People & ownership
Your weakest area
People & ownership
You scored lowest here. That usually means marketing is treated as one person’s job, and the rest of the company is not sure what part they play.
What it looks like when it’s broken
It tends to sound like this.
Work falls through the cracks between people, and marketing ends up carrying far more than it should.
Why it happens
Effective marketing is cross-functional. Whatever your title, you have a role to play, whether that is creating content as a subject matter expert, sharing a post, or knowing the company’s positioning well enough to speak to customers. Marketing touches almost every customer-facing part of a business.
Problems start in a few predictable places.
Nobody knows what marketing is doing
The rest of the team is not aware of current campaigns, priorities, or positioning.
Nobody has worked with marketing
Teams have never contributed to marketing in any capacity, so they do not know how.
Marketing is left waiting
Input, approvals, or assets from other teams take longer than planned, and marketing stalls while it waits.
A team of one SMALL TEAMS
One person can only do so much beyond strategy and planning. This is where a fractional hire or an agency earns its place.
Visibility matters too. When people cannot see what marketing is working on, they assume very little is happening. A short monthly update or a shared calendar of marketing’s current work goes a long way toward answering “what is marketing actually doing?”
What good looks like
Without clear ownership
Marketing works alone, requests arrive in no particular order, and tasks without an owner get done whenever someone has time.
With clear ownership
Your team knows the company’s positioning and does their jobs with resources marketing created for them.
At best, people contribute to brainstorming or actively take part in marketing projects. And your marketing team has the capacity to execute against the company’s goals.
The first move
Map who does what, and which parts of the marketing strategy each person plays a part in or owns.
If you are not sure where someone fits, there are plenty of easy ways to contribute:
Everyone has a role. Make sure everyone knows theirs.
The map is the easy part. Getting people to actually contribute is where most teams stall, and it almost always comes down to friction. Find out what is keeping people busy, take something off their plate if you can, and make the ask small, planned, and well in advance.
If marketing is one person
Start with a different map. Write down what marketing owns and what it does not, and share it with the team. It is the fastest way to keep marketing from becoming the catchall for everything else.
How you’ll know it’s working
Marketing initiatives are understood across the organization.
People know where their request falls in line. They understand how their campaign fits with marketing’s other initiatives, and they do their part to move it forward.
What this looked like for one client
In a previous role, I was a marketing team of one. I owned the strategy, the processes, the operations, and the execution, and marketing also tended to become the catchall for work that had nothing to do with marketing.
Blog content was rare. Leadership occasionally wrote a post, and nobody else contributed. The assumption was that the subject matter experts were too busy, and they were.
So I found out why. CRM tasks were eating up most of their time, so I automated as much of that as I could. Honestly, that was less about freeing up their time and more about building trust. Busy people know how to stay busy.
Then I asked whether they would be interested in contributing monthly content to the website. They were. We planned themed content for the whole year, and each expert got several months’ notice for their piece. I checked in periodically to help them finish, and kept backup content ready in case an emergency meant someone could not deliver that month.
The result was a regular cadence of expert content, from people who were happy to create it.
More than 70 times the content output, written by experts who wanted to be part of it.
Where this sits
Every other area depends on someone owning it. When ownership is unclear, six of them feel it.
Dashed areas are not directly affected by this one.
Goals only get hit when someone owns the work behind them. Without enough people, or without clear ownership of key tasks, the goals slip no matter how good they are.
Who writes, reviews, approves, and shares? Spell it out. Without it, a consistent content process is very hard, if not impossible, to achieve.
Who gets the lead, and when? Everyone involved in the handoff needs to know.
Who is responsible for reporting, and is everyone doing their part to move toward shared goals?
Is data being entered correctly? Are the processes documented and shared with the whole team?
What are the rules around AI at your organization, and who is allowed to use it?
Give everyone a clear role and those six run more smoothly. Leave ownership vague and the work lands on whoever has the least room to say no.
Your weakest area is where to start. It is not the whole picture.
The Scorecard rates eight areas because they fail together. You scored lowest here, but there are often others already under strain. Worth reading the neighbors before you decide where to spend the next quarter.
Click any highlighted area to read it.
- Goals & prioritiesRead →
- Audience & positioningRead →
- Content & conversionRead →
- CRM & handoffsRead →
- Reporting & attributionRead →
- People & ownership · You are here
- Tools & dataRead →
- AI useRead →
Want someone to look at the whole system?
The Scorecard tells you where it hurts. A Diagnostic tells you why, and what order to fix it in. I look at your setup properly and give you a sequenced plan rather than eight separate problems.