Growing companies need strong content marketing teams to keep leads and sales rolling in. If you’ve never hired a content marketing team before, you might not be sure how to bring in people who can help boost your digital marketing ROI.
It’s actually a simpler process than you might think. First, determine who should be on your team and what roles you need to fill. Don’t forget to design a strategy and team that can scale up as you grow! Then you can start hiring great content marketing professionals to increase your business. Read on to find out how to hire a content marketing team that suits your needs.
Who should be on your content marketing team?
Part of creating a great content marketing plan is assembling a strong content marketing team. Each team member needs to be an expert in grammar and SEO. But they also need to possess additional skills. Determining who you need on your team starts with identifying the roles you have to fill.
What roles need to be filled on a content marketing team?
Every business has unique marketing needs. Thus, there are different roles to fill on their content marketing teams. Here are a few positions you might want to hire for:
- Marketing Manager: oversees the entire program and makes sure that your strategy is executed well.
- Strategist: provides insight into the best ways to reach your target audience.
- Creator (or a full team of them): produces the actual content. This might include writers and graphic designers, depending on the type of content you need.
Some of these positions might overlap based on your company’s marketing budget. When you consider how big your content marketing team should be, it’s important to review the scope of work that you’ll task them with.
How big should your content marketing team be?
The size of your content marketing team is contingent on how much content you need to produce. For example, if you’re a large business that needs to produce and post new blogs and social media content every day, you’ll need a large team. If you run a smaller business that just needs a few posts per month, you can get away with a smaller group of content marketing experts.
Keep in mind that you can always scale the team as your company grows. So if you’re not sure how big your content marketing team should be, start by hiring a few key people. Then add more employees as you grow.
What skills should people bring to a content marketing team?
Your team needs a host of skills to produce excellent content and give you an edge over your competition. Of course, they need to possess strong written communication skills and have a firm grasp on SEO best practices. However, digital marketing is more than just typing a few words that make a search engine find your website.
Expert content marketers also must understand how to connect with your target audience. This includes writing blogs and designing social media marketing campaigns that attract new leads. Identifying the skills that each employee brings to the team will also help you determine the roles you need on the team.
How to determine roles needed for your content marketing team
Although each company’s content marketing needs are different, every team needs the same basic roles. As a whole, the content marketing team needs to create and implement a strategy and then produce the actual content.
The first step in designing your team is to consider what factors drive the specific roles your company needs.
What factors should you consider when determining roles needed for your content marketing team?
There are several factors to consider when you determine the roles you need for your content marketing team. Here are a few questions to ask yourself to help you identify the roles and skills you need this team to have:
- What kind of content marketing do you need? Are you going to focus on blogs and social media marketing, or do you need a full website revamp?
- Which social media platforms does your target audience use? Different platforms require different types of content.
- Do you need written content, graphic design, or both?
Answering these questions will help you determine what roles you need to fill and what skills your new employees should have.
What duties must be performed by a successful content marketing team?
To assemble a successful content marketing team, you must determine what duties they’ll need to perform. Creating content for your website, social media, and the occasional whitepaper are givens.
Additionally, your content marketing team needs to increase demand generation, and therefore sales enablement. Demand generation creates interest in your company and produces resources that your sales team can use to sell more of your products or services. Basically, think of each piece of content that your content marketers create as an example of demand generation that aims to increase sales enablement.
Who should be in charge of a content marketing team?
The team manager depends on your company’s overall structure. A large company might hire a full-time content marketing manager with a staff of content creators. And a small company might task their regular marketing manager with overseeing the team.
Whoever you put in charge of content marketing will need to make sure the team produces a consistent stream of high-quality content that helps increase your business. Their job will also include some developmental editor tasks to create a content marketing plan and schedule. Running a content marketing team is a big job. So make sure you pick someone who’s up to the task!
How to create a content marketing team that scales
All marketing efforts focus on growing your business. And the path toward seamless growth is paved with teams that can easily scale as you grow.
If hiring more team members sounds intimidating, or like an investment you don’t want to make, try to see the other side of the coin. Needing to scale is a great problem to have! It means that your marketing efforts are working and your business is growing. More work leads to the necessity to hire more people. And you can achieve this growth as long as you have a strong strategy in place.
What needs to be in place to allow your content marketing team to scale?
The cornerstone of allowing your content marketing team to scale is to have a strong content marketing strategy in place. Your strategy should act as an outline for the team to follow so that new team members can jump in and get right to work. Here are a few elements that the strategy should include:
- Mission and goals so your team knows what to aim for
- KPIs (key performance indicators) to keep them on track
- A description of the content they need to produce
- A content calendar with topics and deadlines
Keep in mind that your content marketing strategy can change as time goes on. Be prepared to be flexible! If certain blogs or social media platforms aren’t bringing in more leads, just tweak your strategy. Have your content team identify new topics, different social media platforms, and other methods to communicate with your target audience.
What does it mean to have a content marketing team that scales?
Having a team that scales means that you can easily add new employees to the team that can hit the ground running. All new team members will require training, and there’s always going to be a learning curve. However, if you create a strong foundation with a great strategy—and hire strong candidates—chances are your team will easily scale.
For instance, consider the process of hiring a new content creator. You’ll have to train them on your company and industry, as well as the SEO content that you’re looking for. If you can show them your strategy and what’s expected of them, they should be able to start working very quickly. However, if you don’t have a strong strategy, their goals and tasks won’t be clear, and they could struggle.
What role do content marketing team members play in allowing a content marketing team to scale?
Scalable teams must have members that want to scale. That might sound silly, but it’s true!
Try to build your team with people that embody your company’s culture. They should be positive, flexible people who aren’t afraid of change. In addition to being a joy to work with, these types of employees are usually happy to train incoming team members. This makes the team more scalable.
Where to find great content marketing professionals to hire
By now, you know who should be on your content marketing team and how to scale up the team for easy growth. So, how do you find that great content marketer? The answer to that question begins with deciding whether to hire an individual or an agency.
Why should you hire a content marketing agency?
Not all companies have the budget for a full content marketing team. Companies that are just starting up or aren’t quite convinced that a full-time marketer will help bring in business might not be ready to hire new marketing employees.
In those cases, you might want to consider hiring a content marketing agency. Here are a few services that an agency can provide without you having to pay a salary and benefits to a new employee:
- Content marketing strategy design and development
- Dedicated content creators that know how to reach your target audience on various platforms
- Editing and proofreading services
Whether you’re looking for written content, graphic design content, or a mixture of both, a content marketing agency will have the expert staff to boost your digital marketing.
What makes a great content marketing professional?
An expert content marketer possesses a handful of talents and skills, including:
- Excellent written and verbal communication
- Knowledge of best SEO practices
- Willingness to learn your industry and your specific company to create effective content that your target audience will enjoy
- A knack for content strategy and planning
- The ability to identify content marketing challenges, and either solve them or prevent them from happening altogether
- Ability to meet content deadlines
Great: you know who to hire and what skills they should have. Now where do you find a content marketing specialist?
What resources can help you find the right content marketing professionals for your team?
Finding a great content marketing specialist to add to your team isn’t easy. Strong content creation is a unique skill. It’s likely you’ll want your new employees to start producing great content very soon after they start working for you. So you’re probably looking for experienced creators.
Some content marketing experts advertise on social media or apply to job posts online. Look at their writing portfolio to see what kind of experience they have. If you feel that their talent could be an asset to your team, they’re probably worth talking to.
You can also look around for a freelance content marketer. Sometimes freelancers grow weary of hunting for their next paying gig, so you might find one that’s interested in working full time for a steady paycheck. A lot of freelancers have their own websites. This is a built-in writing sample that you can review to see if they’d be a good fit for your team.
It’ll take some work, but finding the right people to add to your content marketing team will be worth the effort when you see those new leads and sales piling in!
Hire an Elite content marketing team
You need a content marketing team that can make the impossible possible. Elite Editing provides professional content for industries of all sorts and companies of all sizes. If you’re not quite ready to hire a full team of content marketers, we’re here to help.
Visit our website today to learn more!
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