As the virtual world grows wider, marketing efforts must stay relevant and continue affecting people and platforms.
Content marketing is the perfect storm where marketing and the online world work together in harmony.
Despite what you might think, content marketing is more than posting on social media and writing the occasional blog post. It is highly technical, requiring research and lots of trial and error before something sticks.
The responsibilities of a content marketer range from writing content to reviewing analytics and back-end measurements.
Let’s dive into what makes the content marketer’s role so important and how their responsibilities lead to effective content and traffic.
Content marketing typically falls on the content marketing specialist, strategist, creator, manager, head of marketing, or anyone else on the marketing team.
Although someone on the marketing team is first in command for content marketing, collaboration with the other departments is crucial for curating valuable content.
Aligning your content outreach with your company’s overall goals ensures that you are shipping content that your company will be proud of.
A content marketer works within the marketing team and with other departments such as customer service, sales, and product.
Aligning marketing goals with what the company stands for assures that the content that ships out is coordinated with company values.
Content marketers create content that appeals to their target audience. They use analytics and strategy to grab their audience’s attention and ensure that what they publish will drive traffic and results.
To succeed in content marketing, you must encompass a specific skill set, including:
Content Creation
As a content marketer, you will be responsible for publishing content. This is a wide variety of projects and can range from tutorial videos to blog posts to social media posts and beyond.
This is the most essential duty of a content marketer, and it is their main priority to keep a constant stream of content flowing at all times.
Here’s a list of different types of content creation skills that are useful to the average marketer:
Important Content Creation Skills
- Writing
- Design
- Audio
- Video
- Editing
- Development
Content marketers develop anything from website content to outreach opportunities to optimizing how to curate better content and results.
Strategy
Although it may seem obvious, strategizing before starting any new project or piece of content is one of the most critical steps in getting the results you want.
Reporting & Analytics
Tracking and measuring how your content is performing is one of the most important duties of a content marketer. Finding out what works and what doesn’t is how you succeed and get the results you want from your content.
Writing Skills
Your content will be viewed, read, forwarded, reposted, and republished. That said, maintaining strong writing skills will advance your content in online traffic.
Writing in your company’s voice is extremely important when publishing content. All of your content and pieces should have a similar overall voice and tone so it is clear that it’s coming from your company.
SEO Skills
Search Engine Optimization skills, which include keyword research, on-page optimization, and website structure, are essential to see how a piece of content performs and know the technicality behind it.
Learning the analytics and outreach and seeing what performs better prepares you for upcoming content and posts.
Social Media Marketing Skills
Being able to run and manage different social media platforms is one of the best ways to get content out into the open. Utilizing social media can increase outreach by the thousands, and it is a great way to get the word out about your company and its products.
Email Marketing Skills
We’ve all experienced a full inbox with hundreds of unread emails. Learning what prompts us to open an email instead of ignoring and moving it into the trash bin is the best way to approach email marketing. This means creating a gripping email subject line, short and sweet content, and a powerful call to action that can guide a customer to our website.
Adaptability Skills
Marketing efforts can switch and change on a dime, focus efforts can reroute, and you may need to change how your content gets published.
Adapting to a changing market and audience is one of the most crucial skills for a marketer, especially a content marketer, to stay up-to-date in their daily tasks and projects.
Collaboration & Communication Skills
Communicating effectively with your team members and within other departments is essential to crafting relevant content.
Good communication and collaboration keeps everyone on the same page and leaves no room for confusion.
A content marketing manager oversees all marketing activities and efforts and ensures everything gets shipped on time.
Content Marketing Manager Job Summary:
- Write search engine optimized content marketing. Hold yourself accountable to a high standard of performance to outrank the competition.
- Edit content as an Editor—first and foremost for story, comprehensiveness, and accuracy, then also for grammar.
- Research keywords that would benefit our target audience to consume within a CoSchedule-owned experience. Research the publish destination (e.g., hub, blog, etc.). Research the complete keyword experience to determine the number of pieces necessary to build topical authority.
- Research individual keyword content pieces using the Skyscraper Technique. Draft creative briefs and content outlines to set expectations for freelance writers against which we may hold them accountable.
- Manage freelancer budgets as effectively as possible by assigning pieces to freelance writers based on their individual strengths. Collaborate with the external editor virtual assistant to assign pieces and answer all freelancer questions so they may deliver their best work.
- Coordinate the execution of search engine optimized content with third-party vendors (e.g., the editor and freelancers). Set clear expectations for internal and external team members so they may contribute high-quality content as efficiently and effectively as possible.
- Ensure that writers create consistent content in terms of style, quality, tone of voice, and search optimization. Be an arbiter of best practices in grammar, messaging, writing, and style.
- Learn about our content management system to answer all internal and external team member questions about publishing. Follow and optimize an existing editing process with a virtual assistant.
- Ensure consistent publishing. Identify bottlenecks in our content publishing process and pose solutions so we may publish the most content around the most keywords to increase traffic from organic search.
- Embrace and implement the agile philosophy of shipping, measuring, learning, and iterating with the goal of influencing greater results from the work that has been shipped.
- Manage the CoSchedule blog and hubs as an Editor, proactively identify problems, suggest ways to improve, implement new ideas, and document processes to empower others to contribute effectively and efficiently.
- All other duties as assigned.
Use CoSchedule’s Job Description Generator to find the perfect candidate!
Content Marketing Manager Job Requirements:
- You are a very strong writer with a proven background in written communication. You’re a grammar nerd who can read a sentence and tell us the participles, prepositions, articles, voice, and tense. You value well-written and edited content. Quality is important to you.
- You have strong organizational and prioritization skills. You manage agency and freelance partners, as well as your own projects, with efficient and effective practices.
- You are familiar with content marketing and have some experience with the practice. You have published some blog posts in your day. You have at least read up on search engine optimization and understand how to influence search engine results page rankings via publishing.
- You understand strategy requires execution and that compelling interpersonal communication is necessary for successful, collaborative work environments. You treat relationships with your teammates and extended team members as one of the most essential elements to your long-term success.
- You understand attitude is a choice and approach every challenge with contagious positivity that excites your teammates. You live the CoSchedule values and are a leading ambassador of the CoSchedule culture.
- You are passionate about results, not just the marketing that produces them. You use data to make decisions and proactively determine how you’ll measure activity before you ship so that you can learn from success and failure.
- You understand the act of publishing will provide you and your teammates with the data to help you learn what to continue doing and what to stop doing. You embrace agile work tenets, value constructive criticism, and are open to pivoting as priorities inevitably change.
- You’re not afraid to generate new ideas and facilitate their implementation with your teammates.
- You think big and enjoy moving fast.
- You obsess about our products and the challenges our audience faces daily.
- You care deeply about the quality of the work you produce.
- You have a strong attention to detail and a keen focus on the message and material quality.
Stakeholder
Product owners, c-level executives, and VPs are all examples of stakeholders. Stakeholders are anyone who is affected by the decisions a company makes. Contributors like the ones listed help make important decisions regarding what types of content and products audiences like and how they can benefit from them.
Stakeholders can also be customers, community members, or even employees. They all share a stake in the company’s success and are affected by the above’s decisions.
Operations Manager
An operations manager ensures that everything runs smoothly, from simple tasks to complex ones. They focus on the back side of things and greatly improve the outcomes of the marketing team and other departments. They are essential to improving communication inside and outside of the marketing team, and their main goal is to set everyone else up for success.
Project Manager
A project manager is responsible for making sure that everything is running smoothly from start to finish.
Project managers set precedence before every project begins so that the overall goals and outcomes of the project are transparent. They must be more than proficient in communication because they are responsible for planning and scheduling an entire project. They also are responsible for:
Project Manager Responsibilities
- Budget
- Timelines
- Relationship management
- Conflict management
- Leadership skills
Above all else, project managers will assist you and keep you on track so your content is distributed at the right time and to the right audience.
You can read more about the duties of a project manager here.
Content Marketing Manager
A content marketing manager oversees all marketing efforts and activities on the content side. They are primarily focused on making sure all content that gets published is good quality and will be guaranteed to bring in traffic.
Not only do they oversee everything that the marketing team is working on, they also take part in creating content to publish.
They are the most knowledgeable in the content marketing world and should be familiar with what works and what doesn’t.
Content Strategist
A content strategist brainstorms new potential outreach opportunities and is responsible for leading and executing distinct marketing plans and campaigns.
They take information from projects that have worked in the past and use it to develop new projects and content strategies.
Writer
Writing for content marketing could look many different ways and can be done by different titles. For instance, some freelance writers may be responsible for creating content and writing specific pieces for blog posts and other areas.
All marketers need a good grasp on writing and a creative mind that influences their writing.
Designer
The design team sets up the piece of content in an appealing, eye-catching way. This could entail designing graphics within the piece, such as banners, icons, and photos.
They also design any type of content that gets sent out, whether creating graphics for a blog post or staging a monthly newsletter.
Videographer
A videographer creates visual pieces of content such as videos to publish on social media channels like TikTok, Instagram, LinkedIn, and others. They could be responsible for making anything from a tutorial video to a promotion video.
Audiographer
An audiographer creates audio content such as podcasts, tutorial videos, guide videos, and more. They are responsible for making sure their recordings and audio sound clear and concise.
Editor
Each piece of content typically gets sent around multiple times to get edited further and narrowed down to the best it can be. The editor ties up loose ends and will add any missing information that needs to be included.
When it comes to editing pieces, the editor must read through the company standards and goals to ensure the work reflects that of the company.
Administrator
An administrator on the marketing team supports the overall operations and marketing strategies that are going on within the company. They manage databases, respond to emails, create reports, and track leads.
Administrators work in the background, checking on analytics and measurements to ensure content performs as it should. In return, this improves overall marketing performance, which leads to driving more traffic and setting up your team for success.
Analyst
There are many different categories for analysts. For example, a marketing analyst would analyze how specific campaigns are performing, such as seeing what works and what doesn’t.
When trying out new things and projects, it is important always to analyze and measure them once they publish.
This will help weed out what works and what doesn’t. It is easy to imagine that all of your content works well and sticks with the audience.
However, this is typically not the case. With an ever-changing market, some content will work better than others.
What Is Content Responsibility?
Content responsibility is shipping content that promotes your business and products through social media, blog, and video content.
What Are The 4 Steps To Creating A Content Marketing Strategy?
When brainstorming on how to plan out your content marketing strategy, there are a few steps to make note of to formulate the right plan for you.
- Create a content brief: A content brief is an outline of an upcoming project and should have all the information you need to fulfill the project standards.Content briefs allow you to know expectations so that your content meets all necessary requirements.
- Effectively communicate with stakeholders: Check-in with your stakeholders to ensure you are on the right track. Keeping an open line of communication with them will best set you up for success, and they will give you the correct approval.
- Understand how to analyze your data: Understanding how your content is performing is crucial to posting blogs, social campaigns, and many more.
- Define your monthly goals: Planning weekly goals is important, but setting monthly goals helps you see the bigger picture of what you want to achieve in the future. This enables you to align your content marketing outreach for you to crush your goals and set yourself up for success.
What Are Examples Of Content Marketing?
Creating content for marketing is just the tip of the iceberg of what content marketing entails.Content marketing examples include but are not limited to:
Content Marketing Examples
- Blog content
- Guide content
- Course content
- Interactive content
- Video content
- Book content
- Research content
What Are The Five Pillars Of Content Marketing?
- Strategize: Come up with an end goal and plan your projects and content accordingly. First things first, map out the goals that you want to achieve with this content strategy. Setting aside goals allows you to plan out your projects and strategies so they lead into meeting that goal.There could be several different goals that content marketing can achieve. Find ones that are important to you and your company, and go from there.Several goals can include:
- Increasing website traffic
- Drawing new customers in
- Getting more followers on social media
Once you decipher what your end goal is, it makes it easier to format your content strategy and approach to your projects and tasks.
- Know your audience: Who is your audience? This question seems simple but is much more complex than it sounds.It is crucial to have a target audience in mind to appeal directly to them. Your audience can change drastically depending on what type of content you are creating.Although your content may revolve around the same thing, such as marketing efforts, it can appeal to many different audiences if you target it specifically.Not only will this make your content perform better, but your audience will feel like they have much to gain from it.
- Pick your channel: When it comes to content marketing, there are multiple different channels and platforms that you can post your content on, such as YouTube, Instagram, LinkedIn, and more.Placing your content on the right platform is important to get the attention it is supposed to.For instance, if your content revolves around making a tutorial for a specific product your business has, it would make the most sense to post that on either YouTube or publish it on your website.
- Establish a publishing schedule: Discovering the best times to publish on specific social media platforms is essential to getting the most out of the content that you’re posting.Research what times are the best depending on what platform you are using to gain as much traffic and views as possible. Based on this research, you can set specific projects, such as blog and social media posts, on a posting schedule during the most active times.
- Measure and analyze: After you publish your content and pat yourself on the back for all your hard work, it is time to analyze.You can now use analytics and measurement tools to see how your content is performing and how it ranks compared to similar articles on Google.Use these results to adjust your process to achieve better outcomes as you continue producing content.