, treating it as something that's gonna replace writers? There was

Mark Evans: an interesting post on LinkedIn this morning by Ran Fischkin who said that ChatGPT has essentially established the bar for content. And that if you have writers who can't create better content than ChatGPT, it's not worth doing. So, essentially, when I look at the 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 gotta provide better context, better insight, more creative writing. So in a sense, it is a it is an interesting tool in the sense that writers gotta write better. ChatGPT can write okay for now, but it's an interesting landscape right now and challenging for writers, I think.

Guest: 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. Like, you know, lots of companies have, like, glossaries on their websites of defining terms. And I don't need to hire a writer to define a term for the one hundredth time. ChatGPT could do that. And we can provide the value to our clients in 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, like, everyone wins. Right? 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.

Mark Evans: Yeah. We've gotten off on a bit of a bit of a tangent because ChatGPT 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 wanna thank you for insight into ChatGPT and, obviously, insight into being the first marketing hire. I think a lot of people 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. Successful. Final question is where can people learn more about you and Doc?

Guest: Yeah. So they can learn more about me on LinkedIn. My name's Eric Doty. 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 of how I do my work and what I'm working on. And, doc, you can visit us at d o c k dot u s. 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.

Mark Evans: 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 Podcast, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app, and share via social media. To learn more about how I work with b to b SaaS companies as a fractional CMO, strategic adviser, and positioning and messaging specialist, email mark@markevans.ca, or connect with me on LinkedIn. I'll talk to you soon.