Unlocking AI's Potential for Small Marketing Teams with Expert Caroline Crawford

I think AI can be really helpful to give the marketers a leg up. So I use ai for instance, if I'm like, okay, I've got ideas like my heart, my biggest challenge or what takes me the longest is not the ideas, but it's how to piece it together to where it makes sense for everyone else but me kind of thing. Right?

Mm, that's good. And welcome to a new episode of Digital Coffee Marketing Brew. I'm your host, Brett Geiser. Could please subscribe to this podcast on all your favorite podcasting apps. Leave a five star view really does help with the rankings. And now you can leave a comment on Spotify because. Why not? We love comments. Anyways, I have with me Caroline, and she is a business leader and with aligning marketing initiatives effectively to achieve overarching business goals. She is a seasoned marketer and communication expert with a 13 year successful track record on blending the vision, the visionary with. Just your business practices and your sales goals. But this week as well, we're gonna be talking about building a market team on a scrappy budget because we're all on that plane ride of can you cut the marketing budget? Can you be as lean as possible? But welcome to the show, Caroline.

Thank you so much for having me. I'm excited to be here.

Yes. The first question is, all my guest is, are you a coffee or tea drinker?

Ooh, I just stopped drinking coffee a couple months ago, so I wa I think at heart I am, I'm not a tea person very much, but I've now stopped it all.

Stopped it all. So is it just like straight water and that's all you do? Mostly

water. All. I've, now, I'm trying to get on the matcha train. It's not working as well as coffee, but.

Fair enough. I'm an old drinking person because Sure. I still love coffee, but has be a specific coffee.

Yeah. What? What's the specific coffee?

I usually go for the more expensive ones. 'cause they're actually better. Yeah. If I have to, I'll go to Starbucks, but it's not never my first choice. It's always my. There's one, I don't know the area I'm in and there's no other coffee shops around.

Perfect. Love that.

Anyways, I gave a brief summary of your expertise. Can you give our listeners a little bit more about what you do?

Yeah, absolutely. So I've been in marketing communications for 13 years. Like you said, I, throughout my career, I just. Always had a very heavy hand in kind of all the things with marketing, just and working with a lot of companies that had a very dynamic marketing team. So they didn't have, it wasn't multiple departments within the marketing team. It was a lot of the times myself, maybe one or two other people, and. The size of the company did not match that. So it was very interesting background. But about three and a half years ago, actually, I think before, even before that, while I was still in-house, I started to recognize the patterns and look at the patterns I was experiencing in my career around marketing, the way businesses viewed marketing, treated marketing and also the experiences I was having in-house as an in-house marketer. From outside marketers and that's essentially what formed Cultivate. I really saw this gap that existed between the way business leaders viewed marketing, but also the way that marketing support was delivered. And so that's, I. What I'm now out here doing. And so ultimately, cultivate communications specializes in developing and optimizing marketing functions by aligning sales, marketing and brand to create effective strategies and create and increase revenue, increase efficiencies across the team, and then ultimately grow the brand.

All right, so what are some fundamental skills should. The leader of a scraping marketing team or the market team should possess to ensure efficiency and effectiveness. Because we're all in that. Can you, and as always, businesses always cut the marketing budget first, so how do you become efficient and effective?

Yeah, I think one, first things first, be adaptable. 'cause when you are in an environment that is needing to be scrappy. You have to design everything in a way, in the way you operate. To be adaptable, and nimble as best as you possibly can. That said, you do have to create structure in your marketing system, and I look at marketing from all angles, everything under the marketing umbrella, umbrella. So the easiest way to do to work with limited resources and be scrappy is to see how it all connect connects together, right? And what that looks like is developing marketing strategies where you can repurpose things, where content can work for one channel and on multiple channels. Putting, identifying and isolating sometimes. Pieces of your marketing puzzle that are gonna take more time, effort, energy, money, whatever that looks like, and using that to fuel other pieces of your marketing channel. So that, those are just a couple ways to do that, but ultimately structure, having your. Team in place, being really aware of what the priorities are and then saying back to the business leaders, especially if you're the marketing team working with business leaders that may make marketing a little bit more challenging for whatever reason, they may not understand what goes on behind the scenes. It's really important for you to say, we have all these other priorities. These are the processes that we have in place, and. You keep throwing curve balls at us. So we need to either go back and put focus for you on what's needed for marketing. And that way we can structure our team a little bit better or we need to completely reprioritize some things or operate a little bit differently.

And on the content side, is it more focusing on the evergreen content because that can. Be either repurposed or refreshed a little bit more than just the seasonal or just the one-offs, because I feel like budgets are kinda like, okay, what can I actually do? And Evergreen is usually the one that's the easiest to repurpose and use. Longer than anything else.

Yeah, you could look at it that way. I see any content that's created honestly as an opportunity to potentially repurpose in some shape or form, as long as it's still relevant to the brand and what the messaging is and things like that. But ultimately, when you're creating content, even older campaigns and seasonal campaigns, there's usually a core message there. That can then be repurposed. Obviously, if it's a seasonal campaign, you did a winter campaign, let's say, and then you're now in summer, some things have to be updated. But I think the Evergreen content is great because you can squeeze a lot of juice out of one particular Evergreen content, and it's just a matter of finding fresh ideas from that same thing. But I think it doesn't really, to me, it doesn't really. It doesn't have to be either or Evergreen or campaign. I think that's where the strategic planning comes into play and the structure comes into play. Because if you know what's ahead, you can understand how you can create content. So if you're planning a marketing strategy where you are, again, let's say you're focused on an evergreen campaign about how to create, how to maximize your marketing team. Whatever. What if you have a scrappy marketing team, right? That's an, that can stand alone as an evergreen content. But let's say, okay, December's coming up, so how to then you can create additional content, leveraging the first evergreen content that says, okay, how do you maximize your team? During vacation, heavy vacation schedules or whatever. I'm just coming up with some random examples, but there's ways to do that, and then even by vice versa, if you created the winter thing first, I. You can then generalize it to make it evergreen. So I think that there's, it's more so what is the core message you're trying to convey and what's the core value you're trying to get out there? And then I think you can get creative with all the different ways to go about it.

And how do you identify and leverage the unique competitive advantages of a. Small marketing budget or a toned down marketing budget depending on what's the size of your business. And is that also leveraging more ai? Because you're a small marketing team, AI is prevalent and it's a little bit easier to use given that you have a small budget.

Yeah. I think AI can be really helpful to give the marketers a leg up. So I use ai for instance, if I'm like, okay, I've got ideas like my heart, my biggest challenge or what takes me the longest is not the ideas, but it's how to. Piece it together to where it makes sense for everyone else but me kind of thing, right? And so AI can be really helpful with that. AI can also present different ideas. It can lay out a strategy, it can organize thoughts in term. And then of course there's always arguments about whether or not AI should be used for generating content. I err on the side of best. You don't, if not, you vet it through. I think in terms of the competitive advantages, the scrappier, the team every, yes, it's hard on the marketers, but I think if you set up the right structure, if you really optimize it correctly, the scrappier the team, the more connected they have to be to survive. So they have to serve. They have to be so connected to the business leaders. They have to be so aware of what's going on. They have to. Become a well-oiled machine because they don't have room for error. They don't have a high margin of just letting things fall to the wayside or things getting overlooked. They have to have, that's where again, you optimize your team. It doesn't matter the size of your team, you can op. I've operated with one or two people. I've operated with just myself managing a very large team. Or, sorry, very large company. I think it's just, I think that's where the competitive advantage could be is because if you connect. The greatest brands, the reason they are getting so much attention, there's multiple reasons to be fair, but a huge chunk of the reason if you really analyze it is they're showing up everywhere. And that's a challenge, right? Because you, if you are showing up everywhere, it takes a lot of resources to really go heavy on some things. But if you refine your focus because your team is scrappy, it makes you go. Do perform at that channel very well, and then you can scale up from there and then get really smart with how you scale up from there. But if you're looking at what other brands that are doing that are essentially everywhere, they're doing the same thing just on across the board on every channel. So they're just repurposing a bunch of different things. So if you have that kind of mindset, obviously maybe at a smaller scale, I'm not saying everyone should be everywhere. I think that's where you start to get into this groove where, okay, everything's gonna be connected, and then let's get, let's determine what our baseline is. Once we have that going, let's introduce another channel. And then once we have that going, we introduce another and then we just keep growing and growing from there.

And is this part kind of the part of importance of creating like a clear marketing goal, marketing targets and goals? So you can like. Make your team efficient in delegation because it's not, or yourself, because like you said, you've done it by yourself. Is it like that part of things? Because if you have a plan, it's easier to effectively delegate you or your. Teammates or people under you?

Yeah, for sure. I think that's really the first step because if you don't have that, then you're just come basically identifying like, okay, here's an idea I have. Let's execute it, and it starts, and that keeps happening over and over. So it starts to become very inefficient. But if you're like, okay, this is our goal, these are our marketing goals, these are our sales goals, these are our business goals, you can then be more intentional with where you're putting your efforts. That then lend itself better to you being able to plan ahead for things. So when I'm creating strategies, I'm thinking ultimately, what's the bigger vision goal? What's our immediate short-term goal? So if someone, if a company's 'cause everyone wants more sales, everyone wants more brand awareness. But you do at some point, especially with a scrappy budget, have to prioritize. So if let's just say sales is the first budget that's gonna end, or sales is the first primary goal in the short term. That's gonna indicate what and how and where you're putting your marketing efforts, right? So it's if you're doing sales, but you're doing brand awareness campaigns, there's a disconnect, right? So that's how you start planning accordingly. But I think having that strategy upfront is going to be, it takes away so much of that guessing and that legwork. So then as. The process evolves. You can come together as a team with the lead the business leaders and say, based on our goals, I don't think we have the ability to, or I don't think it's worth our effort right now to do a brand awareness campaign or, it's helps this shiny object syndrome that really appears with marketing and allows you to maintain that focus.

The other side of it is, have you found some like cost effective tools or resources for that scrapping marketing team? Because I feel like you're gonna need tools, but you gotta pick and choose which tools will be effective for you have. Which ones have you found to be the most cost effective for doing the job?

I think Clickup is like any project management tool. You can really plan like those types of like specific marketing tech tools, CL like a pro, any project management system where you can really see what's ahead and pri easily prioritize. That is the best way. But I've done it in like Google Sheets, I've planned it all out. All you really need, it doesn't really matter what the specific. Tool you use as long as it, your team is, as long as it's easily adoptable by your team, essentially. But you have to have the ability to plan ahead and see what's coming down the pipeline for marketing and also to give yourself the ability to see everything from a big picture. I like to plan my strategies, like when I'm actually doing the specific planning of. What's going out when, what are we talking about and kind of content outlines and all of that. I like to know what is happening with every channel and what's happening with our offerings, what's happening with other parts of the company in case that has to influence marketing in some way.

And could it be, you said Clickup, but could it be like notion or anything like that? Because Yeah, any type of

project planning a tool for sure. I personally would just use Clickup.

That's fair. The main thing from what I'm getting is basically just being like super organized and knowing like you have a checklist each day and actually doing it because the hard part of being organized is that you actually have to do it each day and. Be organized. I think that's the hardest part for a lot of people. Oh yeah, I got all this done. Wait, I have to do this every week now or every day. This is not, I'm not gonna like this.

I know. That's the hardest part. And I would say and I've struggled with that too, and I would say it's less even about here's the to-do list, check it off, make sure you're maintaining it. Like that alone is a job. That's why project managers exist because it's hard. I would say it's more of the sentiment, right? It's how can you. Con strengthen connection and communication amongst your team and awareness of what's happening with the company. How you do that is going to be dependent on the leader, dependent on the team, because everyone's different. Everyone organizes different, like some people prefer p post-it notes as their to-do list, right? Like it's not about the specifics necessarily, however. As the marketing leader, you should have a very clear visibility to see what's happening with your team, to understand what's coming, what's gonna be thrown at marketing and how that's all gonna impact. And then you can use tools like Notion, you can use even Miro. Anything that can like. Where you can map out, or at least have, okay, even if it's a whiteboard in your office, this is what's gonna happen and this is what we need to plan for. And so there is a little bit of that organization, but for the people who are really not organized, it's, it really is how can you just stay in tune to what's going on? So that's. Enhancing maybe some communications with your team that's asking questions around what's going on with the rest of the business that's, just being proactive in some areas. Just to even if you're not acting on it now, just to open your mind up to these other activities that may impact marketing.

And how important is it to have diverse skill sets within your team? Because sometimes we're like, why does everybody have the same skillset? I need people to actually do different things that I can't do. So how do you pick and choose that? Because it, it is difficult to figure out unless you know somebody, their actual skill sets. And I think that's the hardest part is like, what can you effectively do? Don't tell me. Show me.

Yeah. That's a great question. I think it's. Depend it. I will say this, like it's, there's a small caveat in that what you focus on is going to be a little bit different, right? There are some companies where. Design really isn't a big deal for them, right? But then there are some companies where it is a really big deal. So I think that's where some of the caveats come into play is how specialized do people really need to be. But I would say that, again, going back if you do tend, if you do create a strategy and a plan ahead of time, you have more of an ability to predict. This is where I think. It is gonna take us a long time. So for instance, if you're planning a team around and you know you're gonna need some automations, how savvy is your current team? If you're working with a bunch of generalists, for instance, to try to do that? Or is like maybe you're working with a bunch of copywriters. Is anyone willing or able to get into the tech mindset and really build things out? I think it's really understanding what. If everyone's generally quote unquote, doing the same thing or have the same skillset isolate what unique qualities they have within your team. And potentially diversify that team, diversify their responsibilities in some shape or form. No one should be doing the same things. If you have a scrappy team, you can't afford to have someone do two people doing. I. Same work, unless it's a heavy, significantly heavy workload. But that usually, that actually creates more inefficiencies if you have people doing the same thing. So you've got two people creating content for things that really can be consolidated and have you be the, I'm gonna be the copy person, you're gonna be the tech person, right? So that's where you can diversify. I think in terms of other skill sets and actually hiring. I, it really is a matter of how specialized do they need to be, right? If you want someone to really build very advanced email automations within, you are not able to give them direction, then you need someone highly specialized. But if you're able, if as a marketing leader or business leader, you're able to provide a little bit more creative direction or guidance for them to execute. They don't really need to be that specialized. They just need to be organized or be very clear about what their responsibility is and be willing to learn as they go.

And just to go along with that, is it also the decision between hiring full-time or contract because. You may sometimes just need a really short span of somebody, so you just might wanna hire a contractor instead of a full-time employee because you may just want them to build out and that's all you need them to do. So how do you distinguish between hiring the full-time person and just hiring a freelancer slash contractor?

Yeah, I think that's also a great question. I would say that more and more companies are leaning towards contractors because. Marketing, but like you said at the beginning, marketing budgets are the first to get cut. The fir they get like the bottom of the barrel budget so often. So I'm seeing a lot of companies now using virtual assistants, for instance, and I think it goes back to the earlier point of you have to understand what hole you're filling, right? If you. Don't know what help you need and sometimes you, we as marketers, because there's so much, you're like, I just need someone to help with everything. I have no idea. Especially when your budget's so small, you just need one extra, like an extra set of hands and you can do it that way. And you could try to find a generalist and in that case they should probably be full time. But I think if you're doing something, if you're very clear about what's getting done, you have more freedom to say, you know what? I think we just need this contractor for X amount of time in a month, and they're gonna focus on these primary tasks. But I think it's just a matter of, I think if you're looking to generalize people more, it's gonna cost them more time. So therefore they should be more full-time. And ideally you can hire in-house so that they are completely dedicated to you, but a lot of people are going the contractor route and, working with them as much as they have capacity or setting up retainers with them to make sure that they at least can deliver specific things that are needed. So you can either go the hourly route or the retainer route with contractors a lot of the time, and that's where it matter. It's just a matter of how much. How much support are you looking to fill?

What are some of the common pitfalls to avoid when building out that scrappy team? Because some people maybe new, they're like, I don't know how to build a team. What should I look for and please help me avoid it.

Yeah, for sure. And the, so there's so many pitfalls with marketing, and that's the unfortunate part about our industry, right? There's a lot of people that claim they can do things, and then you get there and you're like. This is not what I expected it to be, or whatever that looks like. And I think that's where, as the leader, as the business leader in particular, you have to be. If you are not focused, then it is much harder for you to discern. I. Between what's actually gonna work and what isn't. And marketing is one of those areas where people are apprehensive around what they're spending because the results can sometimes be, feel very uncertain. But I think when you're hiring actual support, I. One being extremely clear about what the expectations are of that role. Be very as organized as you can be. So that way 'cause there's gonna be a learning curve no matter what, doesn't matter who you start with, right? There's always somewhat some of that catch up that they need to do. The more you can be so crystal clear about what your expectations are, what the company is, what the offerings are, what they're supposed to do. The more that person has the ability to find their place within a system already that is in motion. And so I think for, in terms of avoiding specific pitfalls, look for the red flags with hiring. Look at assess, especially in a creative environment. Identify someone's work like, make sure to look at a portfolio, make sure that they have the, either a range of styles or match a style that fits you. And fits your aesthetic. I think from a copy standpoint, right? All of these kind of creative, same thing. What do they have a range of tone? Are they, are you looking for more short, succinct copywriting or are you looking for long form content? There's some questions to ask yourself. And then when it comes to the tech or the generalist, it's that's where you wanna find someone who's very organized who has the ability to communicate. Get those red flags out of the way. If they show up late to the interview, that's a red flag. If they're not communicative about things, that's a red flag. Give them some, potentially even some test projects, if that's within reason, of course. I think those are some ways to avoid that unfor. And then also too, be willing, if you are hiring contractors, at least be willing to. Cut them if they're not working out and I'm, I say that almost in a cutthroat way, but at the same time, you're just gonna waste more money if someone really doesn't have the skillset or the personality to be willing to learn. So they have to be willing to learn and adapt to what's gonna work for you.

And your boss is gonna get mad at you saying, why are we spending this much money on someone that's not producing anything?

Exactly. They have to. Here's the thing, I think more and more. There are some people, like I don't always hire unless I'm hiring for a very specific thing that needs to be specialized. More and more people are, or business leaders are willing to work with someone who has maybe a little bit less experience or skillset. But if their personality is one that they're driven, they're ambitious, they wanna learn, they're curious. Those end up being the best employees, and so I think. There is that balance between what's needed now, because sometimes you're willing to shape someone, but then it ends up costing you more to do that. So it is a balance, but I think just try to weed out the red flags as best as you possibly can.

And what are some like inspirational things to save people going through this marketing budget? Cut? Because I'm pretty sure everybody's I don't know how I'm gonna get all this stuff done by myself or with a very small team.

This is so cliche, but if there's a will, there's a way for sure. And I think don't be afraid to cut things. Don't be afraid to say, you know what? We're gonna do this, but not right now. Focus, identify. The first thing is to identify what is draining you? What's draining your team? What's draining your budget? Is it worth it? If it is, if you really see the long-term vision, you need to optimize it. If it's not right now, then put it on pause. You can always go back to something. I think that's the first step and I think that's the hardest step too, because I. Especially when you're working with business leaders that don't understand marketing, they're gonna throw everything at you. They're gonna, marketing is the catchall and they're not gonna understand what they're doing. So you really do need to I, I like to use the approach of, I understand where. What you're trying to accomplish, here are the barriers that we have to accomplish that. This is my suggestion, become very solution oriented in the process. I think you have a right to say, we just simply don't have the capacity. You either give us more budget to hire more hands, or you get, you be the leader and you tell you give us the focus that we need.

So basically what I'm hearing is the power of No.

The power of No, absolutely. Or the power of not right now is a little bit more palatable for some.

Yeah, the PR answer, not right now.

Yeah.

Anyways, people are listening to this episode and wondering where can they find you online to learn more?

So I have a website that has all the information that they probably need. So cultivate communications.com. Cultivate is spelled a little bit differently. It's. C-U-L-T-I-V-E-I-G-H-T. I'm also on LinkedIn and very active on LinkedIn. So if they wanna add me, the username is c Crawford 22.

All right. Any final thoughts for listeners?

Hang in there. You got this.

Alright. Thank you Caroline for joining Digital Coffee Marketing Brew and sharing your knowledge on just building a scrappy team with a marketing, small marketing budget.

Thank you so much for having me. It was, this was a blast

and thank you for listening. As always, please subscribed to this podcast on all your favorite podcast at gaps. You with Five star Review. It really does help with the rankings. Let me know how I am doing and join me next week as I talk to another great thought leader in the PR marketing. Industry. Alright guys. Stay safe. It's understanding your small marketing budget. Stay safe as well and stay sane and see you next week later.