How to develop an efficient content marketing team for your company?
These days content marketing should be an essential part of your marketing department. It doesn’t matter if you are a big enterprise, a small business owner, or a startup, you need content to market your business and your brand.
In my own experience and since working for Bannersnack, I saw how vital is a well-structured content marketing team. That’s why in this article I’m showing you some important roles.
This can be an effective content marketing team structure but I think that every business should take into consideration first their own resources and see what they can afford assigning content team roles.
Summary
To this end, I will show you today the 5 important parts of content marketing and who should be assigned to what task inside the content team structure.
1. Strategy & Planning (Content Manager or Chief Content Editor)
“Strategy and planning” represents one of the most important parts of your content marketing strategy. It gives you direction, but most of all, it is the core of it, the part where the vision is happening.
Just think about the fact that during this stage, you are setting up your tone of voice and create a clear list of goals, for every project you are working on.
With strategy, you can understand how to measure the success of your content and set up a team roadmap to have a clear workflow.
But in the meantime, strategy and planning should work together.
Planning sets you up the editorial calendar of your content. It can prioritize the content that must be created and the projects that must be launched to help the business get more traffic leads or even awareness and helps set up the correct content team workflow.
Think about planning as the roadmap that shows you what should be written, how, and when.
The Chief Content Officer (or call it Content Strategist or Content Marketing Manager) it’s the one that leads the entire content marketing team’s efforts. Look at this position as your content ambassador in your organization. From this position, they write the entire playbook of your content.
But don’t misunderstand his role. He/She does not sit on a throne, commanding their team to create content. The Chief Content Officer must have a clear understanding of the business while at the same time, assuming the role of being the bridge between the content and the business itself.
That’s why they need to have strong communication skills and a structured mind to create the architecture of the entire content marketing team.
“The role of the content strategist is to be bilingual. They can’t be too editorial or they won’t be able to have conversations with the people who control the budget. At the same time, they have to understand the levers that impact the piece of content and how to measure and optimize the success of the editorial calendar”
Ari Kepnes, former lead content strategist contently
Responsibilities:
- Ensures that all pieces of content that are being published are on-brand, consistent in terms of style and design with the brand and that they are of similar quality and share a unique tone of voice.
- Creates a content strategy that supports and extends marketing initiatives.
- Supervises the content calendar.
- Integrates the content creation/publishing activities with other traditional marketing projects.
- Conducts competitive audits.
- Participates in the hiring process and supervises content leaders within the entire content marketing department.
- Helps to create a strategy for developing projects on content creation, content promotion, and content optimization.
- Works closely with the SEO department, Brand department, and Sales Department.
Skills Required
- Has a good “nose” for a content opportunity that can boost the brand image
- Understands the power of storytelling
- Has the ability to be a leader in the organization
- Skilled at creating long-form content or short-form content
- Being a connector between projects
- Project management skills to manage several projects at one time
- Has a rooted understanding of the principles of marketing
- A very good mediator and negotiator
- A willingness to adapt
- A very good speaker because they can also become the company’s spokesperson
2. Creation (Content Writer, Designer, Videographer)
Here is where the magic is happening. This is the process where articles, images, infographics, videos, and every piece of content you want for your business are being brought to life by the content creation team.
From my own point of view, there is no “the most important role” in the content marketing team. Every part has their most important role, but without them the team is empty and they can’t get the best of their work.
The content creator is the one that produces most of your content. You can have several members inside the content marketing team with the role of content creator: copywriter, content writer, graphic designer, video producer, photographer, and sometimes, I saw that in a bigger media company, there have specialized meme creators as well. All these roles combined make up for the content writing team or, as I like to call it more often, the content development team.
Most of these people are very creative and all they can dream is to create content. I know this fact because sometimes I feel like all I want to do is just create content (thank God I have this personal blog and I can write here my ideas).
The content writer is always focused on writing content for your blog, podcast scripts, landing pages, ebooks, and whitepapers.
The designer is the one that creates featured images for the blog, email headers, thumbnails for videos, and other illustrations and graphics that share the same tone of voice.
The video producer is the one that creates video content for your Facebook, Youtube, Instagram, and other channels. They’re the one that understands how to put in motion pictures or that awesome idea you’ve just had and shared with them a few days ago.
The photographer can capture photos of your team, photos of the product, or the place where your team works (offices, restaurant, coffee shop, production, and others) and edit it in a way the graphic designer and the content writer can use them for their next content project.
Responsibilities (Content Marketing Writer)
- Reviews all the pieces of content that are being published: everything from blog articles, email newsletters, landing pages, and provides suggestions when necessary to improve the content.
- Determines the editorial guidelines and tone of voice for the brand itself.
- Conducts simple keywords research and uses SEO as a guideline to create articles that can increase brand awareness.
- Prepares well-structured drafts using CMS’s.
- Updates and optimizes website/blog content when it’s required.
Skills required (Content Marketing Writer)
- Excellent writing skills
- Pro-journalistic-level research skills
- Knows how to create hook-headlines
- Can play with numbers
- Managing different projects
- Must know how to work in teams
- Comfortable to give feedback on designs
3. Review (Content Editor)
The content editor’s eyes must be the last set of eyes on a piece of content before it will be published and promoted to your audience.
The content editor is the one that can transform the content writer’s work from good to AWESOME.
I believe that every content you put out there must be edited by a second person who works side by side with the content team. We are doing this at Bannersnack where everything we publish is reviewed by our Chief Editor. She knows the tone of voice of the brand, she knows that embarrassing mistakes can harm your brand profile. This is why we have created this system that everything we publish, must be blessed by our Chief Editor.
Writers should write. The editor should edit.
That means that even for you, the best of the best, the kind of writer that never ever had a mistake, there might come one day when you will publish something with a grammatical error. Thus, you will get to learn about how important an editor is and how important their position is within the content marketing team roles.
There can be 2 kinds of editors:
- development editor: the one that can make the best from a piece of content – this means that they can delete paragraphs, make the sentence shorter or change words inside the articles to make the pieces look better.
- copy editor: the one who can easily see the typos and grammar mistakes inside content.
Responsabilites (Content Editor)
- Proofreads, re-structures, and edits content created by content writers.
- Optimizes published content using SEO guidelines.
- Ghostwriting for executives.
- Works together with the content writer to pitch new ideas and new content projects.
- It can easily modify short texts (headlines, subject lines, and even tweets) that can be on the same tone of voice.
- Edits press releases.
Skills (Content Editor)
- Team spirit
- Excellent editing and writing skills
- Attention to details
- Hands-on experience with CMS
- Familiarity with SEO and keyword research
- Adaptability and flexibility
- Knows how to work under pressure
- Project management
4. Publish and Promote (Content Promoter)
The content promoter understands the power of influencer marketing and knows how to leverage this strategy to get more web traffic or views on the content produced by the content team.
The term “content marketing” is composed of 2 words: content and marketing.
The “content” is where the content is happening – the creation and editing part. It’s a creative way to make the content alive.
The “marketing” represents the part where the content is being researched, analyzed, and promoted.
And, in this oversaturated market, we need a very good strategy on how to promote the content for the right audience at the right time.
The content promoter knows how to distribute the right content, to the right audience at the right time.
This department works closely with the Social Media Manager and the PR person.
They know the importance of link-building and they know how to get those links to these articles. Sometimes it’s even better to have the content writer and content strategist work closely with the content promoter, so they can get some ideas on how to create the kind of content that gets and holds the audience’s attention.
Sometimes this person has contacts at major publications and strong relations with other bloggers and YouTubers.
Responsibilities (Content Promoter)
- Promotes the content on different channels.
- Creates a workflow to distribute the new kinds of content on different channels.
- Understands every social media platform, publishers and bloggers, and how to get in front of their audience.
- Knows how to write outreach emails.
- Understands the power of link building.
- Works together with the content editor and content writer so they can know what kind of content to create to get more eyeballs.
- Gets more awareness on every piece of content.
Skills
- Very good negotiator
- Good networker
- Very good writing skills
- Project management
- How to close deals
- Has very good strategy skills
- Visionary
5. Analyze and Measure (Researcher)
When creativity and data meet content – there is where the magic happens. But you need SEO to get the right data for the right content. That’s where the expert comes with insights that can be a support for your next content idea.
Just think about this. Having the right kind of content that is researched by an SEO specialist, that is created by a very good content creator and promoted by a very good content distributor, it’s heaven on earth for many content marketers, right? Well, sometimes dreams can come true. But when they can’t, you need to work for them.
I strongly believe that SEO is a vital element for the content marketing strategy. Not just keeping track of the progress, optimizing content, and doing the audit, but also helping the content creator know what keywords to use to create the kind of content that Google loves.
Sometimes an SEO expert can influence everyone else’s roles because their work can inspire the content marketing manager to create more articles, launch more landing pages or make some whitepapers – that’s because the data shows us this.
But let’s also not forget that SEO is based on data. And sometimes this can be a reaction to a trend. This is why sometimes, I recommend you to follow your gut instinct. And, try to combine these instincts with data. In time, you will see that there can be some awesome results for your efforts.
Responsibilities (Content Researcher)
- It provides well-researched keywords for content.
- Optimizes the content to get in front of Google.
- It comes with ideas and strategies on how to use SEO to get more organic web traffic.
- Oversees the SEO on every piece of content that is being published.
- Tracks progress and come with data and reports that help the content team to create the next content piece.
- Identifies core objectives for the content metrics and methods for measuring and reporting on the effectiveness of the content.
- Works closely with the Content Promoter to develop link building strategies.
Skills
- Teamwork
- Analytical
- Research
- Project management
- Has very good strategy skills
- Excellent verbal and written communication skills
- Strong organizational and time management skills
Conclusion
Here we are, at the end of this journey through the organizational chart of the content marketing team.
I tried to summarize everything that I have learned throughout all these years I have worked inside the creative and marketing departments and share with you the best list of the content marketing team roles I could come up with based on actual data and first-hand experience.
How close is your content team structure to the one I shared with you in this article and what do you think you can improve on this part?
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