CONTENT NEWS

8 Essential Content Marketing Roles & What Each One Does

Content marketing has come a long way since its early days. You can no longer write something and post it online and expect it to generate positive results because you were one of the first to write about it.

Today, the content marketing process has become significantly more complex.

Many companies have responded to this reality with appropriate urgency and commitment. It is no longer unusual to find a company that has an entire content marketing team in-house.

The content marketing team also isn’t a spin-off from the more traditional marketing group. Most often, the members of these teams have different roles within the company.

Let’s take a look at the common roles within the content marketing team, the different positions available on that team, and the responsibilities associated with each.

1. Content Manager or Content Marketing Manager

We’ll start at the top. Often, the person in charge of the content marketing department is usually the chief content officer or director of content marketing—at least, if such an executive role exists.

This role is often found in enterprise organisations.

This person oversees every aspect of the content program to ensure that the company’s content marketing strategy is on point and meets its business goals.

Among the main responsibilities of this professional are setting marketing goals and setting strategy.

Is the company focused on breaking into a new market, or perhaps improving its online reputation?

The manager or operations coordinator needs to identify those key goals and develop the strategy their team will use to achieve them.

They define the people, processes, and technology required to achieve the company’s content goals.

Another important aspect of this person’s work is coordination and cooperation with other departments.

This is the person other executives look to if they need something from the content marketing team. The content manager is also the person who communicates with other departments if the content marketing team needs help.

2. Content Marketing Manager

Next up, we have the Content Marketing Manager. As the job title suggests, managers focus on creating a roadmap for the team.

Content marketing managers set the overall direction for the content team.

They are also responsible for delegating tasks and setting goals for team members. They set deadlines until those above goals are met.

Content marketing team members interact more frequently with the content marketing manager than they do with the lead content manager, as these two roles exist. In a way, the content marketing manager also acts as a bridge between these two camps.

And in smaller companies, the content marketing manager may be responsible for the entire program including strategy as well.

3. Content creators and contributors

Content creators and contributors are the lifeblood of the content marketing team.

Simply put, content marketing would not exist without creators and contributors. It feeds the content engine with rich, high-quality, relevant content.

Content creators and contributors play a key role in keeping your business relevant. If something big changes with search engines and algorithms, your content creators and contributors can help your business keep up by producing content around it.

Examples of content creators and contributors you might want to add to your team include writers, video creators, photographers, graphic designers, and audio engineers.

These may be full or part time, home or outsourced, in the office or remote – or any combination thereof.

4. Editors

You can’t let every piece of content your team creates go live without someone reviewing it first. One big mistake can damage your company’s reputation.

Avoid these mistakes by hiring content editors. The Content Editor is responsible for maintaining a high standard for the department.

They develop and implement processes that ensure quality content and keep the brand out of copyright issues and the like.

Editors ensure that the content produced by the department is as close to error-free as possible.

Furthermore, they may also have to edit content or request revisions in certain situations. With written content, they provide direction, fact-check, line edit, and take other steps to ensure brand guidelines are adhered to.

Depending on the type of media, you may also be using video or audio editing software. These people can be in-house or outsourced.

Content editors work tirelessly to check the submissions sent to them. It can be a tedious and time-consuming task, and it’s also critical to the day-to-day operations of the content marketing team.

5. Editorial assistants

Uploading content, editing and sizing images, sending reminders to authors, writing meta descriptions, and other repetitive tasks can all benefit greatly from the sharing of an editing assistant.

This person assists content editors and creators with their workloads by serving in a support role managing the tasks they can perform.

Editorial assistants with average SEO knowledge can be helpful, as they can use important SEO techniques to support your organic ranking goals as well.

Again, this person could be in-house or outsourced. They can be available full time, or just on contract as needed. It’s best to work with the same person or a small group regularly so they really get to know your business and content processes.

6. Community managers

In 2021, every company needs a social media presence of some kind. If you are not using social media to promote your business, you are not reaching your full marketing potential.

The focus of the Community Manager is to promote your content and engage your readers on social networking platforms. The interesting thing about the Community Manager job is how multifaceted it is.

As the Community Manager, you must know how to talk to clients and potential customers.

You should also be able to provide some customer service from time to time, or at least have processes in place for quick triage and escalation of any issues that may arise.

In some cases, the Community Manager may also be required to create a short post to highlight a new product, service, or event. A community manager really wears a lot of different marketing hats and must be flexible and willing to do whatever the business needs to do.

7. Analytics professionals

Content cannot be produced blindly. There should be a purpose behind every piece of content posted online.

If your goal is to enhance the visibility of your business, then the content you post should help you achieve that goal.

But how do you know that your efforts are paying off?

You need someone to interpret the results of your content marketing efforts and extract their true value. An analytics professional can do just that.

Analytics professionals can evaluate the performance of your content marketing strategies and ascertain whether they are living up to expectations, exceeding them, or perhaps falling short by tracking analytics data across a variety of platforms.

This person is skilled at measuring what matters and reporting to each stakeholder only those insights that matter to them. They won’t hand over the same report to the director that they did for the video editor, for example.

Analytics professionals can also highlight ways to improve your content. They can tell you if the length of the content is appropriate or if it needs to be modified.

They can also decide if the content could use more keyword infusion, or perhaps if it should be posted on a different day or at a different time.

There are many factors that influence the success or failure of published content, and fortunately there is plenty of data to help point us in the right direction.

8. Content Promotion Specialists

This is one area in particular where you can benefit from the freelancers. These are the people you bring in to complete specific tasks; They are not permanent members of your team and are specialists in their field.

For example, you may want to hire someone who can upgrade your website to help your content stand out. You can hire a web developer to make this happen.

Paid search and social networking are also popular jobs for the freelancer since the skill, while still including the content, is very specific.

You could have a freelancer or agency help you with link building and/or PR to get more attention on your content as well.

You may also decide to partner with influencers as you strive to create more exciting content. Influencers will likely charge a lot for their services, but it may be worth it for the buzz they will generate for your company.

Takeaway

In short, content marketing is not a one-to-one process.

To do it right, you must be willing to work with a team and hire the right people.

Your team will almost certainly not look exactly as I indicated above. On a small marketing team, you may only have one or two people responsible for many of the positions and responsibilities listed above.

And in enterprise companies, you could have a team of hundreds.

The most important thing is to make sure that every stage of content planning, production, publishing and promotion is covered by a dedicated expert.

We hope you can refer back to the information in this article as you aim to build your own content marketing team and ensure that your company’s content gets the buzz it deserves!

More resources:

  • 11 excellent content marketing examples to inspire your digital marketing campaigns
  • Content Marketing: The Ultimate Guide for Beginners
  • The difference between content marketing and content strategy

Featured image: Shutterstock / AlessandroBiascioli

Related Articles

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Back to top button